O06Art Project

one eye project

Ahn Sang-soo

Area
Other
Period
2021.07.22(Thu) - 09.05(Sun)
Hours
All-day experience available (VR Work)
Others

Passport

《one eye photo》 by Ahn Sang-soo is the photo project of Korean typographer and graphic designer Ahn Sang-soo which began in 1988 and continues to the present day. The first one eye photo was made for the cover page of legendary culture magazine “bogoseo/bogoseo” created and published by himself from 1988 until 2000, when he covered an eye with his hand in his self-portrait photo. Since then, Ahn has taken one eye photos of people he has encountered in everyday life. It was 2003 when he opened his blog (http://ssahn.com/) and started to upload selective one eye photos with dates and names of when and whom he met, which counts almost 10,000 today. From 2012, the project was invited to several exhibitions and festivals in different cities such as Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China.

Ahn believes “when meeting someone for the first time, it is like opening a whole universe,” so this project is about his true joy of acknowledging and respecting life. In addition to his daily sincerity, there are performative elements in this project. Because he asks to cover an eye and be in front of his camera to random people he meets, his asking becomes an instruction or a score for people to create a little “happening”. The ongoing action of himself – meeting people, asking for one eye, taking photos, saving files and sharing online, is also a repetitive gestural performance.

Cooperation: Tokyo Metropolitan KOGEI High School

(As of June 2021)

1. 《pati. graduation.》2020, Paju bookcity (Korea)
2. 《kang.tae-hwan.》2020, Chungju (Korea)
3. 《lee bul.. gum.nuri.》2020, Seoul (Korea)

http://ssahn.com/

Artist

Ahn Sang-soo (Designer)

Born in Chungju City (South Korea) in 1952. Typographer, Graphic Designer, Artist. Studied at Hongik University, Seoul. Honorary Doctor of Design in 2001 from Kingston University, London.
He has been the editor and art director of the underground art-culture magazine Report/Report since 1988. He began his Typography professorship at Hongik University in 1991 and retired in 2013.
Internationally, he held many solo & group exhibitions including the ‘Nalgae-PaTI’ exhibition at SeMA (Seoul Museum of Art) in 2018. Ahn was the Chair of TypoJanchi (Seoul Typography Biennale) from 2001-2017 and was the 1998 recipient of the Grand Prix of Zgraf8 and the 2007 Gutenberg Prize from Leipzig, Germany. He has also received the DFA Lifetime Achievement Award in Hong Kong.In 2013, Ahn established an independent design school called PaTI (Paju Typography Institute) in Paju Bookcity, Korea. He is also a Professor at CAFA, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.