Don Sunpil: Kitsutaiten

“Kitsuaiten” / 喫態店 translates as “store where you can enjoy the form”. It is also the name of a solo show by South Korean artist Don Sunpil in The Arario Museum in Space in Seoul, one of four locations of the Arario Museum (the other three are located in Jeju). The museum describes Sunpil’s work as “looking into contemporary society today through a multifaceted analysis and approach to figures and the industrial environment surrounding them.” The exhibition shows a multitude of figures which are “made with precise molding techniques and high capital inputs, but they are unique objects that lack obvious usability or objectivity.”

The exhibition poster by Shin Shin shows a photo by Don sunpil, centered between the name of the artist above it, and lettering below (probably showing the name of the exhibition). For the latin spelling of the artist’s name, Julien by Typotheque has been used. Julien is a playful geometric display typeface with a large number of loosely related glyphs to choose from for every character. The letter a for instance comes in 33 different shapes. The typeface is offered as four presets with bold, thin, round or square shapes. For this poster, the designers picked their own selection of bold lettershapes, and added eyes to the tittle on the i. The artist’s name in Hangul/Korean spelling was added within Julien’s lowercase o.

This type treatment is mirrored below the photograph with lettering inspired by Julien. The name of the exhibition translated to the Latin alphabet using Didot Elder (Optimo) is placed within one of the characters. This Didot revival with its arrow-like serifs on certain characters like S and C is also used for information about date and location, paired with an as yet unidentified Chinese typeface.