Artists, Graphic Designer, and Creativity along the Borders

In my first and second years of university, my friends and I were preoccupied with three central questions: what constituted an artist, what constituted a graphic designer, and which one was more important. Although I knew these questions were no different than the chicken or egg debate, I only came to understand why we were so preoccupied with such answerless questions a few years later, after I had been able to gain more experience in life. In retrospect, what we were actually interested in was not the difference between an artist and a designer but questions of creativity and the source of creative inspiration. In the end I learned that a creative person is someone who reflects their ideas and experiences into their activities through the five senses to communicate with other people.

Creativity is not something that arises from nothing but rather something that is more often than not a trivial interest, a fairly reckless obsession, or someone’s continued absorption in details. Occasionally, I find myself trying to organize something unconsciously. For example, there was a time I wondered if it was possible to organize my eight square meter room so that everything would be no more than an arm’s length away while sitting on my chair like a pilot. I spent three full days trying to carry this out, later recognizing that it was like an empirical lesson in collecting, analyzing, assorting, and organizing an overwhelming amount of information. Then there was the time I was into the color red so much that I wanted everything in my life to be red, from my cap and rubber bands to my shirts and even the text color in my work. This might have been a subconscious desire on my part to reflect my memories about the color red and my emotions related to those memories using the physical property of red. In this way, an obsession with trivial things can be an important way to draw creative inspiration.

Certain memories can also become an impetus for creativity. Cast iron scissors, a triangle-shaped piece of sewing chalk, measured clippings for suits, a wooden ruler, and unprocessed cloths neatly arranged in built-in closets around the walls inside an office – all these things are fractions of my memory when it comes to my father, who was a tailor, and his workplace. He occasionally made clothes for me and my brothers, but was more interested in making the clothes than the clothes themselves. In a similar vein, a faded photo of a slightly nervous young woman wearing a kimono and kneeling down on the floor next to a man who is dressed in a Western-style suit with round eyeglasses is a symbolic image for me of my maternal grandparents. A Japanese style room with tatami mats can be seen in the background of the photo. My imagination about the marriage between a Korean studying in Japan and an ordinary Japanese girl at the end of World War II provides me a vague clue as to my roots. After I accidentally found the photo, I decided to go in search of my grandmother’s original name, which no one in my family remembered, as she spent her entire life after her marriage living in Korea with a Korean name. For me, creative inspiration is sometimes acquired accidentally, without a plan, and can be rediscovered in existing thoughts and objects.

However, what is most important for me when it comes to creativity is the fact that in order for an individual’s experience and the sources of inspiration surrounding that person to be developed into creative behavior or results, he or she should be able to constantly interact with the sources of inspiration in both an emotional and intelligent way. They should put themselves in a position where they can effectively express their experiences by working steadily in their field. They should also constantly ask fundamental questions about their life and their work. I learned this firsthand through constant trial and error, and have since done my best to be as creative as possible by following my own advice. As I do this, I have had to constantly make myself the subject of different creative projects. There are times I have to be unwillingly involved in projects in which creativity is ignored. Other times I have not been able to decipher what the right thing to do is while standing on the cusp of creativity and what clients actually want. Although clients want me to do one thing, I still cling to creativity as the most important entity, so much so that it becomes my lifeblood. It is almost an obsession for me that I should continue doing meaningful things that will enrich my life on emotional and mental levels in order to make myself a more creative person. Ultimately, I have helped maintain my sense of creativity by constantly questioning everyone and everything around me.

In this way, creativity has been a series of meaningful activities that reflect my thoughts and experiences through my designs, as the energy I derive from this becomes the stimulus for my next design project. People today tend to try to distinguish between artists and designers almost as if they belong in completely separate fields. Yet such a distinction is merely the result of the economic structure of production and consumption. I firmly believe that artists who have an inability to communicate with the general public (and who do not understand the changing media going on all around them) and designers who are under the mistaken belief that the role of a designer is limited to serving commercial art cannot become creative producers and mediators of communication.