SPACE July 2022 (No. 656)
Sometimes, the attempt to define something may prove reductive. SUPERELLIPSE deals with design, furniture, and graphic design in the realm of architecture, exhibition, and publication. The question that first came to mind when I encountered this work was ‘what are they on about?’ A decade has gone by since then. As I still have not been able to find the exact language through which to describe its activities, I thought it appropriate to understand SUPPERELLIPSE by reviewing the clues that it has scattered around thus far. Along with publications entitled ‘Reduction-Oriented Architecture/ Architect’▼1, ‘Small Frame’▼2, ‘On Cuteness’▼3, and ‘K-art and K-hiphop’▼4, it is hoped that this interview with Chung Hyun, the principal of SUPERELLIPSE, will provide some clues to understanding.
1 The title of article written by Chung Dahyoung in SET PIECE 2 SEED (2020) Volume 1’s subtitle 3 SEED (2020) Volume 2’s subtitle 4 SEED (2020) Volume 3’s subtitle
interview Chung Hyun principal, SUPERELLIPSE × Park Jiyoun
Park Jiyoun (Park): The curved superelliptic line alters in shape according to variables. Your activities across architecture, exhibitions, and publications resemble a superellipse.
Chung Hyun (Chung): I opened a publishing company in 2012 under the adorable name SUPERELLIPSE. This name was coined after encountering the table ‘Superellipse’ designed by the poet and mathematician Piet Hein and the furniture designer and architect Arne Jacobsen. It was only later that we learned that a superellipse is a non-rigid geometrical shape that changes in form according to variables. After becoming independent in 2017, I wanted to open an architect office that could conduct diverse activities, and I thought that my aims would coincide well with the properties of the superellipse and which changes according to varying circumstances. As a consequence, I decided to keep the name instead of coming up with a new one.
Park: Perhaps because SUPERELLIPSE started out as a publishing company, its publication activities are among its most pronounced. As an architect, what brought you to the field of publishing?
Chung: During my college years, I studied architecture mostly through books. The first architecture book that I bought was Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks (1993), which I picked up second-hand in a store named Artinus that was facing closure. As I read this book, I felt a sense of satisfaction from engaging with his buildings built across the US from east to west, despite the fact that I had never visited the country. I wanted to relive this feeling through my work, and so at the end of the semester during my graduate studies in the US, even if I had to discard the floor plans and models, I stapled all the drawings, photos, and texts that were produced during the working stages into a collection and turned it into a book. I was documenting projects in this way as a habit, and so I did not think too deeply on why I should go into publishing. But I often reflect on what Ludovic Balland noted, that ‘a book is, in fact, the only museum for architecture’. And, taking this point, I wonder if a book is the final destination for all architecture and architects.
Park: In your first book PBT (2014), you said that the architect’s working method can be expressed. What do you mean by ‘an architect’s working method’?
Chung: Most of my book projects begin with decisions on the book’s width, height, and paper quality in relation to the contents. Based on these decisions, I either add texts or images as filling, open, fold, or pile the books to design them as constructed models, or spend time imagining the kind of space or objects on which the book will be placed. The fact that I am conscientious, not just in terms of my contemplation of specific form, measurements, and materials, but in the way a project will appear when in a stack and how it will occupy space makes my work on books not all that different from designing a building. In the case of PBT, the book’s inner pages were designed as though I was drawing a floor plan. The inserted images are spaces for the entrances and exits, the page numbers are the elevators for moving up and down, and the words are the people or the furniture that pass by or fill up the frame. As the first print run ran out and work on the second began, I placed a critique written by visual culture theorist Yoon Wonhwa entitled ‘A Sponser’s Reply’ on a large book-band. Like an exterior skin that merely stays on and wraps a building’s surface, I wanted the text on the book-band to function as a graphic or a pattern capable of decorating and elevating the exterior skin.
Park: The project ‘YES/NO/LIKE/DISLIKE/LOVE/HATE/REPLY/SHARE: THE PORTRAIT OF KOREAN POP CULTURE 2000-2020’ (2020) (hereinafter The Portrait of Korean Pop Culture) that introduces artists influenced by mass culture also began as an exhibition and was turned into a book. The exhibition introduces eight artists, but the book covers 856 works by 214 artists. Was a publication planned from the start as an offshoot of this exhibition?
Chung: ‘The Portrait of Korean Pop Culture’ was originally intended as a project that would showcase numerous Korean artists. The exhibition was the prequel, and the book was the main show. The aim behind The Portrait of Korean Pop Culture (2020) was to display every Korean artist who was either directly or indirectly related to mass culture within a singular book space without prejudice or hierarchy. To realise this, numerous artists had to be approached and encouraged to participate. And so, instead of explaining to them the aim and concept of the project in specific detail, I wanted to show them something more intuitively recognisable. The reason the exhibition was carried out before the publication was to convey its aims and to help the artists to understand that The Portrait of Korean Pop Culture was not a typical art book but an exhibition held within a book.
Park: As a curator, I assume you made a list of artists. How was the list been categorised?
Chung: The exhibition design for SUPERELLIPSE sought a scale that could be physically reducible to approximately 1:20 of scale in a model. This emerges from the idea that an architectural model of 1:20 in scale is a good reference point from which to make judgments regarding human scale. I look for artists who make distinctly perceptible images at this scale. Painters, sculptors, furniture designers, and artisans who handle media and material meticulously have been added to the list. In terms of designing exhibitions across various themes, it is advantageous to have artists that can keep themselves within a specific range.
Exhibition view of ‘SET PIECE’
Park: The work ‘A Contact: Figure. Object. Place.’ (2022) reflects plainly on the recent trajectory of SUPERELLIPSE. After renovating a typical shopping centre into a gallery, navigation of an exhibition space itself was supported through an explanatory guide. Is this the intended goal of SUPERELLIPSE?
Chung: My first private exhibition ‘SET PIECE’ (2019) was an experiment in reducing a book, a bookshelf, and a spatial design into a display and then into a book again. The graphic designer duo Sulki and Min transformed the thick and heavy book and furniture shown in their exhibition into a thin and light saddle-stitched ‘zine’. The second exhibition ‘A Contact: Figure. Object. Place.’ was another experiment that renovated a commercial space located at Euljiro into a gallery for use as exhibition content. The process of renovation and the process of turning this renovation into an exhibition will then make another turn in the cycle to a publication. While the precise aim of SUPERELLIPSE cannot be pinpointed, what remains certain is that circular approaches such as these will continue unchanged.
Park: In the introduction to your book CC (2017), and in a text within Architecture, Exhibition, Curating (2019), you used expressions such as ‘something book-like’ and ‘something architecture-like’, respectively. What do these expressions mean?
Chung: To address things that we would not normally consider to be books or architecture into their respective categories, I used the expressions ‘something book-like’ and ‘something architecture-like’. CC, which was reviewed as something that lacks the function of a book despite possessing a book format, and the work of an artist and graphic designer which stays under the radar in the architectural world despite its valid achievements in introducing possibilities that architecture might consider pursuing—these are works that are found in the border between book and nonbook, and architecture and non-architecture. But the moment we start calling them ‘something book-like’ or ‘something architecture-like’, this then becomes the starting point and a moment of intersection where a more divisive line may be blurred and new exchange may occur.
Park: You have worked continuously with graphic designers Sulki and Min, Shin Shin, photographer Kim Kyoungtae, and critic Yoon Wonhwa. How did a collaboration with individuals would not be considered architects influence your work?
Chung: In my view, not just Sulki and Min, Shin Shin, Kim Kyoungtae, and Yoon Wonhwa, but all those who had collaborated with me were sensitive to architecture and possessed a certain expertise that is not that different from architectural work. Collaborations with them act as decisive elements that ‒ like the variables in a superellipse ‒ force me to produce results that are my own and yet also theirs, results that are architecture and yet also architecture-like. Just as a work on space with a furniture designer is done at a scale of centimetres, and a work on publication with a graphic designer is conducted at a scale of millimetres, when the result goes beyond my design intentions, it is always made manifests at the micro-level architecture fulfilling my expectations as a collaborator. Also, collaborations provide the motivation to observe and contemplate the relationships between hand and object, human and space.
Spreads of SET PIECE ©Park Sungsoo
Park: There is a rise in the number of young architects who are working on designs in props to products, interior design, branding, and curating. I would like to know what your thoughts are on this new flexibility in working areas, and what you think the limitations of such extensions architecture-wise might be?
Chung: Recently, many young architects are operating across numerous fields such as books, fashion, furniture, and interiors and drawing them into architecture. Unlike the reach that results in relation to methods that connect architecture to philosophy or urban design, these new connections are relatively micro-level and deeply personal. I am confident that these new directions of young architects can motivate greater variety in our architectural language, enabling architecture to be summoned with ease at various levels and realms. In his award speech for Best Achievement in Directing in the Academy Awards, the film director Bong Joonho cited the film director Martin Scorsese’s sense that ‘the most personal is the most creative’. If architecture situates itself as a stage through which to reveal one’s personal worldview, then it will be able to gain approval and participation from a greater number of people.
Park: A decade has passed since you established SUPERELLIPSE. I would like to know of your continuing areas of interest and your future plans.
Chung: For anyone, 10 years is a significant marker. Along with the establishment of SUPERELLIPSE, I had conceived of a plan for the books and spaces that would be produced within a decade. Many of them were realised, and the responses they received far exceeded my expectations held at the moment of the office’s establishment. Therefore, I look forward with even greater anticipation to seeing what kind of opportunities and changes in direction my future books and projects will prompt. The first book to be published this year from SUPERELLIPSE is Shin Donghyeok-Book, which is a first in the series Korean Designers. Aside from this, we are planning to publish nine volumes from SUPERELLIPSE’s SupereEllipse Editions, two books concerning on/offline exhibition spaces, and survey books for the painters Lee Yunseong and Kim Seoul respectively.
Exhibition view of ‘A Contact: Figure. Object. Place.’ 전시 전경 ©POPCON