Binna Choi
Commercial advertisements in Seoul as well as in other Asian cities, by their sheer omnipresence, may generate a feeling of suffocation. Oversized screens can be spotted on buildings, huge signboards seem to decorate every single façade and every means of public transportation is papered over with ads. Numerous (illegal) flyers are 'exuberantly’ present in the Seoul streets. Its hybridism imbued with commercialization has become the common landscape of any Asian city and can be perceived as vigorous and dynamic, especially if you enjoy being “lost in translation”. And yet even this positive assimilation needs to be re-affirmed with a question: “how can we manifest and 'author' ourselves in an authoritative visual environment of the kind?” The flyer project 'This is Not a Love Letter', curated by Binna Choi is an initiative that attempts to answer this question. For this project, eight visual artists and designers each created a flyer design, using all different sorts of visual rhetoric, to be randomly inserted into dailies in Seoul. The flyer, when it is not immediately discarded, may possibly trigger a critical view of reality in the attentive reader (one in five hundred on average) that generates interaction and encounters. Like a love letter, the flyer is sent carefully and secretly; perhaps some reader will sense the essential pleasure it captures.