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→ Currently pursuing MFA in Graphic Design at Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island, USA
→ BFA in Communication Design and Architecture&Art at Hongik University, South Korea
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2025 | Exhibition Design, Spatial Design, Art Direction
¹For Reference Only
RISD GD Biennial 2025
¹For Reference Only explores the uncertain trajectories of design work once it enters circulation. Featuring 49 works from current and past students of the RISD Graphic Design MFA Program, the exhibition interrogated the fate of design artifacts—whether they are engaged with meaningfully or relegated to fleeting digital consumption and archival obscurity. The show invited visitors to consider how design is encountered, remembered, and recontextualized over time, asking whether reference itself is a form of life or a kind of slow erasure.
CONCEPTWhat happens to design after it is made? ¹For Reference Only examines the circulation, consumption, and afterlife of graphic design in a world of endless visual content.
Designers spend countless hours creating books, posters, websites, and experimental works—but once these pieces are out in public, how are they actually experienced? Are they meaningfully engaged with, or simply glanced at and forgotten? Are they saved as references, only to be recycled into future designs that might meet the same fate?
EXHIBITIONThe exhibition uses the idea of a footnote—¹—as both a visual and symbolic element. Visual cues drawn from footnote systems—numbering, annotations, typographic hierarchies—appear throughout the space, subtly reinforcing the theme of circulation and reference. The spatial experience invites visitors to move fluidly, making connections across works and reflecting on their own habits of viewing, saving, and referencing design.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
We spend hours designing books, posters, websites, and “personal projects” that will never be handed off to clients or exist beyond an Instagram feed. The irony of most designed objects—especially printed visual graphic materials—is that they are barely read. The typeface optimized for the reader’s eye will never experience the satisfaction of being truly read, instead becoming reference material for yet another design doomed to the same fate (dark, we know). The heavily treated, dithered, duotone photo isn’t an image, just an ornamental texture. But who cares? If it looks good, designers will buy it.
Nobody actually reads graphic design books. Nobody meaningfully interacts with a website that has been “graphic designed.” And honestly, these things are fantastic to look at.
So let’s celebrate the surface. The aesthetic. The reference-only.
*Or—let’s reconsider what “reference-only” actually means. Graphic design is a discipline that thrives in adjacency. It is not literature, yet it shapes language; not theory, yet it structures thought; not art, yet it influences visual culture. It is defined as much by what it isn’t as what it is, existing in the negative space between disciplines, borrowing, reframing, and meditating. Maybe the failure of graphic design to be deeply “read” isn’t a failure at all—but proof that design doesn’t need to be the final destination. And that is precisely where its power lies.
CURATION+EXHIBITION DESIGN Luisa Maria Heindl, Shrishti Chatterjee, Avrie Allen, Jacob Marcus, So Jung Yoon, Brooke Shary
IDENTITY DESIGN Kevin Tomas, Hamin Seo, Joy Zou, Clara Cayosa, Faith Kim, Thea Kim, Tonia Zhang, Jo Zixuan, Ritu Mantri, Hailey Lee, Barbara Cutlak
WEB Lucy Nguyen Pham, Tina Zhou, Annabel Gillespie
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