Haha Hoho vs Huh Huk

When I visited the Design Museum on Sunday, I was immediately drawn to this pair of digital prints hung side by side. The two canvases are exactly the same in dimension, shade of pure snow white, and use of the hieut character, encased by the same thin, black frame. The similarities end there.

The pring on the left, titled Haha Hoho, sounds just like the emotions it is meant to express. Bursting with the vibrant colors of bright green, brilliant magenta, and neon orange, one can feel the explosion of laughter, joy, and happiness emanating from the canvas. the curvature of strokes resembles, as artist Hyunju Lee stated, "the shape of an ebullient smile."

The print on the right, titled Huh Huk, is a slate gray, dark blue, and pine green composition of straight lines with hieut characters scattered sparsely among the dull-colored stripes. The flat, straight lines coupled with the somber colors convey a grave and serious mood, or perhaps the gloominess of a rainy day. Lee entitled this piece so since it bears resemblance to "the Korean sound of sobbing," although it pretty much sounds like the universal sound of sobbing.

What especially makes this duo so irresistible to gaze at is that they are juxtaposed in such a way as to make them stand out more, in comparison to each other. Haha Hoho, overflowing with overlapping hieut characters crowding over the lines looks like a tropical rain forest densely populated with life, whereas in Huh Huk, each individual hieut character stands alone, a barren, snow-covered forest in the taiga.