Soo Ji Lee

Prizes: Gijs Bakker Award Nominee

Department: Information Design
Website: eelijoos.com

Craftsmanship

In the increasingly high-tech society we live in, with its massproduced
identical commodities, Soo Ji Lee wanted to study
the value of human originality. She found it in craftsmanship,
which she believes originates in our continuous striving for
perfection, even though we know we are imperfect.
Lee presents this craftsmanship through a manual reproduction
of the Bodoni typeface. Intended for mass reproduction,
typeface lettering is all around us. But even though she has put
in incredible amounts of time and effort trying to recreate the
perfect Bodoni lower case ‘a’, the pressure and speed of Lee’s
hand are still not consistent enough to flawlessly execute the
73 steps it takes for each ‘a’. A machine cannot help but deliver
perfect copies; it could never mimic this variety of unintentional
imperfections. This spirit of tenacity and the resulting originality
is what Lee believes gives us our added value as humans,
and ‘Craftsmanship’ is her celebration of the beauty of human
imperfection.