When SoYun Cho (MFA 2014) told her friend Youngjune Hahm, co-founder of Common Center in Seoul, that she would be attending a CalArts-Kookmin University workshop in the city with her fellow classmates, Hahm invited them to exhibit their work during their stay in June.

“It was significant for us as CalArtians to show our work in Korea, because it is not so common to see the kind of visual language in the Korea design community like there is at CalArts. He was curious to see my work and my friends’ work in person. We had 90-100 finished pieces in total, but didn’t have a budget to ship the work, so we brought the printed matter on our flights.”

The physical space of Common Center proved to be of particular significance for So and her classmates, she explains “We saw a space that is the opposite from the usual white-wall gallery; at Common Center we showed our work alongside exposed concrete walls and torn layers of wallpaper. One of the rooms had a dilapidated ceiling that was on the brink of collapse. You can imagine this all sounding like a post-apocalyptic event. In my opinion this aesthetic is an honest reflection of the economic limitations as a student body and contemporary society. Common Center provided us economic support for supplies and encouraged us to express freely so that everyone could contribute creative time to install, and they still have our work with a pricelist that makes our work affordable. We want any design student to be able to own our work if they want to. The Common Center audience was so responsive and shocked by the raw and vivid materiality of our work, because poster silk-screening is very uncommon in Korea since digital printing is cheaper. Visitors to the exhibition said they could feel the sunshine from L.A.”