Superficial
In collaboration with: Grace Cao, Julie Du, Lucie Tran
Under guidance of: E Roon Kang
Exhibition Design
May 2025
Young Ones ADC Brand / Communication Design: Branding
Young Ones TDC Communication Design: Environmental Design
For the CCA senior exhibition, we worked with the theme Superficial by covering a wall with a grid of risoprinted newsprint. Each stack carried fragments of the word itself, short descriptions of the projects, and close-ups of the exhibitors’ eyes. The show looked back at its viewers as much as they looked back at it.
The pages were nailed to the wall, echoing how decoration is often thoughtlessly tacked on. Printed on flimsy newsprint, they moved in the wind and were free for visitors to take. As the layers were revealed, the exhibition itself represented our cycles of consumption, waste, and repetition. By privileging appearance over meaning, the exhibition became its own critique of superficiality.
Process
This project took forever in the best way possible, and I still wish we had more time. We had to do everything from creating the concept of superficiality as abstraction to whole-punching each paper by hand. The number of little things we had to figure out was the best part. The newsprint was too thin for the Risograph, and it would also turn yellow with sun exposure. The only guillotine that could fit a huge stack of papers was apparently a million years old, and nobody wanted us to take pictures of their eyes even though we promised it would be ASCII. What a blast.