Jungho Lee was born in Seoul and studied Visual Design at the Hongik University of Fine Arts. After graduating, he worked as a graphic designer and then as an illustrator, drawing inspiration from classical art and music. Jungho was the overall winner in the Professional Category of the World Illustration Awards 2016.
In this post, Jungho talks about his debut picturebook, ‘Promenade’, for which he won the World Illustration Awards 2016. This outstanding work was originally published in Korea by Sang Publishing, and has so far been translated into five other languages.
Jungho: For a long time, whenever inspirations that I could use for my work have come to me, I’ve been recording them by writing short notes or drawing thumbnails. Ideas came randomly and were often independent images, without order or relation to each other, but after regularly collecting them in one place, I could group them into a few categories.
One of these categories was ‘book’. This might have been a natural phenomenon given that I had been drawing various images for covers or bodies of literary works such as novels and essays, and I enjoyed working on book projects.
As a medium, the fact that books could hold an infinite world in a small and simple structure made them a good subject to introduce surrealism, one of my main interests.
I shared the following two illustrations on the subject of books online and received a proposal to create a picturebook on the same topic from Sang Publishing. I had really not expected these pictures to become the start of my first picturebook.
Shortly before this happened, I saw Chris Van Allsburg’s ‘The Mysteries of Harris Burdick’, and that book was an awakening for me, as I had been uninterested in picturebooks after childhood. This book, which was published over thirty years ago, shattered the firmly fixed preconception I had about the paradigm of the picturebook. Receiving the proposal from the publishing house – when my interest in picturebooks was slowly growing as a result of that book – was a continuation of meaningful coincidences.
At the start, the publishing house suggested using colour in a way that the completed book would come together as one blue image. It was a good suggestion that would highlight the personality of the subject. The publishing house also allowed me to work as freely as possible by being considerate in many ways. From the beginning, they did not expect me to have a page order or description for each picture. Nor did they expect a main character to lead the story or for there to be a clear ending. I wanted each scene to have its own voice under the umbrella of a common subject: book. I wanted pictures that were autonomous even when they were separate, and a book that was made up of these pictures.
Excluding colour, for all other elements of the picture, I used black and white materials on a coarse paper and filled the colour in digitally. In theory, this is similar to silk screen where you need a black image for each shape and colour. This can be thought of as digitalising the latter process of using a squeegee to add colour. This technique makes the process extremely complicated the more realistic the image is, but it creates a unique vibe that cannot be expressed by using just analog or digital techniques.
The length of time I spend working on pictures varies greatly, with a short project lasting a week while a longer one might take me a month or so. Even when I finish my pictures, it is common for me to continuously make edits. I often think that it’s done, but then I discover parts that need to be fixed. This process can repeat itself many times. When I am heavily focused, it can be hard to recognise these issues, so I need time to remove myself from the project and relax.
Discovering parts that needed to be edited but was hidden from view previously was the biggest variable to scheduling the deadline for ‘Promenade’.
I often use imagery inspired by music in my work. The title of this book was taken from ‘Promenade’, a repeating musical section that appears four times in Mussorgsky’s composition, ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’. While music can simply make working on a project less boring, it can also be an important element that has a huge impact on my work. At times, music has completely changed the direction of my work from what I had started with in the beginning. This usually happens with instrumental music. Music with the language muted makes it possible to listen more deeply and imagine richly.
In the same way, for some pictures, when there is no language getting in the way, the visual language increases synesthesia. In ‘Promenade’, I minimised the role of text so that it wouldn’t get in the way of readers freely interpreting and appreciating the work. I started writing the text after I had completed all of the images, and this phase turned out to be very difficult. When I viewed the images individually, one by one, they were best without any text. However, within the framework of a book, I could not eliminate text altogether because from the beginning, the images did not have a ‘beginning and end’ narrative structure.
For the language to not box in the pictures but act as a bridge between them, I needed short concise text, such as a poem or haiku. To accomplish this, the process of editing and re-editing the text felt like cutting out unnecessary parts from a sculpture. After discussing several texts with the editor multiple times, we decided on an order for the images, and the final version of the text was completed.
“Where does your imagination take you each evening?”
“The wisdom of the ages.”
While working on ‘Promenade’, I was continuously reminded of the fact that truth and the world from long ago have been passed down by books for thousands of years. Like the saying, ‘books make man and man makes books’, books are the most familiar and the oldest medium that endlessly delivers wisdom and inspiration that transcend time and space, and brings about the inner growth of individuals.
‘Promenade’ is a project that praises this world of books and embraces the longing for solitude that happens when we are absorbed in a book.
Illustrations © Jungho Lee. Post translated by Gengo and edited by dPICTUS.
산책 / Promenade
Jungho Lee
Sang Publishing, Korea, 2016
A book is a lifetime companion. Sometimes an invaluable tutor and other times a source of delight. The purpose of this book is to remind us of the often forgotten value of books. Through fantastical illustrations and poignant phrases, it invites us to explore the world inside the pages.
Overall winner of the 2016 World Illustration Awards from the Association of Illustrators in the UK.
- Korean: Sang Publishing
- French: Editions Milan
- Spanish: Barbara Fiore Editora
- German: Moses
- Chinese (Simplified): Guangxi Normal University Press
- Chinese (Traditional): Locus Publishing Company
