Today I went to the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre in London for the Aleksandr Rodchenko exhibition. More on that later. Luckily my 5 pound ticket also gave me access to another exhibition called Laughing In A Foreign Language. This was basically loads of humourous pieces created by artists from many different countries. I really liked a lot of the stuff on display so it was definitely worth going.
One of the first pieces I saw was by a Chinese guy called Jun Yang. In 2004 he created this set of pictograms called 'X-Guide'. These pieces illustrate appropriate codes of Western behaviour for foreigners. But at the same time there are deeper ironies at play: while designed to enable us to communicate regardless of nationality, race and age, pictograms used as public information symbols are highly culture-specific and can often be misunderstood. Here, in order to make everything absolutely clear, the pictograms are accompanied by captions in English, though English-speakers presumably should not need these pictograms instructions.
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FoxyTunesLabels: exhibitions, illustration, infographics, jun yang, the hayward gallery
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Today I went to the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre in London for the Aleksandr Rodchenko exhibition. More on that later. Luckily my 5 pound ticket also gave me access to another exhibition called Laughing In A Foreign Language. This was basically loads of humourous pieces created by artists from many different countries. I really liked a lot of the stuff on display so it was definitely worth going.