Eager Zhang
The power of language really catches me”: Eager Zhang on what draws her to experimental typography
Growing up speaking three languages has instilled a “metalinguistic awareness” in Eager which now infiltrates nearly all her projects.
Eager Zhang’s love of graphic design stems from its ubiquity. “It’s a pure language that we use to communicate,” she says, “wiggling between intuition and logic and distinct from fine art.” It’s a medium that often begins its life in a grid but is far from confined to it, straddling a multiplicity of outputs, meaning Eager has previously worked with coding, product design, architecture, photography and more. Based in Kansas City where she works at an art college as a faculty member, Eager also runs her own studio practice, creating works that explore language and boundaries, whether that’s “the boundary between the functional and poetic, between legible and enigmatic, or between visual and phonetic.”
This interest in the relationship between design and language began at an early age. Eager – whose first name in Chinese is Yige, which is pronounced the same as “eager” in English – grew up in her hometown of Weihai, a small town in northern China. “I grew up as a Chinese speaker but held a personal interest in foreign languages: besides English, my third language is Japanese,” she explains. Speaking multiple languages fostered a “metalinguistic awareness” and she became fascinated with “observing how people use language as an individual or as a group, how we ‘read’ language or ‘perceive’ it, what happens in our brain when we read a poem, etc.” She was drawn to graphic design, particularly typography, for the fact it represents “an intersection where the visual part and semantic part of language studies meet each other.”
Eager’s graduate project from School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which she attended following her studies at Tongji University in Shanghai, consists of two books that exemplify her preoccupation with the vernacular. Having “messed about” with so many different mediums during her time there, she decided to return to a core of graphic design – printmaking, resulting in Michigan the Sea and Garden in the Air. The first explores the boundary between how we perceive poetry and how we read it in two dimensions: visual and verbal. Having picked up writing poetry during the pandemic, she designed a typeface to embody the narrative of each of the six poems that made it into the publication. In one piece titled With Tomas, for example, Eager tells of a historical crush with poet Tomas Tranströmer. “I mixed his poem lines with mine, so I created a ‘half regular, half italic’ font to print that poem out, to show a dialogue between internal and external literature,” she explains. For another poem that deals with the nostalgia she feels when standing at Lake Michigan, Eager created a Latin typeface from “Chinese calligraphy writing habits”.
The following article is one that I received through It's Nice That's weekly new email, and I was instantly both inthralled and inspired by Zhang's practice, in particular the subject of the article: her graphic poetry book 'Michigan The Sea'.
Since Zhang is a multi-linguist, she has a greater awareness of the various nuances in each language, and how although language is a great communicator, there are some things that can't be communicated through language alone, or certain feelings or phrases that get lost in translation. As mentioned in the article, Zhang's book aims to emphasise these 'dimensions' of language, and more specifically poetry. We each perceive poetics on an individual basis, but also in a visual sense as well as a verbal one.
This is why the combination of design and language in Zhang's work is so fascinating, and as the viewer/ reader, we get to experience this convergence of both.
In my own project, I am also looking into utilising design elements to communicate aspects of language that may be unknown or overlooked, especially in English. As someone who can only speak one language, I find it really engaging to learn about what makes each language individual, and how words can alter meanings across the globe, whereas feelings may remain the same. I'm looking in to ways in which I can communicate these 'untranslatable' and indescribable feelings, and am considering mediums such as typography and printmaking, similar to Zhang's methods when bringing both language and design together in her practice as a form of individual expression, exploration and communication.
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