Ji Lee’s Words as Images

Ji Lee is one of those prolific and humorous artists that is putting the comical back into art and design. Korean-born Ji Lee immigrated with his family to Brazil at the age of ten, where from he moved to New York in 1991 to study fine art at Parsons School of Design. After just a year of that he ditched the course to study communications and design.

image: pleaseenjoy.com

Before I came to New York I was bathing myself in the romantic fantasy of becoming a starving artist like van Gogh. Then I realized there’s nothing romantic about starving. The Fine Arts program was all about the pursuit of such utopian dreams.

Lee continues,

I realized I was more interested in communicating my ideas instead of pursuing this romantic life style. Studying design opened my eyes. In contrast to the exclusive nature of galleries and museums, design offers possibility to communicate with masses of people.

image: pleaseenjoy.com

image: pleaseenjoy.com

Lee has since dabbled in many projects including the renowned Bubble project where he printed 50 stickers that looked like comic book speech bubbles and posted them throughout New York on various advertisements and posters. Offering a new blank canvas, or bubble rather, the public was free to fill in the gap with whatever popped into mind.

image: pleaseenjoy.com

Ji Lee’s most recent work is a compilation of words he put together in a graphic design book where he shows words as images. The fonts are visually created in such a manner that it mimics the word itself. Take a look at some examples below to get a better understanding. Witty and intelligent, Words as Images is a definite boredom killer and beats browsing Facebook. It’s worth a Like though.