"An Eccentric Reversible Reaction": Yi Sang's Experimental Poetry in the 1930s and Its Meaning to Contemporary Design

Abstract

This article bridges east and west by introducing to the western design community the experimental poetry of a Korean avant-garde poet Yi Sang (pen name, Hae-Kyoung Kim, 1910-1937). His experimental poetry from the 1930s, his use of space-time perception and his design sensibilities all contribute to meaning in contemporary design. While many researchers in Korea have investigated his poetry, relatively Iittle insight has been developed regarding his methods and goals for his poems. Trained as an architect, it is my assumption that his strange and often incomprehensible poems from the early 1930s should be interpreted not in the context of textual or literary theory as often supposed, but in the context of visual texts found in such fields as architecture, graphic design and typography. His poetry consists of persistent space-time conceptions as shown in the domain of modern visual arts. By decoding Yi Sang's logics on poetry, we may find how the underlying concept of modern design in the 1930s was encountered by a Korean poet. The 1930s are a legendary period when Korea began to absorb western modernism into its culture, even though it arrived indirectly through Japanese intervention. While this article investigates signs and their inner logic of Korean response to the aesthetic modernism of the 1930s, I argue that even though western modern culture forcefully affected Korean modernists, Yi Sang's creative mind moved beyond modernism and toward deconstruction.