In Conversation: Jungyou Choi & Kyuhyung Cho of Studio Word
The husband and wife duo founded Seoul- and Europe-based Studio Word in 2018 with the aim of creating neutral objects with a clear purpose. We speak to them to find out more about their journey and practise
Design Anthology: How did you first meet?
Jungyou Choi (JC): We were introduced by our mutual friends who live in Sweden. They kept trying to set me up on a date with Kyuhyung. As Kyuhyung was working internationally, most Korean designers already knew about him. I was interested in his work but back then I didn’t want to date a designer. A year later when my friends were visiting Seoul, they invited both of us to dinner. I went out for a casual dinner, without the pressure of a date. But later Kyuhyung told me that he had thought of it as a date, and that he Googled me before we met!
What did you study at university?
Kyuhyung Cho (KC): I majored in visual design at Konkuk University in Seoul, and completed a master’s in Storytelling at Konstfack in Stockholm. Storytelling involves learning how to create and deliver interesting stories based on graphics. My area of study was collaborating with non-human subjects under the theme of the ‘unwitting collaborator’. My project was Pictograph Font, in which the text turns the story into a pattern that is then applied to textiles. As a result, it extended the tools of writing and reading characters to become media that can be touched and used.
JC: I studied Man and Well-Being at the Design Academy Eindhoven and then luxury and craftsmanship at the ECAL in Switzerland. At the Academy, I learned how to be true to myself and work as an independent designer. I also learned than very small or personal ideas and projects can grow into something valuable and worthwhile for society. It helped me find the joy in creating something beautiful. At ECAL, I was able to use my design skills in the world of luxury brands.
When and why did you decide to establish Studio Word?
KC: Like our dating process, it took a bit of persuasion. Jungyou had been working alone for a long time and has established her own design style, her own ‘colour’. I knew how hard she worked to get to where she was and that she didn’t want many changes around her. But an artist goes through many changes as they grow, and so should she. I told her if our ‘colours’ mix naturally they’d still be part of her own ‘colour’.
JC: Since we started dating, Kyuhyung often said that he wanted to start a studio together. I didn’t agree with him in the beginning. I had a failed experience a long time ago and since I was used to working independently, I liked the way it was. I wanted to keep our studios separate and work together only sometimes. But as time went by, I realised we have a good vibe when we work together as we have different backgrounds and ways of working. And we were able to expand our work scope, which we weren’t able to do independently. So, after getting married, we decided to start Studio Word.
How did you come up with the name for your studio?
KC: Our studio name was taken from the title of the song Words by Gregory Alan Isakov, which I listened to a lot when I lost my beloved family members. The lyrics of the song are a message to someone who has died, and there’s a phrase in the lyrics that says ‘Words mean more at night.’ The meaning of a word changes depending on the circumstances and the meaning added to them, or who is saying them to whom. Designers continue to create objects, but the meanings of things also change depending on the situation and the person who uses them. In a way, I think design is very similar to words. I wanted to start with a very basic name like Word, and Jungyou agreed to it.
Your studio designs products across a wide variety of categories, do you have any particular scale or typology you enjoy designing most?
JC: Kyuhyung worked for a long time as a branding and graphic designer, and I worked as a product designer working with craft and materials. We collaborate together, working across these areas or expanding into new fields like space, furniture, installation, and interactive design. We enjoy working in a variety of fields without boundaries or limits. We are more attracted to seeking new things than being tied to past projects. It’s always interesting to explore new relationships between matter, traditions, cultures, and craft or industry practices.
South Korea has quite a dynamic design scene these days, what are the benefits of being based in Seoul?
KC: There’s high demand for something trendy, new and very sensitive to what’s happening in Seoul, and there are many opportunities for designers to exhibit or collaborate on various projects.
Since the colonial period and the Korean war, there hasn’t been much opportunity to establish a Korean design identity, but now everyone is trying to find the Korean beauty aesthetic in things like graphics, spaces and products.
How did the Wallpaper* Handmade collaboration in Milan in 2019 come about?
KC: In January 2012, my Pictograph Font was featured on the cover of Wallpaper*, and from then the magazine featured other projects of mine over the years. Then, Tony Chambers invited me to participate in Wallpaper* Handmade 2019. That year’s exhibition was to be themed around love. We thought about how couples bring together the different things in their daily lives, and how they could imagine various ‘shapes’ of love. We made a few proposals and the curators liked the idea of cutlery most. So, they matched us with Architectural Titanium in the US to collaborate on the project.
We purposefully designed the cutlery set not to match, and instead we wanted the different pieces to be an ode to the differences between all of us. We wanted to move away from the idea of always pairing two of the same things together — we’re accustomed to this with shoes, gloves, a cup and saucer, for example — because thinking in pairs might mean that eventually you’d become prejudiced against pairing two objects that have different shapes and colours. As we grow up, we tend to think that only a person with similar skin colour and background to us can be our mate, almost like how we’ve been taught to pair similar things. We wanted to communicate our belief that people of other nationalities, races, and religions can very well be the person we come to love.
The cutlery set reflects various characters and different shapes, like a round spoon and a square fork, and we hope that as people use these mismatched pairs in their daily life, they might naturally imagine other different kind of pairs, and thus different shapes of love.
What’s next for the studio, what are you working on now?
JC: We’re currently working on creating a brand identity and space for a movie theatre, a traditional Korean hat called Gat’s Modernisation Project, a textile project and expanding the family of Word lamps.
As told to / Suzy Annetta
Images / Courtesy of Studio Word
Studio Word was featured in a survey of designers in our Korea Issue (September 2019), our annual edition dedicated to exploring a single country’s design scene.
