“One Eye―Ahn Sang-soo” (1988) marked the starting point of Ahn’s photo project “One Eye Project” that has been on-going since 1988. Ahn has carried out this project by taking photographs of people he encounters every day. He asks people to cover one eye with one hand and then documents their pose in his photographs. He has been uploading photos every day on his blog (ssahn.com) since 2004, creating an archive that now consists of some 30,000 photos. “One Eye ？ Ahn Sang-soo” is the self-portrait with one eye covered that he took for the cover of the first issue of bogoseo/bogoseo. The One Eye photos originate from a playful meaningless gesture that has become a diary―the act of asking for people to pose for him becoming a kind of game―as Ahn has photographed people from all walks of life from famous celebrities to random strangers. The One Eye Project represents Ahn’s philosophy that “meeting someone is like meeting a universe.”

Ahn Sang-soo (b. 1952) has been a vanguard of Korean graphic design, first developing the Ahn Sang-soo Font in 1985 before creating a variety of typography including the leesang font, myrrh font, and mano font. He was a professor at Hongik University and is currently the Wing (meaning director) at the Paju Typography Institute (PaTi is a design school first established in February 2013 by Ahn for those who support and share his commitment to typography design). Ahn Sang-soo worked as an art director at a number of art magazines including Madang and Meot in the early 1980s before establishing the publishing company “ahn graphics” in 1984 where he served as a representative until 1991. After he developed the “out-of-frame” Hangul typeface Ahn Sang-soo Font in 1985, he launched in 1988 the art magazine bogoseo/bogoseo, printing a comprehensive range of visual experiment using the Korean writing system Hangeul. He also managed the first Korean computer-activity cafe, Electronic, with Gum Nuri (Kookmin University’s Metalwork and Jewelry Department) to share visual materials that were scarce at the time and to hold meetings of Korea’s first online communities. The free-spirited, experimental space created by Ahn and Gum formed the foundation for the artistic culture of the so-called “Hongdae” district. Ahn was also greatly influential on Korean graphic design as one of the leading designers who first liberated Hangul from a square configuration by creating the Ahn Sangsoo Font. Based on his philosophy that Korean design must embody its distinctive culture, Ahn has continuously presented works that reflect the originality of culture, thus playing an essential role in introducing Korean design. Ahn has infused his designs with his own philosophy of jedaum, meaning, “identity.”