Based in the Bay Area and New York City.
Hwang Yoo-Yup
One archive for two audiences: first-time visitors and scholars.
Hwang Yoo-Yup (1916–2010) was a Korean modernist painter. His work was spread across exhibition catalogs, institutions, and family archives, with no single place to see it. His estate hired me to build one. I designed the information architecture and visual system, wrote the curatorial copy, and built the site in Framer.
Role
Solo Product Designer
Scope
Strategy · Research · Product Design · Curatorial Writing
Domain
Website
Status
0 → 1
Duration
9 weeks
LIVE ↗︎
The Problem
Two audiences, one body of work
Two kinds of people come to an artist's archive, and they need opposite things.
A first-time visitor usually knows little about Korean history. They need context before the paintings make sense. Hwang returned to the same subjects for six decades, and without context that repetition reads as a limit.
A scholar or curator arrives with a specific question. They need dates, exhibition history, and a searchable record. An interpretive layer slows them down.
The site had to serve both without making either one walk through the other's path.
HOME RETURN WAY, 1979 [PRIVATE COLLECTION]
Research
What I looked at before designing
I reviewed the estate's materials: exhibition catalogs, academic texts, institutional records, and biographical documents. I compared how other artist archives serve mixed audiences, including fellow Korean modernist peer estates. I interviewed four art-industry peers: an art advisor, a gallery dealer, a museum director, and a practicing artist.
Two findings shaped the structure.
01 Newcomers need context first.
Without the history behind the work, a first-time visitor has no way to judge it.
02 Scholars need direct access.
The context that helps a newcomer gets in a researcher's way.
Four decisions spoke to the vision
01 Structure
One site, two paths
I considered building two separate sites: a public exhibition site and a scholarly archive.
The site has one structure with two paths. The Discovery path is the default: Overview, Journey, Motifs, and Exhibition Plan. Archive Mode holds Biography, Works, Bibliography, Exhibitions, and Timeline. A toggle on every page switches between them. A scholar can go straight to the archive. A first-time visitor starts with the story.
DUAL NAVIGATION
02 Sequencing
Themes first, dates in the archive
Most artist archives run in date order. That serves art historians and loses newcomers, who don't yet know what a sequence means. The Discovery path is organized by theme and motif. Chronology lives in Archive Mode for anyone who wants it.
I wrote the interpretive layer: three themes (Figures of Memory, Landscape as Witness, and Surface of Time) and a Motifs section on the subjects Hwang returned to. Those subjects are the ox, cow, and bird; roads; labor; land; and the village.
PATH TO ARCHIVE MODE
03 Comprehensive Detail
Everything about a work on one page
Each artwork page holds the full record: the image at full size, my curatorial text, links to its themes, structured metadata, and related works. Historical context sits in an expandable section, so a scholar can skip it and a newcomer can open it.
04 Visual System
A quiet frame so the paintings lead
The site uses a dark burgundy ground, warm off-white text, and earth-toned accents taken from Hwang's own surfaces. The dark ground lets the paintings carry the color. Korean and English appear at equal weight, because the archive serves Korean and international audiences at the same time.
I checked each visual choice with one question: does it pull attention toward the paintings or away from them?
PALETTE + TYPE BOARD
Next Steps
Live, with the catalogue in progress
I also wrote an exhibition plan that organizes a retrospective into four zones: Formation, Displacement, Labor & Land, and Ritual.