Conversation with Jiminie Ha

Jiminie Ha is a young female art director and graphic designer, intensively productive. Her works is breaking the borders of the common digital and graphic design attitude.
I met her few years ago, and felt totally delighted by her personal artistic vision and her international backgrounds. Here are some words we recently exchanged.

Where are you today?
Jiminie:Just woke up, at home in Brooklyn.

What are you working on?
I am just finishing up a lookbook for a new fashion line called GAR—DE, and starting on a few experimental websites for a couple of clients.

You are the new art director of Bidoun magazine which is dedicated to the Middle-East culture and politics, but it is based in New York, right?
Yes.

I have bought this book With/Without, published by Bidoun, which is a very interesting book about spatial products, practices, and politics in the Middle-East. The art direction is also very sophisticated.
How is your work going on there?
I actually just recently saw that book With/Without at the office in the city! I did not even know they had a book out until very recently. I've been familiar with Bidoun, and really loved the themes they approached each issue.

Magazine work is crazy, and it's been a crazy month. This is the first time I've worked with editors so intimately, and I really enjoyed the dialogue that took place during our intense two weeks of working together. I got to know them so quickly within such a short time frame...we had to get the special issue out for the Art Dubai Fair, so we had only a couple of weeks to get to issue out to the printer. I was sick and was running on barely any sleep, but it was totally worth it in the end.

It's interesting to see that you have enriched yourself within different cultures, from Asia to France and the Usa, and now working for a Middle-Eastern magazine. Are you consciously attracted by different cultures, countries in various aspects?
I think I am very much influenced by different cultures. I moved around so much growing up and always felt like a minority where ever I was. What makes it even stranger is that while I was in university I wanted to be a religious studies major and pursue Islamic Studies, and continue my study abroad in Egypt. I eventually ended up broadening my focus to International Relations and Ethnic Studies, and really fell into race politics while I was in school. I came to realize my fascination with race and identity politics related to my own issues with identity while growing up.

When we first met, you told me that you were used to speak French as you did your Baccalauréat in France, but you also said that you have forgotten everything! I don't really believe that!
Could you say how many languages you can speak and write?
Are you inspired by these different languages into your work?
HA! I lived in France since I was 12, my parents just recently moved to Lille from St. Germain en Laye a couple of years ago. I went to the Lycee International, and totally struggled with the language for years. I don't think I opened up my mouth until my junior year in Highschool. But I read and wrote french perfectly fine....I think the French education system is so much more intense than any American school I've been to.

I can speak French, Korean, and English. My Korean is pretty colloquial, and my French...eh. Let's just say when I come back home to France to visit the family, I need about a week and the words start coming back to me. I never speak French in NY. I just don't have any French friends here! But I wish I did. I am completely ignorant of Korean culture except for its stereotypes and its food, so I think I'm mostly influenced by my upbringing in France and the US.

You studied in one of the most prestigious American university: Yale, in New Haven.
What did you exactly study there? How was it?
I attended the Yale School of Art MFA Graphic Design program.
I really loved my program though, despite its neurotic environment. My class was really collaborative and supportive. I think the dynamic of the graphic design program tends to vary depending on the year, but I think I was fortunate to have a really great class, and really amazing professors. To have Karel Martens, Linda & Armand, Paul Elliman and Irma Boom be part of your graduate education was amazing. I learned so much from all of them, and they really encouraged me to pursue my interests within the field.

What is your personal approach on graphic design?
We, Fake-Real, are working with Event10, who is our main art director. His approach seems to be in a way similar to yours. He likes to confront the raw material to the graphic design technical borders.
He begins to work with a very clean and precise technique of design, and he ends up destroying it, adding new matters that he's scratching, binding, pulling out.
Thus he is creating an unfixed object through a strong and sophisticated visual identity.
Do you feel close to this kind of work?
Yes totally. I actually feel quite paralyzed by the computer. In some ways, I am a self taught designer so I am really, in a way, a total idiot when it comes to exploiting the quick shortcuts to make something on InDesign or Illustrator. Fortunately enough, I am a fast worker, but whenever these super-designers see me working, I think I frustrate them because I'm always taking the long route to do something. But also, I'm just not interested in computer generated work, and don't really geek out on the latest software. I enjoy how you can combine you own handcraft into something computer generated, and really input something more personal and/or analog into a mechanical process.

What is inspiring for you? How do you enrich yourself?
Lately, not sure to be honest. When I was in school I came to New York CIty every weekend to get away from New Haven. I'd go to museums, galleries, shows, etc. Anything graphic design related was never something I gravitated towards immediately, and perhaps it was just because my close friends in New York are not graphic designers, so I wasn't surrounded by the kind of conversations a room full of graphic designers would have. I'd rather be out with my friends going to a show and hanging out. I really think there needs to be a sense of humor to it all.
I think fashion and fine art were always fields that influenced me the most. I worked in fashion for a little bit before I started doing graphic design, so I have always found inspiration from designers such as Margiela, Viktor&Rolf.

What are your new upcoming projects?
I am working on a book with Rizzoli soon that addresses the point and shoot phenomenon, which will be edited by Ken Miller and Julie Schumacher. Mark Borthwick, Ryan McGinley, Juergen Teller are some of the photographers who will be making new art for this book, which is exciting!

I just took up a space on Division St. in Chinatown with three other people to make a gallery/installation site.
It's a teeny closet space of a room, but it is a storefront in a great location and because of its size, it can only be a place where installations and sculptures are made with the provided space. There is a considerable amount of rennovation to do so we're working towards finishing up in May, and have a May opening/block party. This project for me, is one of my escapes from design when I need to get away.

I am just starting on the Ball-Nogues website. Ball-Nogues is a LA bsaed architecture office that won the PS1 Young Architects Award last year. I have done some work with them since then, and now I am just about to begin their website.

I am also working on sites for some artist friends from the Painting and Photography from graduate school.


Jiminie Ha