= o²

When I was young, packed homemade lunches were my frenemy. I never really understood why I had to feel so embarrassed to be eating my mom’s cooking. She was a fantastic cook and they hadn’t even tried her food before, so why was I being ridiculed for eating something other than a ham and cheese sandwich?

But as a kid who just wanted to fit in with the rest of my friends, the comments about how stinky my food smelled or how weird it looked gradually started getting to me. It scarred me for years until I realized I didn’t have to be apologetic for embracing where I came from.

Food is supposed to bring people together, but sometimes the “unknown exotic” dishes tend to repel rather than entice. With this ongoing project, I wanted to create a similar feeling of discomfort yet attraction toward traditional Korean food by obscuring typography to the bare minimum. By abstracting simple geometric shapes and lines, I spell out a traditional Korean dish that is semi-difficult to decipher on its own, but pair it with a description of the dish in both English and Korean.