Hanna Moon and Jouce Ng – English As A Second Language

Exhibition at Somerset House showcasing the work of Hanna Moon and Joyce Ng, two fashion photographers, celebrating the vitality and importance of fresh perspectives within fashion photography in a globalised and interconnected world.

Curated by Shonagh Marshall, the exhibition explores the artists’ feelings of being ‘lost in translation’, a feeling which, as artists living in a foreign city navigating different languages and shifting landscapes, informs Moon and Ng’s search for capturing beauty in the often overlooked and unseen narratives in our everyday lives.

Employing an otherworldly and playful approach to their practice, Hanna Moon and Joyce Ng incorporate cultural signifiers, set design and fashion to present their unique take on Western aesthetics and fashion ideals. Bringing distinct Asian perspectives to their work, they challenge the concept of ‘otherness’ and reflect upon the power fashion photography holds in shaping our perceptions of beauty, style and taste.

The exhibition designed by Studio Veronica Ditting pairs LL Catalogue and Univers: a serif and a sans serif, as a representation of how their works relate to each other. The typeface used for Hangeul and Chinese is yet to be identified.

Veronica Ditting, in conversation with It’s Nice That:

Yes! So basically, I said okay and tried to figure out what they wanted to achieve in their respective works, the first thing being the structure. Hanna wanted her works on the wall, a more classic approach, and Joyce already knew she didn’t want anything on the wall and instead a free-standing structure. The third room was completely undefined at that point.

Quite early on I thought what if we gave them a bit of more an object-like quality and they were keen for the rooms to reflect each other, but not be exactly the same. It’s a bit like working out the layout of a page, you just follow your feeling of what makes sense. Then the wall panels we made are these powder-coated metal panels. They show the layers within the photography and with the typeface it was looking for a bit of tension between the two – how those two worlds could meet each other.