Collections

Play is sacred. To celebrate and revere levity, and embrace it as part of one’s creative process, is to be fully alive.

In honor of spring and the imminent promise of summer, we’ve curated The East Asian Graphics Archive’s fifth collection around the concept of play. The collection contains 22 jubilant pieces from talented designers who intentionally choose to explore the idea of play without restraint. Their work fills us with the wonderment of childhood: it is at once beautifully indulgent, cheeky, nostalgic. These artists show us that when we allow ourselves the liberty to embrace what feels like play, that’s where the real magic happens.

East Asia’s visual landscape is known for its embrace of stunningly maximalist, larger-than-life compositions and graphics that practically ooze with richness. In the Eurocentric field of design, however, this manifestation of maximalism is often seen as “too much”: too chaotic, too crowded, too over the top to be taken seriously. Even the term “maximalist” is highly subjective—maximalist to whom, and in relation to what?

We curated the EAGA’s fourth collection out of a defiance of the rules that the West imposes on cultural production. There is untold beauty in pushing one’s artistry to the fullest, in capturing every facet of one’s subject in luscious, radiant detail. Nurtured from an unapologetic love of East Asian maximalism, this collection is our devotional to design that—by Western metrics—does too much.

The EAGA’s third collection, “Shades of Abundance”, is our love letter to the Lunar New Year, one of the most important holidays in China, Taiwan, the Koreas, and beyond. A highly auspicious occasion, the Lunar New Year is a revered time for spending time with family, paying respect to ancestral lineages, and ushering in blessings for the upcoming year.

When concepting this collection, we set out to curate a contemporary take on the visual language of East Asian Lunar New Year celebrations. In an effort to move beyond the Lunar New Year’s common motif of red (symbolizing abundance in the Chinese cultural sphere) and explore more expansive interpretations of the holiday, we sought out pieces that instead incorporated some form of pink.

The visuals brought forth in this collection each present unorthodox, out-of-the-box visualizations of the most time-honored holidays in our tradition. Ranging in form from festival posters to paper banners to lucky envelopes, the collection’s vibrancy foretells the arrival of an abundant new year and a prosperous start of spring.

It is with great delight that we present EAGA’s second collection “Electric Geographies”: a 12-piece assembly of striking colors, eye-popping type, and spirited compositions.

Featuring visionary works originating from Okayama City to Seoul to Guangdong Province, this collection interrogates the electrifying, invigorating relationship between the visual and the verbal. When curating this collection, we set out to ask: How can the interplay between bold graphics and complementary type manifest differently across different contexts and geographies? And in what ways can East Asian graphic elements push the visual envelope, creating compositions that burst with character and saturation?

Our inaugural collection, featuring boundary-pushing designs and expansive compositions.