By Jon Han
Did you always know you wanted to be an illustrator? I definitely did not. I initially got interested in comics when I was around nine. I read all the mainstream ones, like X-Men, Punisher and Spider-Man. It started when my dad, who owned a liquor store, brought me to the wholesale warehouse, and I picked up this box set with 100 comics and boards—a comic-nerd starter kit, but it definitely got me interested in the arts. I loved reading them for the art and the stories. It wasn’t until I went to art school that I was introduced to illustration as a career.
You took a lot of printmaking courses while studying at ArtCenter College of Design. How did printmaking improve your work as an illustrator? Printmaking was amazing for me creatively. Before studying printmaking and different printmaking processes, I was painting, but never really connected with the process of painting. The step-by-step process of printmaking, with the final art coming together once all the planning is finished, really connected with me. I loved printmaking so much that I only took one illustration-focused class at ArtCenter and substituted the other required illustration classes with printmaking.
Tell us about the first assignment you got in a publication after graduating from ArtCenter. What was challenging and rewarding about creating it? The New York Times is the first publication I was in right after ArtCenter. Art director Sam Weber contacted me—I believe he saw my work featured on a website. It was a stressful situation to begin with because I got a call from the publication to do an illustration the weekend after I graduated—I hadn’t expected it and was attending my sister’s graduation. I couldn’t take on the work unprepared and out of state, so I had to decline, but felt as if I had blown my only chance. I ended up being lucky because the Times hired me the next week when I was back home.
The biggest challenge as a new grad was sending in sketches and wondering whether I should send something I would want to do or sketches of what I thought was a more “illustration” look. Sometimes people have this idea that they need to “dumb down” an idea so it fits the context of a commercial need, but doing so just makes the work lack life, freshness and honesty. I was lucky that Sam knew what sketches were the work I was most interested in making; he encouraged me in that direction, instead of toward the sketches of what I thought illustration was. This really gave me the confidence to trust my ideas.
From such early work, what led you to your current minimal, abstract aesthetic? I always wanted to do things differently and in my own way, so it was probably a response to the popular illustration trends at the time, which were much more literal. Early on, I just connected with abstraction and the theories that revolved around abstract, minimal work. I was introduced to a wider view of illustration—fine artists more than the illustrators my teachers would talk about—through Anthony Zepeda, my printmaking teacher, when I was in my junior and senior years at ArtCenter. From there, I gravitated toward modern art.
Is the job of storytelling more difficult when you don’t rely heavily on figures in an illustration? I don’t think it makes it more difficult for me to tell stories without relying on a figure. It does put more weight on the viewer to understand and look for things she or he is not used to seeing, and I’m OK with that. It forces the viewer to understand a piece without the figure as the vehicle to inform them about what is happening in the image. It forces the viewer to connect the dots more, since they don’t have a figure to identify with and put so much weight of importance on. It can be like a puzzle set where the pieces with the figures are missing, and you have to come to conclusions about an image by the clues in the environment.
You illustrated a New York Times’ series on the topic of death. What about the usage of black and white appealed to you? When working on the death series, I felt that black and white was perfect for it because life and death is such a black-and-white concept. Death is perceived as an on-and-off switch—we’re here, then we’re not. So I applied that thinking to the work. I didn’t need color to complicate the simple feelings I was trying to get through. I thought that working with grays in-between the black and white helped to show the journeys these people had endured when dealing with death.
You once told Communication Arts that you’re “influenced by unconventional beauty.” What role does beauty—whether unconventional or not—play in your work? The definition of beauty is always changing, and there’s nothing better than to be able to make work that questions people’s views and definitions of beauty. I constantly question our ideals of it and how some things—especially in art—have come to be accepted as a definition of beauty—mostly a Western and European definition. There is a pretty standard idea of what is acceptable for a beautiful piece, as well as the tools that need to be used to achieve it; if someone were to use her or his cultural look, then this would be a theme or be perceived as stylistic. For example, I’m Asian American—more specifically, Korean American. If I were to draw in a historical Korean way, I think it would be looked upon as an Asian style.
I’m inspired by art from all over the world, but I’m more excited to see new art and new ideas. In illustration, there is this prevalent idea that what was done before is a defining ideal of what is and will always be good, and there is a focus on continuing to do what was done in the past. For example, for a long time, a fully digital approach was looked down upon, but a majority of the illustration you see now is digital, just made to look like it’s traditional. The tools we use have somehow been passed down as the acceptable tools, and anything else that you use is seen, in a way, as taboo. I think it’s funny that it’s necessary to drop a texture onto a digital shape to make us feel at ease all of a sudden. We can use tools that people haven’t used in a way to try to question the acceptability of an image and picture. Challenging those ideas is fun.
What’s one piece of advice you like imparting to your students at Pratt Institute? I try to emphasize that they need to be undeterred if things do not happen for them all at once. And that they should stay focused right after they graduate, since that’s usually when they have the most momentum.
You took a lot of printmaking courses while studying at ArtCenter College of Design. How did printmaking improve your work as an illustrator? Printmaking was amazing for me creatively. Before studying printmaking and different printmaking processes, I was painting, but never really connected with the process of painting. The step-by-step process of printmaking, with the final art coming together once all the planning is finished, really connected with me. I loved printmaking so much that I only took one illustration-focused class at ArtCenter and substituted the other required illustration classes with printmaking.
Tell us about the first assignment you got in a publication after graduating from ArtCenter. What was challenging and rewarding about creating it? The New York Times is the first publication I was in right after ArtCenter. Art director Sam Weber contacted me—I believe he saw my work featured on a website. It was a stressful situation to begin with because I got a call from the publication to do an illustration the weekend after I graduated—I hadn’t expected it and was attending my sister’s graduation. I couldn’t take on the work unprepared and out of state, so I had to decline, but felt as if I had blown my only chance. I ended up being lucky because the Times hired me the next week when I was back home.
The biggest challenge as a new grad was sending in sketches and wondering whether I should send something I would want to do or sketches of what I thought was a more “illustration” look. Sometimes people have this idea that they need to “dumb down” an idea so it fits the context of a commercial need, but doing so just makes the work lack life, freshness and honesty. I was lucky that Sam knew what sketches were the work I was most interested in making; he encouraged me in that direction, instead of toward the sketches of what I thought illustration was. This really gave me the confidence to trust my ideas.
The definition of beauty is always changing, and there’s nothing better than to be able to make work that questions people’s views and definitions of beauty.”
From such early work, what led you to your current minimal, abstract aesthetic? I always wanted to do things differently and in my own way, so it was probably a response to the popular illustration trends at the time, which were much more literal. Early on, I just connected with abstraction and the theories that revolved around abstract, minimal work. I was introduced to a wider view of illustration—fine artists more than the illustrators my teachers would talk about—through Anthony Zepeda, my printmaking teacher, when I was in my junior and senior years at ArtCenter. From there, I gravitated toward modern art.
Is the job of storytelling more difficult when you don’t rely heavily on figures in an illustration? I don’t think it makes it more difficult for me to tell stories without relying on a figure. It does put more weight on the viewer to understand and look for things she or he is not used to seeing, and I’m OK with that. It forces the viewer to understand a piece without the figure as the vehicle to inform them about what is happening in the image. It forces the viewer to connect the dots more, since they don’t have a figure to identify with and put so much weight of importance on. It can be like a puzzle set where the pieces with the figures are missing, and you have to come to conclusions about an image by the clues in the environment.
You illustrated a New York Times’ series on the topic of death. What about the usage of black and white appealed to you? When working on the death series, I felt that black and white was perfect for it because life and death is such a black-and-white concept. Death is perceived as an on-and-off switch—we’re here, then we’re not. So I applied that thinking to the work. I didn’t need color to complicate the simple feelings I was trying to get through. I thought that working with grays in-between the black and white helped to show the journeys these people had endured when dealing with death.
You once told Communication Arts that you’re “influenced by unconventional beauty.” What role does beauty—whether unconventional or not—play in your work? The definition of beauty is always changing, and there’s nothing better than to be able to make work that questions people’s views and definitions of beauty. I constantly question our ideals of it and how some things—especially in art—have come to be accepted as a definition of beauty—mostly a Western and European definition. There is a pretty standard idea of what is acceptable for a beautiful piece, as well as the tools that need to be used to achieve it; if someone were to use her or his cultural look, then this would be a theme or be perceived as stylistic. For example, I’m Asian American—more specifically, Korean American. If I were to draw in a historical Korean way, I think it would be looked upon as an Asian style.
I’m inspired by art from all over the world, but I’m more excited to see new art and new ideas. In illustration, there is this prevalent idea that what was done before is a defining ideal of what is and will always be good, and there is a focus on continuing to do what was done in the past. For example, for a long time, a fully digital approach was looked down upon, but a majority of the illustration you see now is digital, just made to look like it’s traditional. The tools we use have somehow been passed down as the acceptable tools, and anything else that you use is seen, in a way, as taboo. I think it’s funny that it’s necessary to drop a texture onto a digital shape to make us feel at ease all of a sudden. We can use tools that people haven’t used in a way to try to question the acceptability of an image and picture. Challenging those ideas is fun.
What’s one piece of advice you like imparting to your students at Pratt Institute? I try to emphasize that they need to be undeterred if things do not happen for them all at once. And that they should stay focused right after they graduate, since that’s usually when they have the most momentum.
Artist and illustrator Jon Han makes use of the abstract and the familiar to help convey an image that is both understandable and new. Born and raised in California, he graduated from ArtCenter College of Design and now works out of his studio at the Pencil Factory in Brooklyn, New York. Han’s work has been published in the Atlantic, GQ, the New York Times, The New Yorker and many other publications, including on the cover of American Illustration 32. His work has also been recognized by Communication Arts, Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine and the Society of Illustrators. Han is an instructor at Pratt Institute.
