Ayong Son — Unfinished Finished

Ayong Son — Unfinished Finished — 2026-09-01. The Seoul-born designer left agency life, relocated to Berlin in 2026 and turned a daily habit into the foundation of a new body of work.

Trained at the Paju Typography Institute and the Basel School of Design, Son set up her own studio in 2018, working across branding, editorial and web design. As the business grew she found herself managing people more than making things and making compromises to fit client briefings. The solution was simple and drastic: stop taking client work, change the environment and refocus on producing the images she wanted to make.

Five drawings a day

Son now draws five things every day to stay loose and to resist the pressure to perfect a single image in one pass. The routine is deliberately iterative — a way to privilege time and repetition over a polished, one-shot result.

"If I make something bad today, I can always draw five more things tomorrow," Son says.

That commitment feeds Unfinished Finished, a project that asks a simple question about originality in an age of easy copying: even if an image can be reproduced, can the story of making it — the time, the setting, the mess — be copied?

Hand-cut scale and visible process

Two standout works in the series are large floor installations made from thousands of hand-cut paper circles. One blooms in hot pinks and reds with trailing green stems; the other settles into pale pink and buttery yellow. Son photographs each piece from directly above while it’s still in progress, leaving masking tape, plastic sheeting and studio clutter in frame so the process remains legible.

Leaving the surrounding mess visible is intentional: the photograph becomes a record of work in time, not a tidy final object. Recreating the images is possible, Son accepts, but recreating the exact time, labour and context behind them is another proposition entirely.

Son’s approach sits between opposites — completeness and incompleteness, retro and modern, classic and pop — and aims to show how sustained, small-scale labour can renew a practice. For music and art fans, Unfinished Finished is a reminder that discipline, scale and visible process can be as compelling as a single headline-making piece.