Aldon Chen's exploded infographics challenge our "assumptions of sight"

"In his graphic design work, Aldon transforms periodic tables and dense masses of information into maximalist pieces of design, expressing information whilst also challenging the impossibility of taking it all in. Data sprawls across screens and pages, overlapping in overloads and feedback loops, communicating more the aesthetic of information rather than its substance, playing with images we have all seen in science classes or colour palettes. These are exploded infographics."

""The notion that language is not only incapable of capturing and expressing reality but also corrosive to its meaning, inverted an assumption I had about language that I believed was self-evidently virtuous: that more language, more articulation of the world, was inherently a good thing." This led to a longer, personal study of postmodern theories of agency, objectivity, subjectivity, and power, grew alongside Aldon as a student in school - now we can see the fruits of his curiosity."

Aldon Chen frames his practice as organised intention, spanning typeface design, sculpture, writing and interface construction. Much of his creative work is driven by private writing that informs design context. A teenage encounter with Wittgenstein's notion of the inexpressible, via Maggie Nelson's Bluets and The Argonauts, inverted assumptions about language and led to prolonged study of postmodern agency, objectivity, subjectivity, and power. Graphic work converts periodic tables and dense information into maximalist, exploded infographics that foreground aesthetic experience over digestible substance. Language and design are treated as modes of interfacing and interpretation, implicating power and political dimensions.

Read at Itsnicethat