Thesis

What is beauty?

My entire thesis is inspired by a persistent question that has been bothering me: where exactly is beauty found, and how and why is this determination made? This has nothing to do with a person's appearance, to be precise. I'm referring to the fundamental human mentality that distinguishes between "good" and "bad."

Why does it matter?

Beauty and ugliness are central to my thesis. I'm attempting to decipher what this implies. To explore beauty without ugliness was to grasp only half of the idea. Every element in this universe, in my opinion, stands with its opposite and equal to make perfect sense of itself. Nothing has meaning or value of its own and cannot exist without its opposite. How are these categories determined, I wonder? These judgments, in my opinion, are based on people's experiences, cultural backgrounds, and personal characteristics.

Research & Process

Understanding what was beautiful and ugly was the first step in my research. What other words might be used to describe this relationship? During this investigation, I found that the terms "damage" and "destruction" are closely related to the idea of "ugly." My process moving ahead was to create destruction of objects using various methods to further observe and analyse the change by repairing or simply keeping the object in the fractured condition.

In order to better analyze how this practice changes or refines the concept of "beauty," which is frequently viewed as ideal and faultless, I set out to look at the changes. I have used materials/objects like paper, ceramic, and fabric for my iterations. These are broken and/or mended back repeatedly by being simultaneously documented.

My topic demands natural progression of the methods of destruction. But instead, it is being done with an intent. This is contradictory to the design of my thesis. However, doing these experimentations repeatedly made me realized that it serves the main idea of my thesis, which is–contradiction, also seen in the words–beauty and ugly. Thus, I wanted this association to hold true for the duration of my research.

A key idea I connected with is that ugliness comes from something missing, while beauty is something we long for. Beauty is often seen as truth. If beauty is truth, ugliness could be interpreted as untruth or as concealing, denying, or warping reality. What if, in reality, the "ugly" things—broken, damaged, and ignored—tell a more honest story than the glossy exterior?

How is it relevant?

This body of work holds relevance within the field
of design as it challenges dominant narra-
tives around perfection, functionality, and polish.
In a visual culture that often celebrates clean,
flawless outcomes, the thesis pushes back by valuing irregularity, incompleteness, and contradiction.
It contributes to ongoing conversations in graphic design and visual communication about meaning-making, perception, and emotional resonance.

By highlighting the aesthetic potential in what is typically discarded, broken, or overlooked, it encourages both designers and viewers to shift their gaze—to see beauty not as a fixed or universal standard, but as something fluid, subjective, and deeply influenced by context. This approach
has the potential to not only expand our visual vocabulary but also inspire a more empathetic, thoughtful engagement with materials, forms, and ideas in design.

Installation

The concept behind the installation explores the dynamic interplay between light and shadow. While the shape of an object always defines the outline of its shadow, the shadow’s size and distortion shift depending on the position of the light source. In this work, the object represents a human being, a concept, or an experience; the shadow becomes its interpretation — one that may appear beautiful or ugly depending on where the light falls. Here, the light source symbolizes context: cultural background, upbringing, personal beliefs, even one’s mood or trauma. Just as a shadow transforms with changing light, our perceptions of beauty and ugliness are shaped by our individual and cultural positioning.

This installation also speaks to our natural tendency to seek meaning. Shadows suggest an idea of the original form without fully revealing it — inviting viewers to project their own understanding onto what they see. In that way, the layered and imperfect shadows cast on the wall echo the way aesthetic judgments are often formed: through an accumulation of beliefs, experiences, and inherited ideas.

Publication

What does the book convey?

Together, beauty and ugliness constitute a concept that is molded by personal perception and understanding, layers of interpretation that are constructed by a person's cultural background, geographic location, and life experiences. These layers create impressions that shape a person's decisions and evaluations for the rest of their life. A book, which is a tactile and visual object composed of pages with varying sizes, colors, and textures, is what I have created out of this complex ideology. The book itself becomes a metaphor for the complexity of perception, demonstrating how opinions are shaped by a variety of factors rather than being definitive or unique. My art examines how the ideas of beauty and ugliness are products of the human imagination rather than being grounded in any unchanging reality. These conceptual layers, which are constantly filtered and altered throughout life, reflect the overlapping and evolving concepts in the human brain. The book offers an embodied understanding of perception as fragmented, fluid, and intensely personal by inviting the reader to experience this ongoing re-evaluation through material, form, and narrative.

How is it important?

My book brings out the realness of the project in a way that I don’t think any other medium can show right now. It presents the idea through its pages, textures, and form in a very practical and direct way. While I do have an installation piece that acts as a model to represent my thesis, I feel that the book completes the whole story I am trying to tell. It adds more meaning and helps explain the concept better to the viewer. The book allows people to connect with the idea through something they can hold, see, and flip through, making the layered thoughts and perceptions I talk about feel more real and easier to understand.

Layout of the book

A newly created grid structure, derived from the experimental items used in the thesis study—tissues, plates, newspapers, shirts, and magazines—has been used to arrange the content inside the book. During and after the experiments, physical patterns that developed in or on these objects were closely examined and subsequently extracted. The book's layout was constructed using these patterns as a guide, which helped determine how the content was arranged on each page. Through this process, the research and the book's visual structure are directly linked, allowing the form and content to complement one another and represent the main idea.

beyond beauty