Year
2025
Scope
Master's Thesis · Graphic Design
Duration
4 months
Beauty is perceived.
And perception is influenced by:
Culture. Experience. Context. Belief. Memory.
What is beauty?
Beauty needs its opposite.
The contradiction
beauty x ugliness
whole x broken
perfect x imperfect
destruction x repair
revealed x concealed
To understand beauty, I had to examine what existed outside of it. Through repeated acts of breaking, damaging, repairing, and documenting objects, destruction became a method of investigation rather than simply an outcome.
Breaking things apart
Experiments
Break · Repair · Repeat · Observe
What happens to our perception of an object when its original form is disrupted?
The discovery
What if the broken thing is more honest?
Beauty is often associated with perfection, polish, and truth. But damage reveals history. A fracture shows that something happened. Repair shows that something was changed. What we call ugly may therefore reveal more about an object's reality than its untouched surface.
Light changes what we see.
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.
Installation
Installation images
Making perception tangible
The grid came from the research.
Experimental object
Translated into a grid
Applied to the publication
The grid came from the research.
Extracted visual pattern
Scanned objects
Enhanced scans through photoshop
If perception is layered, fragmented, and constantly changing, the book should behave the same way.
Publication
Exhibition
reflection
What changed for me
This thesis taught me to trust my own ability to think beyond the surface. I began questioning things more deeply, looking at familiar ideas through a different lens
and following the absurd questions that kept coming up throughout the process. Not every question had a clear answer, and there were moments when I almost gave up.
But continuing to question, experiment, fail, rethink, and pull the work together taught
me that the process itself can be just as important as the final outcome.
More importantly, this project changed the way I think about perfection. I realised that
not everything I create has to be perfect, complete, or resolved. In fact, constantly
running after perfection can make it harder to see what is actually there. The cracks, con-tradictions, irregularities, and unfinished parts can sometimes reveal more than
a polished surface ever could.
In the end, Beyond Beauty became more than an exploration of beauty and ugliness.
It became an exploration of how I think, how I question, and how I make sense of
what I see. It taught me to be more comfortable with uncertainty, to trust my instincts,
and to recognise that sometimes the most meaningful outcomes come from allowing
a project to remain imperfect.
Perception is contextual.
Imperfection carries information.
Design doesn't always have to resolve ambiguity.
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