Grace Ong Yan

 Grace Ong Yan contributed the chapter, “From Interior Supergraphics to Participation in the Public Sphere” to the book Public Interiority: Exploring Interiors in the Public Realm, edited by Liz Teston with Karin Tehve, Ladi’Sasha Jones, and Amy Campos, published by Routledge.

Abstract: Fragmenting and juxtaposing large scale urban billboards and signage into interior spaces were specific tactics of the late 1960s and early 1970s Supergraphics moment. Chronicled by critic C. Ray Smith, as what he called “experiments in spontaneous and transitory environments, in witty and flamboyant optical tricks,” the designs aimed to empower inhabitants to act on urgent societal issues. In doing so, Supergraphics challenged modernism’s rigid ethos of universal truths, instead seeking immersive and emotional experiences that engaged urban life which I suggest is a state of public interiority. In this essay, I discuss and compare the Supergraphics experiments with public murals created at the same historical moment. My discussion is expanded by the theories of philosophers Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, and architect Charles Moore. I connect the late 1960s to our current milieu with reflections on recent urban graphics, including the street murals of the Black Lives Matter movement. By theorizing public interiority through the flat media of graphics, I offer a unique study of image, communication, and theories of modernity and Postmodernism as well as suggest the transformative potential of human participation in public space.