(Un)finishedness
Jian-Xin Wang
Antwerpen, Belgium
About
Jian-Xin Wang (王 健鑫) is a graphic designer from Taipei, currently based in Antwerpen. After several years of working in commercial and digital design, he returned to art school and shifted his practice toward experimental typography, colour and print — screen printing, risograph, and dry-transfer. His work moves between two design vocabularies: the precise, system-driven approach of Taiwanese commercial design, and the more open, experimental attitude found in Belgian art education. He often layers traditional Chinese, English, and sometimes Dutch within the same composition, treating multilingual typography not as decoration but as a structural element. His recent research focuses on the quieter, less discussed sides of graphic design: anxiety, failure, imperfection, and (un)finishedness.
Project
When is a graphic design "done"? A graphic designer keeps revising. Each version closes some doors and opens others. The work is never quite finished, only paused. (Un)finishedness explores completion not as a fixed state, but as a performance, negotiated between the designer's intuition and outside pressures. Through repeatedly screen-printing posters and making a custom dry-transfer type kit, the project investigates how designers decide to begin, pause, and reopen.
The work focuses on a single poster, Bare Minimum, screen-printed in multiple versions over several months. Each version differs by a colour shift, a kerning adjustment, a repositioned element, a torn edge. The point is not to find the "best" version, but to make the small, often invisible decisions of design practice visible — the doubt during the making, the second-guessing after, the moment of choosing to stop. The accompanying custom dry-transfer type kit extends this question into a different register, offering a way for decisions to come from outside the designer. Completion, the project suggests, is never the designer's decision alone.