Format was proud to support the first annual Booooooom Illustration Awards. As an extension of the awards, Format gifted these Illustrators lifetime subscriptions to support their careers with a professional, design-forward portfolio website.
Booooooom is a recognized authority on art, design, and photography. Over the past 15 years, they’ve captured the attention of a massive audience, highlighting the work of emerging talents, and launching the careers of many young artists internationally.
Please join us in celebrating the work of this year’s recipients; Minji Seo and Adrianne Huang.
Minji SEO
An illustrator based in Seoul, South Korea, Minji creates artwork with compassion and affection for the human existence. This, she describes, “constantly requires self-reflection.” Minji works in both digital painting and traditional media, including paper and canvas. Her submitted illustration above, part of her series Neighbor, made the shortlist in the 2024 Booooooom Illustration Awards.
After overhearing loud conversations from the next-door apartment one day at home, she started to wonder how much neighbors might know about each others’ households, even if they didn’t really know each other; a thought that made her uneasy and want to avoid her neighbors. “I found it interesting that this train of thought might be something others also experience–the feeling of not wanting to encounter their neighbor. This led me to imagine neighbors moving around to avoid each other, separated by just one wall. I thought it would be more fun if they were holding tools, like in a game,” shared Minji.
Minji draws inspiration from everyday and mundane experiences; lines from books and song lyrics that resonate, rambling phone conversations, and scaring away birds during an outdoor picnic are all fodder for her imagination.
Discover more of Minji’s work in her portfolio: https://seominji.format.com/
Adrianne Huang
Navigating the space between reality and the hypnagogic, Adrianne Huang‘s works on paper cast richly detailed images into layers of visual metaphor. Informed by both the beauty and the unease of being a second-generation immigrant in the Southern United States, she examines broader subjects of attachment, regret, and longing.
Her subjects inhabit a world of unexpected contrasts and melancholic fantasy, expressing an underlying frustration with the human experience and proposing half-answers to difficult questions. Interrogating the expression of vulnerability in the face of an ambivalent outside world, the nature and necessity of coping mechanisms, the condition of being at odds with oneself, the dissonance between linear time and loss, and the ephemerality of memory and moments. Huang’s work invites viewers to join her in grappling with such subjects from a personal perspective, and to pursue catharsis in the absence of certainty.
Discover more of Adrianne’s work in her portfolio: https://adriannehuang.format.com
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