For some of the pictograms shown next to the Kanji that I have selected to visualise, I believe the context corresponding to its Kanji does not have a strong relationship in relevance to the actual meaning itself, such as the Kanji character 考 means to think and consider but instead showing an image of an old man standing next to a tree branch that shows irrelevance in the meaning that I wanted to visualise in my illustration (see figure 7). However, their application of using human-looking characters in pictograms of other Kanji characters inspired my attempt to draw a person with a thinking posture, by looking at the pictogram figure of 康 (see figure 8). Inspired by similar language learning services like Duolingo, the pastel colour palette and chalk-looking brushstrokes show a consistency in an illustration style that brings a sense of friendliness and invitation to the colour palette and graphics that respond to the project research question – also approved by peers in proceed me to continue to focus on this style for the development process of the project.

Figure 8: A dictionary page of 康 features with Kanji pictogram

The GUTs exhibition was set up by pasting 6 of the printed illustrations in approximately 30cm x 30 cm each on the wall to show details in high quality. The 6 Kanjis illustrated have been selected due to my belief that further development and refinement might need to be made in terms of the communication of the Kanji meanings. During the exhibition, an A/B testing was carried out by first asking the class peers to separate into two groups in order to collect attempts from two kinds of cultural perspectives – whether they were raised in a Chinese-speaking cultural background or not, as a majority of the participants does not have achieved to learn any basic Japanese. The two groups of participants were handed two different colours of sticky notes that were pasted next to the printed work, requiring them to write down how they perceived an illustrated Kanji as the English meaning of the actual Kanji I visualised in one to a few English words (see figure 9-10). The non-Chinese cultural background participant group included 8 students using the blue-coloured sticky note, with one of them having previously studied Chinese in their younger education; and the other 4 students all frequently used Chinese in their cultural background using the yellow-coloured sticky note.

Figure 11 indicates the attempts collected from the participants for each exhibited Kanji illustration, where the discussion was carried out after the activity surrounded by the reasoning of the participants' attempts.

Figure 9: Overview of exhibited activity during GUTs

Figure 10: Exhibited activity during GUTs with viewers interacting

The overall exhibition was successful in that all of the participants showed a strong sense of engagement. Here I will be reflecting on my performance in the exhibition, how the participants viewed the illustration’s visual language applied and concepts in visualising from the Kanjis structurally, as well as their impressions through my presentation of works.

At the start of the exhibited activity, there was a lack of confusion among the participants from what I had stated, by told the participants to separate into groups of people who knew Chinese and those without Chinese knowledge not in a non-precise way. This turned out that one of the English-speaking participants questioned whether should they join the group of people with Chinese knowledge with the limited Chinese characters learnt, but did not have the ability to use Chinese in their cultural language background, resulting in the adjustment to a better wording of ‘divide yourselves into groups of Chinese cultural background and non-Chinese cultural background raised'. This reveals the fact that better preparation should have been demonstrated in delivering the activity verbally, and to keep a higher sense of awareness in the participants with various language exposures.

The colour choices used for each illustration have been decided on my own interpretation and judgement, providing a further exploration that could also be done in the GUTs exhibition. This aspect has not been covered much in the discussion after the activity but was directly revealed in some of the attempts from the participant group of non-Chinese cultural backgrounds participants perceived emotionally towards the colours. For example, the choice of using vibrant primary colours with the boldness of type design brings out a sense of joy and goofiness in the illustration of意 (I, meaning; purpose; intention), which misled to the results of juggle and clown – as I originally used those colours to represent the different voices of people in their opinions with a heart-shaped 心 (heart) typography at the bottom. And these ideas were found to be overly complicated to be perceived among two of the groups. As a result, a more careful consideration of my colour usage and stroke design as an illustrator has been taken into account since it could affect the effectiveness of the overall Kanji cooperative system practised by end-users. Where non-Chinese background participants tend to be more focused on the tangible objects illustrated over my design decision of type design, such as the sense of moodiness I originally tried to bring out in the swirly strokes in a low saturated blue colour in 考 (kanga(e), to think). The non-Chinese cultural background participants were not able to recognise the concepts through the graphical language but on the tangible objects they could relate more to, such as adding a lightbulb next to the human character’s head as suggested.