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CHEN LUO                

Chen Luo is a Graphic Designer based in Maryland. She serves as a thesis adviser at MICA. She has taught at MICA, Tufts SMFA, Boston University, and UMass from 2022 to 2025. Chen is the co-founder of Body&Forma, a collective design practice focused on bridging language barriers through publishing and performative workshops. Her work has been awarded and recognized by Communication Arts, NewOne Awards, Design 360˚, Boston Art Review, and The Young Ones TDC, and exhibited in Canada, Italy, Japan, China, Korea, and the United States. Her work shares a language of reconfiguring reading/writing gestures into bodily acts, turning static materials into participatory, communal, and kinetic forms of publishing. She currently explores how embodied publishing forms a diverse readership and communal experience.
On/Off/In/Between:
The Body in Graphic Design

Edition I

Book
2022
ON/OFF/IN/BETWEEN: The Body in Graphic Design comes from my appreciation of our bodies and an understanding on both how graphic design creates community and what sensations can be embodied in graphic design. My body of work is a systematic experiment composed of research, inquiries, and projects. The study defamiliarizes the normative interaction between body gestures and tangible graphic design objects. The canon that emerged from the ancient Greek sculptor Polykleitos and Le Corbusier’s Modulor institutionalizes the gestures that connect us with tangible objects. My process challenges that very canonical interaction and critiques historical procedures of how the body, proportion, and movement have been interpreted and articulated with 2D graphic design prints. My thesis creates a new interplay of activities by defamiliarizing tactile sensibility with 3D raw objects. To facilitate unlearning habitual patterns, I utilize experimental tools—including printed matter, reciprocal installations, and pedagogical workshops—in order to examine the boundaries between bodies and prints, activate typography and space, connecting the individual to the communal. My methodology starts with constraints and allows possibilities to happen in the process. My thesis challenges and questions the normative body gestures traditionally embedded in graphic design.
Late update in 2025