For those who find Kakao characters too cute, an upcoming exhibition by Daegu’s Mesh Printing features the friends in somewhat less savory situations, alongside other work.

Jess Hinshaw and Christopher Cote, the men behind Mesh Printing, have been working together for almost three years, producing artwork as well as logos and designs for local companies. 

The show is designed to show off the work they have produced over that time.

“I hope that the exhibition will be interesting in that you can see how our styles work together and how our styles are also separate, too,” said Hinshaw.

“With the client stuff it is always a collaborative thing, where we both plug our ideas into the final design. With the things that we are individually interested in you can see more of one person’s voice in each respective print.”

He said the group’s name came partly from a technical term related to silk screen printing.

“The other part is how we are hoping to mesh with people that we work with and how there’s a mesh between the viewer and the artist,” he said.

Their work has included designs for the Percent bar and the Pollack bookstore in Daegu, and the Galmaegi craft brewery in Busan.

But other work is done for fun, such as the depictions of KakaoTalk characters engaging in social taboos.

“I’m really into skateboard art and culture and the artwork that comes with that is usually very cynical and kind of poking fun at popular culture, so that was of interest to me,” Hinshaw said. “And I kind of wondered how the Korean audience would react to them.”

The exhibition will include 40 poster prints as well as T-shirts, bags and notebooks, all of which will go on sale.

“One thing that is really attractive to me about screen printing is that so many more people can own art because there are multiples and so the price goes down a lot more,” said Hinshaw.

“I’d love everybody to leave with a print in their hand.”

The art show starts this Saturday at Space Bar in Daegu from 4 p.m. and runs until April 12. Mesh will also be printing live at the Big Day South cultural festival in Ulsan in late April.

By Paul Kerry (paulkerry@heraldcorp.com)