Aldon Chen’s exploded infographics challenge our “assumptions of sight”

Aldon Chen is part of It’s Nice That’s Ones to Watch 2025 – a curated list of next generation creative talent from across the globe.

At first glance, New York-based designer Aldon Chen’s work consists of graphic design – naturally, it’s what he studied and it’s the work he’s most public about, but it’s only really a useful shorthand. For Aldon, his work is what he calls “organised intention”, which covers a range of practices from typeface design, sculpture, writing and interface construction. In fact, it’s writing that Aldon does the most of, and although the writing stays mostly private, it informs the context of his design.

“I found out about Wittgenstein’s notion of the inexpressible when I was a teenager, through Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and The Argonauts, both of which had a profound effect on me,” says Aldon. “The notion that language is not only incapable of capturing and expressing reality but also corrosive to its meaning, inverted an assumption I had about language that I believed was self-evidently virtuous: that more language, more articulation of the world, was inherently a good thing.” This led to a longer, personal study of postmodern theories of agency, objectivity, subjectivity, and power, grew alongside Aldon as a student in school – now we can see the fruits of his curiosity.

In his graphic design work, Aldon transforms periodic tables and dense masses of information into maximalist pieces of design, expressing information whilst also challenging the impossibility of taking it all in. Data sprawls across screens and pages, overlapping in overloads and feedback loops, communicating more the aesthetic of information rather than its substance, playing with images we have all seen in science classes or colour palettes. These are exploded infographics.

“I grew to become very sensitive to the ways language and design engendered certain modes of interfacing and interpreting the world, which made design and language not only an issue of power, but an inherently political activity too,” says Aldon. “This is where my ethical and aesthetic affinities correspond, it’s why I think I tend to gravitate towards designing systems of some kind: interfaces, tools and more.” It won’t come as a surprise that Aldon’s major creative influences come from thinkers outside of the design tradition: Chris Kraus’ autofiction novels, Ursula Le Guin’s essays, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas and also the larger liberal arts and humanities sector that taught him how to understand design as “situated within a larger continuum of human thought.” It’s exactly the kind of lofty philosophy that drives boundary-pushing design, interweaving the capacities of our own understandings with pleasant, clinical data presentations and the poetics of computation.

Aldon Chen is part of It’s Nice That’s Ones to Watch 2025 – a curated list of next generation creative talent from across the globe. Discover all 65 creatives in our directory, here.