on Languages
Learning from Breaking the Barrier, Surabaya
A few months ago, Adji from Studio Akronim asked if we wanted to join a group show in Surabaya. We hadn’t participated in many exhibitions lately, and the theme sounded interesting, so we said yes. The brief was to design a motion piece about breaking barriers and celebrating collaboration across cultures.
It reminded me of something I wrote on Threads:
Graphic design is a language.
Writing is a language.
Art is a language.
Having a bias towards one limits how we express and absorb ideas. The more languages we know, the better we can understand others.
Anything that shapes how we think or make sense of the world can be treated as a language. Art is a language for expression. Math is a language for patterns. Code is a language for building systems. Architecture is a language for shaping space. Photography is a language for framing what we see. Even cooking is a language, combining ingredients and technique to share culture and taste.
Language is old. Really old. Around a hundred thousand years ago, as humans started living in bigger groups, we needed ways to hunt together, share knowledge, and form tribes. It began as simple sounds and gestures and slowly became structured, eventually evolving into what we use today. Groups shaped their own dialects and decided who belonged and who didn’t. Language became glue, creating trust, belonging, and identity. But it also built walls. Speak one way and you’re in. Speak another and you’re out. Language connects and divides at the same time.
Learning a new language changes how you see the world. You notice things you would have missed before. You start seeing through someone else’s eyes, finding new ways to work together and share ideas. It rewires how you think, and over time, the edges of what you know blur. New connections start to appear.
A ‘jack of all trades’ is usually seen as a flaw. Maybe there’s another way to look at it. More like a polymath, someone curious enough to go deep in a few areas while noticing how everything connects. The world doesn’t run in neat lanes anymore. Complex problems need cross-disciplinary thinking. Innovation often comes from combining old things in new ways. Insight appears at intersections, where design meets writing, art meets psychology, music meets architecture. Being fluent in a few complementary languages can be more useful than being perfect in one.
New ways of thinking often appear at the edges, between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the strange, the old and the new. That is where ideas collide, patterns reveal themselves, and unexpected things appear.
Abraham Maslow said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” Stick to one language and that’s all you see. New ideas come from connecting what already exists in ways no one else notices. The more languages you know, the more patterns you find, and the more of the board you can see.
Breaking the Barrier was held at Famos Hub in Surabaya, Indonesia on 3 - 7 Dec 2025.
*This was previously posted on our studio’s field notes on 19 Dec 2025.
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Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous
@felix.anonymous
linguistic colonialism?