A new series of coins are being introduced in Singapore, some 28 years since a previous revamp was initiated in 1985. The new coins issued by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) are to gradually replace the existing ones, which have a 30-year tenure, according to The Straits Times.
For the first time, the coins were designed by a local, Mr Fabian Lim. This third series of Singapore’s coins features national icons and landmarks — the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, public housing, Changi Airport, the port, and the Merlion — marking the country’s progress over the decades.
$1 coins from the Flower series — SINGAPORE MINT
This departs from the current coins, known as the “Floral Series”, which were done by the late English painter and coin designer Christopher Ironside (1913-1992), who also created coins for countries such as Brunei and Kuwait. When introduced between 1985 and 1987, this series of coins were designed to be smaller, lighter, and more distinct from Malaysian ones as compared to Singapore’s first series of coins.
First series 10-cent coins — SINGAPORE MINT
Introduced in 1967, the first coins in Singapore currency portrayed it as an exotic tropical island with marine animals. Designed by Stuart Devlin (1931-), a gold and silversmith who was born in Australia and is now based in the United Kingdom, these coins are apparently still legal tender today, although most have been phased out.
The changing visuals in Singapore’s coins over the decades, clearly mark its transformation from a tropical island to a Garden City, and today, a global city of landmarks. As Ravi Menon, Managing Director of MAS said in a press release, “Coins reflect the events, persons or symbols significant to a nation. The new series coins depict local icons and landmarks that are familiar to Singaporeans and reflect various aspects of Singapore’s progress as a nation.”
The latest coin designs also brings it in line with the nation’s current “Portrait Series” notes, which feature a portrait of our first President, the late Enchik Yusof bin Ishak, on one side, and on the other, scenes that depict themes of his life against the backdrop of the nation’s development. These notes were Singapore’s fourth series, and also the first designed locally when introduced on 9 September 1999 to welcome a new millennium. They were by artist Eng Siak Loy, who in 2007 was presented the President’s Design Award Designer of the Year.
To find out more about the evolution of Singapore’s money, check out this timeline by the Singapore Mint or information provided by MAS. There is also a very interesting blog about old currency in Singapore by here.
National campaigns — against littering and breeding mosquitoes or encouraging the speaking of good english and to have more babies — are part and parcel of everyday life in Singapore. A new exhibition, “Campaign City: Life In Posters”, celebrates this aspect of the country’s heritage by inviting 50 individuals from its creative community to design posters based on their personal memories of various campaigns. The works are currently being exhibited at the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, on Level 11 of the National Library Building, until 3 July together with a historical survey from the library’s poster archives.
I was fortunate enough to have been invited to contribute a work for this event organised by The National Library of Singapore, in partnership with Salon Projects. Since I was a writer, I figured my best bet would to be create “word art”:
Here’s what this “pledge”, made up of a mish-mash of campaign slogans over the years, meant to me:
As a writer, language is how I define my world. Growing up as a student under Singapore’s two language campaigns — first the Speak Mandarin Campaign, then the Speak Good English Movement — I always felt caught in-between.
The Chinese language was suppose to root me to my ethnic culture, but it was alien to my English-speaking family and my elders who spoke Cantonese, Teochew or Hainanese. When I discovered Singlish connected me with my family and friends in Singapore, I was told to speak English to plug in to the world outside.
Made to grow new roots and taught to cater to strangers outside of home, what have I become? A successful hybrid Singaporean or a failed translation of our bilingual policy?
As the campaign slogans over the years reveal, language for a Singaporean is so we can speak to everyone outside of this city, but never amongst, nor for, ourselves.
One of the biggest issues I’ve always felt about my understanding of design (and even the world) is it has been largely from the view of the West. Living in Singapore where English is our first language, I’ve easily gained accessed to the tomes (and tonnes) of writing about design from Europe and North America. Most of these are not only from the West, but are also about the West, as English-language writers and publishers are only just starting to take notice of the Asian design scene.
A hint that designers from my neighbouring countries might have something else to offer first came when I attended “The Way of Asian Design” forum in Singapore a few years ago, featuring Kirti Trivedi, Ahn Sang-Soo, Lu Jingren and Kohei Sugiura. Then, I chanced upon Kenya Hara’s Designing Design, one of a select few English-language publications from an Asian designer. At the beginning of this year, I discovered Chinese translations of Japanese design books on a trip to Taiwan, and I immediately bought them—assuring myself that my rusty Chinese language I picked up in school would hold me in good stead.
It barely did, especially since the books were in Traditional Chinese script, and I learnt the language in Simplified Chinese. Nevertheless, I’ve trudged through a few volumes of these Chinese-language design books along with other Asian design books over the year and here are some things I’ve picked up, accompanied by interesting related links:
Clockwise from top left: Books, Text, and Design in Asia (2006), The Way of Asian Design (2010), Dialogue in Design: Kenya Hara x Masayo Ave (2009), Graphic Design Magazine #21 (2011), Papier Labo (2010), and Ex-formation: Plants (2008).
Books, Text, and Design in Asia (2006) （亚洲之书。设计。文字） This volume contains the conversations between Japanese designer Kohei Sugiura (杉浦康平) with his contemporaries from Japan (Tsuno Kaitaro 津野海太郎), India (Kirti Trivedi, and the late R.K. Joshi), South Korea (Ahn Sang-Soo 安尚秀 and Chung Byoung-kyoo 郑丙圭), Taiwan (Huang Young-sung 黄永松), and China (Lu Jing-ren 吕敬人). Each of them have been picked by Kohei because he feels they dig deep into their cultural roots to design, particularly in their typography work and books.
The conversations mostly revolve around the history of craft and culture in the respective countries and how each designer has tapped into that for their design work. One becomes aware of the possibilities when designing in the language of a particular culture; and it struck me that the traditional Chinese character is both a graphic and word that represents what it means, which is unlike the Roman alphabet that makes up most of our modern-day languages.
The Way of Asian Design (2010) This is the printed volume of the proceedings that went on during a forum held in Singapore in November 2007. Four Asian designers—Kohei Sugiura, Ahn Sang-Soo, Lu Jingren and Kirti Trivedi— shared their design philosophies and showed how their work were underpinned by the region’s cultures and beliefs. Like during the forum, the speeches have been translated into English, which makes it very useful for those who can only understand Asia through this language.
A standout speech was Kohei’s design philosophy of “one in two, two in one” and “one in many, many in one”, which he attributes to how ancient sages in China and India thought how the universe works, thus the concepts such as Yin and Yang. In Kohei’s case, he compares a book to a universe, which hosts a multitude of characters, stories and elements in a single form, thus “one in many, many in one”. The structure of a book can also been seen as many pairs of pages that extend left and right to top and bottom; and this he says represents sky and earth, beginning and end, past and future. Yet, when the book is closed, this duality becomes one, thus “one in two, two in one”.
Summa Cosmographia (1979). Click on the image to see how Kohei has designed, literally, the entire book.
Kohei then extends this design philosophy to the reader too. He says, “…We readers of books have bodies that reflect this same duality, with the left half and right half. When we pray we join our hands together. In doing so, we unite the right and left sides of our bodies into one. Our body hosts one heart, and this one heart is what we offer together with our prayers.”
It is in this view that guides how he designs his books, which unlike contemporary zen-like Japanese designs are full of colour, details and possibilities—and got me re-thinking what I thought I knew as Japanese design.
Moving from an older Japanese designer to two contemporary ones, this is another conversation-drive book that revolves around Kenya Hara and Masayo Ave, who travelled between their bases of Berlin and Japan to chat about design in the two countries, society and their personal lives. There is certainly a thread here amongst these Japanese designers regardless of generations: how they see design as integral to the way they live. They don’t see it in terms of its “value-add” or how well it sells, or whether it is aesthetically beautiful. To them, design is an expression of values, which makes it such a personal and powerful endeavor.
Reading the conversations between the duo, I found it curious that the Japanese feel design in their country is too insular and needs to make itself understandable to the global arena to survive. Ironically, this is the reverse of what I have been thinking about Singapore, where design is so attuned to globalisation that it has no voice of its own.
These two books are really photo books for me because both are in languages I do not understand.
GRAPHIC is an independent South Korean design magazine started in 2007, and is now trying to reach out to the world by publishing both in Korean and English. The issue I got was Korean-only because it is an “archive” of another Korean magazine, DESIGN, which it regards as a pioneer of the community, having been publishing since 1976. It’s a fantastic flip through 400 of DESIGN’s covers and a selection of Korean works that together paint how the scene has evolved. Unfortunately, I ‘m not able to read the essays, which I can only imagine help to make this issue of GRAPHIC, a significant one in understanding its country’s design history.
As for the Japanese-only Papier Labo book, I gathered from online that it is a custom printing press formed in 2007 in the Sendagaya area of Tokyo, and this is a book that documents the work that goes into this studio. I was simply struck by how beautiful the book is as an object, as well as the photography of the works they have created and studio life.
This is essentially a report of the 2007 edition of Kenya Hara’s Ex-formation project, an annual research he conducts with students at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo to understand how little we know, to question what we think we know and understand. For this edition, the group explores the theme of “plants” and they design a series of projects that present us new ways of looking at them as silhouettes, food, products, and colours—which makes the book a delightfully unexpected page-turner.
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If you know of other Asian design books worth checking out, do drop me a comment. I understand Jamie Winder and Iain Hector from Where You Going? are already working on a book about Southeast Asian design after traveling through this area, so that should be something to look out for.
A new series of coins are being introduced in Singapore, some 28 years since a previous revamp was initiated in 1985. The new coins issued by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) are to gradually replace the existing ones, which have a 30-year tenure, according to The Straits Times.
