Stepping into Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts’ Gallery 1 to see this year’s design graduation show is quite a sight. The entire gallery is filled with white cubes that are tables to hold the students’ projects. As one begins to move from cube to cube, exploring the Be A Good Creative exhibition feels like a voyage to see the countless islands that make up this year’s Design and Media graduates.
This fluidity, and even slightly chaotic, navigation opens up many journeys to a diverse range of works ranging from illustrations, art, graphic design, photobooks and everything else-in-between. The only order is that each project stands on equal ground, given a platform that favours no one. This is after all a graduation show, which is more about recognising everyone’s efforts to reach the end rather than a rigorous examination of each path taken.
Still, one wonders if more effort could have been done in preparing the works for public presentation. How good is a creative who has a catalogue riddled with spelling errors beginning with its introduction? Moreover, feeble write-ups and simply putting out entire theses makes one question if this graduating class has learnt to communicate — a “core element of design” that it says it wants to keep “close to our heart”. The few projects that left an impression on me include Do You See What I See, Universal Colourblind System and Project M.
As I ended my voyage, I realised very few of the works connected with the world I lived in. None of them could make me stay long on the islands. I very much preferred to be out at sea.
