Due to some unforeseen circumstances, FTKYW won’t be hopping on a plane to France. We’re all bummed out about it but fret not, you’ll see the new pieces from the collaboration with L’ile aux Ashby around and very soon! Very excited to share them with all of you (: xx

FTKYW is going to France! I’ve been busy working on a collaboration with the madly talented designer of L’ile Aux Ashby. Very very excited to show the new FTKYW pieces at the upcoming Born Designers 2012 trade show in Courchevel! Drop by if you’re in France. Will post photos soon!

Check out the event here and L’ile Aux Ashby here and here.

Alhamdulillah. Excuse me while I scrape my jaw off the floor and resuscitate my heart. In the meantime, see it here. Thank you to everyone who made this possible.

Happily working. Happy New Year!

Back in November, the good people at CATALOG approached me to collaborate with their creative team for the magazine’s December cover. I pretended to be cool (though my heart was excitedly beating its way out of my chest) and said HELL YES. Enough talking, on to the covers!

Check out the stitched masthead the CATALOG team did. Very neat, no? Here are the girl and guy pre-production almost done but not quite there, before rocking their Levi’s threads.

I must admit I’m not much of a magazine reader but after working with the CATALOG team and poring over their past issues, I only have one word - madrespect. The magazine has come a really long way since their humble beginnings. As an independent magazine, it is strongly holding its own against other local publishings and dare I say it, doing a better job. Needless to say, am incredibly lucky and ultra excited to have this small part in its history.

Thank you to the CATALOG team, especially Weiling, Ash, Janice and Farhan for photography. Insanely talented, hardworking, friendly and passionate they all are, with just the right touch of good crazy. Not forgetting Pakkee for writing the feature, without whom I think this would not have happened. And of course, thank you to the good people at Levi’s.

Pick up your CATALOG now. It’s cool.

www.catalogmagazine.com

“Let’s talk about everything” is a collection of memories carefully collected from four individuals, springing from four different phrases that hold strong emotional connections to these individuals. These phrases were taken from songs, quotes, poetry, etc. Each memory is explored, studied, laboured over and embroidered on found materials.

Gold thread was used in varying degrees on each piece to recreate gold dust. The preciousness and value of gold reflect a similar preciousness and value attached to individual memories. However, memories extremely treasured by one, may be meaningless to another. In a similar manner, gold dust, though still having value, is useless until it is turned into something useful such as a bar or a button.

Here are some photos from this series.

And here are photos from the installation at Finale Art File Gallery. Photography credits go to Mariano Ching and Rafeeza Khaliq.

I feel really honoured and lucky to be part of this amazing show with all the other super talented artists. I mean, look at this… 

Antarctica Manifesto / Antarctica Treaty by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid

Kinabukasan Ay Kaginhawahan by Zeus Bascon (Yeah, those are spikes!) Easily, an artist I admire greatly.

A crayon sketch of Leonor Rivera drawn by José Rizal taken from Wikipedia by Patrick Cruz. Another one of those crazily talented people.

Balls and Chains by Mac Valdezco

Dust by Mac Valdezco. The range in the materials she uses and how she use them to make breathtaking works astound me.

Wall work by Juan Alcazaren

Oh…Melayu (Version 2) [Oh…Malay] by Rafeeza Khaliq

The Great Smoke by Rox Lee

Rebuilt by Eugene Jarque

China Girl by Felix Bacolor

Untitled by Romeo Lee

Photography credits go to Mariano Ching. For more photos of the event, go here. The show will be up till December 31st. Thank you to Finale Art File, the curators Mariano Ching and Isabel Ching and everyone else who made this show possible!

Edit: How could I be such a dork and forget to thank my incredible friends who took the time to answer my questions and were more than willing to share a part of themselves with me and everyone else. Thank you for believing in this project! You know who you are (; This project would not have been realised without all of you.

On a sidenote, I am thinking of expanding this project. Anyone interested to take part, please drop me a note with 1) A line (from a song/poetry/quote/etc) that has strong emotional attachments and 2) The memory that is attached to this line. Thank you!

Some of my most recent works are showing now at Finale Art File Gallery in the Philippines till 31st Dec. It is such an honour to be shown next to some really amazing artists who are making very exciting works. Thank you to the curators and everyone else who made this possible. Will post some pictures soon!

Arrange, assemble, collect, choose, construct, collide, cut & paste, intervene, invade, juxtapose, jumble up, rip, remix, tear, trim assorted found materials and readymades. This is a show about remixing and reassembling, taking collage as departure point and involving artists with certain sensitivity towards material. While collage was a strategy for destabilizing systems and conventions, its aesthetics seem more de rigueur than radical in our visual landscapes. Pasts are constantly recycled, conflicting cultures collide visually and spatially, and the collage cunning of displacement and disruption seems to have lost its point. An almost unlimited storehouse of image and sound resources is instantly accessible for sampling and consuming in the digital age, where private and public merge, and copyright becomes an increasingly testy and confusing issue. Is there now scope for the spirit of counterculture to operate, and for the aesthetics and process of collage to be meaningful? Does borrowing, or the sometimes preferred term, stealing, yield any more creative innovation or insights? Wherefore is one a collage artist? Here, we explore orthodox and less orthodox tangents from collage in theme, imagery, style and material. Circling the tangle between the crisis of collage and the drive to keep making and remaking the world from the scraps of human culture, we take a stab at widening interpretations of and evaluating collage’s bleed into contemporary artistic practices, somewhere between collage’s more traditional definitions as a medium-based category and how, in principle, everything today can be seen as collage. 

curated and organized by Isabel Ching with Mariano Ching

participating artists:
JUAN ALCAZAREN
FELIX BACOLOR
ZEUS BASCON
PATRICK CRUZ
EUGENE JARQUE
RAFEEZA KHALIQ
ROMEO LEE
ROX LEE
PAUL D. MILLER AKA DJ SPOOKY THAT SUBLIMINAL KID
IZZIYANA SUHAIMI
MAC VALDEZCO

It’s a Tuesday morning which feels like a Saturday. And here’s a peek into what’s coming in December.

Friends to keep you warm was recently featured on Like I Give A Frock, a website to definitely visit if you want to keep up to date with all things art, design and fashion local and otherwise. Thank you, Pakkee! Skip on ahead and read it here and do check it out the rest of the site too!

Making new works, yay! While alternatively rewatching Harry Potter (hehe) and listening to Florence + the Machine’s Ceremonials, Feist’s Metals, The Antlers’ Burst Apart, Andrew Bird’s Norman OST and of course, The National’s everything.

Though I love FTKYW to bits and pieces, it is nice to work on something else and explore other ideas, other ways of expressing. This time I’m staying away from drawing people and instead delve into objects and abstraction. This is for a VERY EXCITING exhibition in December, which I am reeeally looking forward to but also freaking out about because it’s one of those solittletimesomuchtodo type of thing.

Ok, back to sewing.

Some photos of the installation. Thanks to drömkeepers for the pictures!

It is another rainy day. Have I mentioned that I love this type of weather? All I want to do is read a good book or watch a good film with a steaming cup of coffee and warm cookies. But of course I cannot. Work beckons, big plans that should keep me busy till the end of the year! 

She finds that bear hats protect her secrets very well. But they threaten to tumble everytime she opens her mouth.

Come down to The Little Dröm Store to meet the silly and strange girls and boys of Friends to keep you warm. They would certainly love to meet you! More details here. Thank you to the drömkeepers for generously providing their space and help, and to everyone else without whom FTKYW wouldn’t have been this wonderful and easy.

Fancy your very own piece? Write me a note and let’s talk (:

ps: Pay careful attention to the window display made by my very talented friend, Hanzhi.