fFurious over Art!

The best way to explore an unknown place is by walking.

Our first couple of days in the Lion City involved plenty of walking, sightseeing and talking. Shopping only came later. It was only when we conduct interviews with fellow Singaporean designers that we learned more about this beautiful place. We wanted something memorable to bring back with us so we made arrangements with some interesting people and let them decide on where to take us. Interestingly, we found ourselves sipping branded sparkling water at a cafe inside the National Art Museum with none other than Singapore's best export in the name of design, Phunk Studio's co-founder Jackson Tan. We also did climb up to Mount Sophia (a total of 160 steps) to visit this place called Old School - the new creative hub in Singapore City. Next to Old School is Trinity Gallery where we met with illustrator, Ben Qwek.

Ben Qwek aka MRB. More about this aspiring illustrator at BenQwek.com

And these are some of his artpieces exhibited at Trinity.

Oh, did we mention Little Ong, the fFurious guy? We dropped by his office too. He's quite a chap. Look at his personal toy collections ranging from the 1970's til now...

J+S: I see that you have something to show us.....
Little Ong (digging up whatever he can get from the box...): Yea, I like vintage stuff...old stuff. Toys especially. They give me a lot of fun, you know. Like when I was a kid, I had this very huge Godzilla dinosaur which had a mechanical arm that could swing a baseball. My grandfather gave it to me as a gift and I played fetch with it a lot. But I lost it when we were moving out to a new house.

Little's most favourite favourite, Jim Woodring's.

J+S: How crazy are you about toys?

Little Ong (putting out more toys...): I travelled to Japan 3 times. Obviously, they have one of the most characteristic toys that I cannot possibily find in Singapore. Well, these newts by Jim Woodring (above) are my favourites. I am more keen towards capsules or miniature figurines that come in loose sets. That way, I get to collect them all so that I don't get doubles.

Little's all-time favourites [from left to right]: Wally, Friends With You, Petter Bagge's toys, Jim Woodring's and the Hulla Girl

Little's collection also consists of antiques such as this space-themed toy gun.

J+S: What's with the double 'F' in fFurious?
Little Ong: I was young and 'angry' back then. Anger kept me moving forward and I couldn't find any other word better than 'furious' to describe the passion in me. Double 'F' simply means "very, very furious". It mirrored the creative process of getting involved in an issue and letting that energy work out ways to get it right, and this extends to everything right from the imagination to paper then to the computer.

J+S: Tell us a bit more this design enterprise, fFurious.
Little Ong: We started at the year end of 1999 with 3 people and now there are 7 of us. Some people think we do only certain things, like create cute characters or design websites, but that's not only that. We work across branding, illustration, motion graphics, interactive multimedia, print and a few more other things. We have done some great stuff for Esplanade and illustrated for Mogwai when they came to town, and recently worked on Twoface - a Santa Claus / Satan Lucas lenticular lightbox for Butter Factory Club (below).

J+S: What's coming up this year?

Little Ong (smiling, delighted): fFurious is designing the interior of an entire floor of a hotel in Singapore. It's a really interesting concept. There's going to be lots of illustrative work and small and huge human-sized be monsters and spaceships.

FYI: Fox Hotel's rooms are specially designed by renowned artists and Tokidoki's private room is favoured the most by the media press. Looks like we're gonna have an Asian version of Fox Hotel soon! More details at http://www.ffurious.com/

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avi @ J+S