KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 27 — When like-minded individuals come together, they can do great things. In the case of Design Union, a collective founded by Miracle Watt’s Suek Mei together with The Alphabet Press’ Cliff Leong and Zee Jay Wong, the idea is to promote design.
Zee Jay shares that it started out as a print market to revive old-school printing but it evolved into something completely different. He adds, “Basically we are friends first and we also do specialty printing. We met each other and discussed what we can actually do together because we are in a very niche market. It’s very tough to run it by ourselves so we need a bigger community to do a lot more events together to educate people... that’s how we started.”
The print market was intended to showcase what printing is about, be it silkscreen printing, linocut, offset printing and even digital printing. “Initially, we wanted to have a print market where we gather different printing companies and where artists can actually showcase their artwork with special printing techniques in one market,” said Suek Mei.
Since their inception, Design Union has made a name for themselves for exhibitions that appeal to the general public. If a designer is visiting from abroad, they are quick to approach them to share their works and thoughts with others via an exhibition or talk.
What also made Design Union possible was the fact that people believed in their cause and chose to help them out. “More than 50 to 60 people signed up as volunteers but those who can actually make it will be around 30 because they have full-time day jobs,” shares Cliff.
Since their first exhibition, these volunteers have offered to lend them a hand again and again. Through that working relationship, friendships were forged and the volunteers were also exposed to what goes on behind-the-scenes in design and how designers work.
“People just trust us based on The Alphabet Press so they just want to get involved,” explained Suek Mei.
For their first exhibition Collecteral, Design Union engaged with 10 designers to showcase brochures from their travels. They managed to get thousands of brochures.
The name Collecteral is a play of words, namely the word “collect” as the brochures were collected during travels overseas. The week-long exhibition also had eight workshops where people could learn risograph and letterpress printing.
“As it was our first exhibition, it’s good to let the public know what is good design. It’s more to educate people outside of design backgrounds and to let them know what other people are doing overseas. It also teaches them how they can actually make good use of good design,” explains Zee Jay.
Another highlight of Collecteral was two screenings of Stefan Sagmeister’s The Happy Film, a documentary about how to be happy. They also invited Niklas Ekholm from Amsterdam to do a typography talk.
Shortly after that, Design Union did the launch of Colorplan, a UK-based printer colour. Design Union helped to curate an exhibition using their papers. This included putting up 50 various shades of coloured paper on multiple floors of the PAM building, a thrilling job that was done by Zee Jay and Cliff.
Their next event was with GAS Initiative, a company in Japan that organises events at Isetan The Japan Store Kuala Lumpur’s Free Art Space. The company had engaged Design Union to advise them of the local market and understand what kind of artists should they bring to Malaysia.
“Because of the culture, the thinking process and design process for every designer is a bit different. The way we do design and the way they do design are different so it’s very good to have an exchange so we can learn from each other.
“What’s the best way, what’s the better way, what’s the thing we should avoid, things like that,” said Cliff. This resulted in successful events with Japanese artists like Yu Nagaba and Chalkboy.
In line with promoting conversation between designers and non-designers, Design Union’s logo is actually a speech bubble like how you would see in a smartphone.
One of the biggest challenges for Design Union is funding because everything comes out from the trio’s own pockets. As for venues and manpower, there are a lot of places and people who offered Design Union their space and help.
“We hope that it can run by itself. Of course we need a committee to run it properly. We still haven’t figured out the right model yet. We need to look for a viable model. If there is an elected committee it will become very serious at the end of the day and we want to balance it out,” said Zee Jay.
Their next project is still pretty hush hush but here’s a little hint: it has something to do with paper!
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