We love keeping an eye on ADFEST’s Jury
Presidents of yesteryear because they’re always up to fascinating things!
This week, we’ve been enjoying a new song
and video clip by Rubbish F.M. – a band made up of Pann Lim, his wife Claire
and kids Renn and Aira.
Lim is Co-Founder and Creative Director at Kinetic Singapore, and he joined ADFEST in 2017 to lead our Design and Print Craft categories. He also designed our brilliantly colourful ADFEST 2018 identity.
Lim has always been an incredibly prolific creative. In addition to his day job, he is a founding member of The Design Society and a frequent guest at Singapore’s design schools. Now, his family art collective Holycrap is about to launch their 8th award-winning zine, ‘Rubbish Famzine’. This comes hot on the heels of releasing their first single, ‘Bright Eyes’, which you can watch here:
We thought we’d revisit our interview with
Lim, which took place in 2017 – it’s a good reminder that if you’re struggling
to pass your exams at school or university, you may still go on to become one
of Asia’s most acclaimed designers…
You struggled in school, but eventually found your passion for design. When did you first realize you wanted to be a designer?
In the past, getting a degree in Singapore
was the way to secure a better future. I was following my brother’s footsteps
and tried to study my way into university. In all honesty, most of the subjects
offered in the mainstream education did not interest me.
So while I was serving in the army, a good
friend of mine who was in Temasek Polytechnic pursuing Visual Communications
said I should try that course because she felt that I might like it.
I would like to say that I knew I wanted to
be a Creative Director since I was young, just to romanticize the story. But
the truth was I had nowhere to go except to give design and advertising a try.
It was sheer fate and the lack of options that led me there. But once I was
there, I fell in love and never turned back.
You’ve won hundreds of awards, including the Singapore President’s Design Award for Designer of the Year – twice. But what’s your biggest achievement?
For me, awards are of course good to have
but they are not a ‘must have’. There are many things at work more valuable
than that. For example, seeing everyone in my office working together, both
account service and creatives sharing ideas and opinions: this family teamwork
and bonding is priceless.
It also makes me happiest when the younger
folks in my office put in their best commitment for our clients to make every
project better. And then the results are translated into them winning awards
for those projects. That is the best achievement for me: to see young people
succeed.
You used to be lead guitarist of veteran indie rock band Concave Scream. Is music still a creative outlet for you?
Playing music was a serious hobby for me in
the past. I have stopped playing gigs for coming up to eight years now. You are
right about playing music as a form of outlet. Any form of creation is an
outlet for me.
I believe that being a multi-disciplined
creative like myself, expressions could be manifested in anything: photography,
space design, furniture design, exhibitions, graphic design, communications,
songwriting, etc.
When I was in my teenage years, I used to
be a lot of more angsty and I played guitar in a death metal band called Silent
Sorrow. We released a demo on cassette tape in 1991. As for my second band,
Concave Scream, it was started in 1994. We released five full-length albums and
album No.4, Concave Scream Horizons, which can be found on Spotify.
Holycrap.sg is a family art collective. Why did you set it up?
It came about as a result of a sense of
guilt on my part. For years I have been meeting students and young creatives
whom I don’t even know, sharing and imparting creative knowledge with them.
Spending so much of my time with them and yet I have not been sharing my
insights and thoughts with my own kids.
So one night, before falling asleep, I just
told my wife, let’s start an arts group with Renn and Aira, to educate our kids
through creativity. To date, our kids have had six exhibitions since 2011 and
have collaborated with Lomography, Supermama and Muji.
As Holycrap, we also publish our family
zine called Rubbish Famzine. It’s a bi-annual zine that documents things that
interest us as a family. The kids are very much involved in the zine process,
be it with photography, drawing or writing down stories and anecdotes etc.
One of the main objectives of the zine is
really to collect and archive precious memories, using it as a platform to
educate our kids and at the same time to push the limits of creativity.
* The next issue of ‘Rubbish’ launches on 15-16 December in Singapore. See more of Pann Lim’s work via @pannlim or _kineticsg.
