typeinlocation

Typeinlocation - Tiong Bahru.

Vernacular typography reused, resampled, recycled, repurposed through the use of collage to create type-visualisation of the location.

Having grown up in Tiong Bahru myself, this project was really exciting for me and one of my personal favourites. Though the location picked was not the place I lived in but somewhere nearby, I felt strongly for this project and wanted to express, as much as possible, the feelings one gets when stepping into this quaint neighbourhood.

Each of the collage represents a different feel of Tiong Bahru to myself. The first displays the 19th century style of Tiong Bahru, which feels like Bauhaus architecture. The second emphasises the traditional Chinese feel aspect, the third highlights the hipster, or modern, cafe styles, and lastly, the fourth, emphasizes the traditional style aspect but picks out the by-hand quality of the place as well.

While exploring Tiong Bahru, there were many handwritten types and the idea of using handwriting was then conceived. Shops’ signboards, the block number of the flats, notices, discarded objects, everything that could be used were taken. Extracting each letterform was a tedious and long process.

Overall, the four collages with their mix of typography represents what I feel is a reflection of Tiong Bahru; a mix of the East and West. Hence the Dada style was picked for the collages to easily reflect the Western aspect, and the individual extracted characters of typography are arranged in the standard traditional Eastern writing format to reflect Tiong Bahru's traditional Chinese aspect.

Digital manipulation of pictures on Photoshop, printed on A3 and positioned on custom long papers to resemble Chinese chun lian (banners/couplets).

2015