Saradise Gallery a platform to promote local arts, design
KUCHING: Saradise Gallery has been gathering momentum as it continues to reach out to local arts and design community, giving them a platform to gather and hold exhibitions of their work.
Kuching developer Saradise Sdn Bhd is recognised for having shaped places including Brighton Square, for introducing Saradise Gallery – a venue to promote local arts and design, and also launching community initiatives such as ‘Kuching For Me Contest’ to shape Sarawak’s identity.
Entry is free to Saradise Gallery at Titanium Tower on Brighton Square, Jalan Song, which opens from 8.30am to 5pm, Mondays to Fridays. For more information, visit www.saradise.my.
The current exhibition is the ‘Creative Art and Design’ – a showcase of projects by students of Limkokwing Institute of Creative Technology from four disciplines – graphic design, animation, interior design and fashion design. The exhibition kicked off on May 27 with a launch and fashion show.
While the items showcased in the ‘Dare The World’ fashion show had gone home with its designers, the rest of the exhibition is still open for viewing till this June 23.
Limkokwing Design Innovation Faculty programme leader Rosedelina Mustapha walked reporters through the final project for the nine Diploma in Graphic Design students. Collectively calling themselves the ‘NineTales’, their exhibition aims to display their individual work.
“The final project is in three parts – organising this exhibition, producing a booklet with their personal profiles and abstracts, and their individual projects,” said Rosedelina.
Given the task of creating a new corporate image or redesigning an existing one, many of the students dip into their creativity to invent interesting companies and their supposed corporate images. Two students have opted to breathe new life into their existing businesses.
The results are a full range of corporate stationery with merchandise, a main product and an ad campaign for print and social media. For anyone impressed by any individual’s work, there are name cards available – just make sure to pick the real one instead of the one from the invented company.
Rosedelina said she was impressed by the work by the ‘Nine Tales’.
She said as part of their course, they had to go for industrial training from which they came back with newfound confidence after tasting life as a working graphic designer.
“For the majority of our alumni, the company that took them in for industrial training will also hire them once they graduate.”
NineTales share their exhibition space with the Multimedia and Creativity Faculty, and Architecture and Built Environment Faculty.
The Animation students held a ‘Short Animation Premiere’ – showing five-minute films made with animation styles of their choosing.
Animation lecturer Felecity Uding Jarau said the seven films shown were the products of a one-year project.
“Each student had to come up with the script, storyboard, character development, and did the animation themselves,” she said, adding that in university, they got to try every aspect of creating an animation from scratch before delving into specific areas.
The six male students and one female student presented a range of animation styles from Japanese anime to American animation. One even used ‘rotoscoping’ – a technique that requires filming someone acting out specific scenes then tracing it.
Felecity acknowledged that animation is a male-dominated field because the technical aspects may not appeal to some girls.
“But more girls are starting to join the programme,” she said, adding that she herself went into animation because it was assigned to her.
Finally, if you enjoy imagining a different kind of Kuching, the ‘In.Kuching’ is a project by Architecture and Built Environment Faculty, in which they re-imagined various locations across the city and gave them new identities.
Programme leader Denise Lee said this proved to be an interesting challenge, and all the students had different views of how they would redesign Kuching.
“They picked a number of potential areas, mostly tourism areas,” she said, adding that half of their students are from outside Kuching.
For long-time Kuching residents, it was startling to re-imagine icons like the Open Air as an upgraded food court, or a restaurant with a large compound getting converted into a kindergarten.
The students in this project provided artistic impressions, sketches, and various diagrams to explain their choice of makeover for that location.