THE NEW WAVE
Scotch whisky distillery The Balvenie seeks to trigger a new appreciation for craftsmanship by showcasing the talents of budding craftsmen in Southeast Asia with a meaningful initiative called Connoisseurs of Craft FOR CRAFTSMEN, BY CRAFTSMEN The Balvenie
In today’s digital world, the main exercise our fingers get is when we tap the few buttons on our smartphones to buy our groceries, call a cab or book our next flight. Hence, esoteric crafts that require skill of mind and hand, as well as a dedication and passion for the art, are infinitely valued and treasured. It is this passion, displayed in craftsmen that engage in these artistic pursuits, that has inspired Scotch whisky distillery The Balvenie to shine a spotlight on their talents. This gave birth to The Balvenie Connoisseurs of Craft initiative in 2015, a wonderful effort by the world-renowned whisky distillery, which handcrafts single malt whisky at its distillery in Speyside, Scotland. The initiative serves as an incubator for up-andcoming craftsmen in the Southeast Asian region to hone and showcase their skills through various platforms, including apprenticeships with masters from their fields, workshops for the public and joint projects with The Balvenie. Effectively, it establishes a conducive environment for collaboration and the exchange of ideas and knowledge. When you consider how this initiative has evolved from a small-scale project that gave traditional carpenters in Indonesia the chance to create unique Balvenie-branded furniture for the bar at The Halia at Raffles Hotel in Singapore, you will find it both commendable and unsurprising. The latter because it is a well-known fact that The Balvenie distillery is absolutely dedicated to preserving the art of handcrafting, by employing five rarefied crafts in making its Scotch, namely, growing its own barley, converting raw grain into malt, maintaining and mending
its own copper stills, having a cooperage to maintain its own casks, and having the industry’s longest serving malt master to ensure that the whisky is of unparalleled taste and quality. For the 2017 edition of the Connoisseurs of Craft initiative, four talented Singapore-based craftsmen who share the same values as the whisky house have been chosen to join The Balvenie Craftsmen Collective. Each of the craftsmen have their own stories and skills, which they demonstrated during four consumer workshops held in the past three months. Candy was the medium that Olivia Lee chose for her Curious Confections workshop in June, where she encouraged people to rethink ways of using and marrying different ingredients. The industrial designer, who has worked with the likes of Temasek Holdings and Samsung through her eponymous design studio, has been singled out by the foreign press as a promising designer to look out for at this year’s Salonesatellite at the Milan Furniture Fair. For Ewe Jin Tee, who has been drawing since age seven, making a career out of typography came naturally. During a five-hour sign painting workshop in July, the product designer and calligrapher, who has over 20,000 followers on Instagram, illustrated that beauty can come from the simplest of tools—paint and a brush. This perspective would have resonated most with his fellow Craftsmen Collective peer, Cherin Sim, who specialises in marquage painting. At her marquage hand-painting workshop in June, she explained the art behind the time-honoured technique and why it remains a widely sought-after skill, as it started as a way for the well-heeled to inscribe their coat of arms on their bags. We see this today in the form of initials and monograms on our leather goods, although Sim does try to inject modernity into her work with hand-painted pop art motifs. For her clients, this means one-of-a-kind pieces that are also works of art. With Morgan Yeo, the passion for carpentry is in his blood. His late father, who ran his own carpentry business specialising in handmade furniture, taught Yeo and his younger brothers the ropes when they were kids. Eventually, they took over the reins of JR&P Industries (now called Roger&sons, as a tribute to their father), and are working to perpetuate their father’s legacy by focusing on bespoke furniture. At his carpentry workshop in May, Yeo, who is trained in interior design, imparted basic and useful knowledge—from how to operate common hand and power tools, to creating a wooden tool box. As we head towards driverless vehicles and smart homes, the value of handcraftsmanship is even more significant as we seek to preserve and pass down these time-honoured skills. With such efforts as The Balvenie Connoisseurs of Craft initiative, it is a comforting sign that this cause will continue to be championed fervently and with dedication.
Pending pic from client