Playing it forward
Malaysian-born Singapore-based designer JJ creates art out of discarded cassettes.
WANT to give your old cassettes a new lease of life? Well, Rehyphen founder Jessica Chuan, or JJ as she is better known, might have a few ideas for you to think about. Transform cassette tapes into silhouette portraits and a city map of Kuala Lumpur? Sure thing.
Yes, we’re talking about that glossy metallic strip in those cassettes from your childhood – for all those 1980s and 1990s kids – hand-woven into MusicCloth and made into works of art.
JJ, born in Johor Baru and is now based in Singapore, runs the studio Rehyphen. She combines sentimentality and sustainability in the creation of MusicCloth, which saw its first product application in the form of tote bags launched at the end of 2016.
Today, there are numerous items from Rehyphen made from this material, including coasters, notebooks, jewellery and city map posters. A selection of items are on sale now at Japanese design concept store Koncent, SunwayMas Commercial Centre in Petaling Jaya for a limited period. MusicCloth started as an upcycling initiative by Rehyphen, where discarded cassettes were sourced from the local community and given a new lease of life as MusicCloth.
“I founded Rehyphen with the mission to lead and inspire a sustainable way to be fashionable. We call ourselves craftivists (craft and activist) and initiatives like MusicCloth is part of our effort to reduce and eliminate e-waste. We are fast evolving into a culture that primarily consumes entertainment digitally. Analogue items such as cassette tapes are slowly being phased out. MusicCloth is not just an innovative product; it is also a system that embraces change,” says JJ, 32.
And the sentimental part? When she was in high school – and this was before the advent of smartphones and social media – she used to exchange cassettes with friends who were studying abroad.
“When I found these cassettes again during a major clean up of my room when I came back from New York, I came up with the idea to use a traditional weaving technique to transform them into a piece of cloth. It was a way to make waste and memories beautiful,” says the graduate of Parsons School of Design in New York.
It took almost a year for JJ and her mum to perfect the technique. The result is a flat woven “fabric” with clean edges.
MusicCloth took off with a bang, with swatches stored in the University of Pennsylvannia’s material resources lab and Material ConneXion libraries.
But the most pleasant surprise for JJ is the public’s reaction to the woven cassette tapes.
“Some people wanted to listen to the cassettes that we used to make into MusicCloth!” she shares.
She also quotes Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto: “Nothing old is ever reborn, but neither does it totally disappear. And that which has once been born, will always reappear in a new form”.
“We hope that people will see this not an ordinary workshop project, but a step towards change. We would like to encourage people to view waste with a fresh perspective, and get curious about how things are made,” she says.
We throw things away that are broken or old, when they are no longer useful or have lost their charm, she adds. But at Rehyphen, the mission is to elevate everyday objects to works of art.
JJ also holds MusicCloth workshops at her home studio in Singapore.
Lest you think all she is doing is making a going green statement, she insists that it is not so. MusicCloth might be a way to repurpose the discarded, but at the heart of its creation is a love for good design and a way to immortalise memories, albeit in a different form.
“Music is a universal language that connects people. It has the power to change the world. And upcycling art is not an environment movement, but a reminder that observing the other side of existence is the essence of art,” she says.
More info: www.rehyphen.org.