THE NAGA SERIES
Please view Culture_The Naga Project
Title / Red Carpet
Event / Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics
Organisation / Package & Design Magazine, China
Year / 2001
Designer_Photographer / William Harald-Wong
Shortly after China won the bid for the 2008 Olympic Games, I received an email and fax invitation to participate in China’s first exhibition to promote the Games to the Chinese people.
The organisers invited 60 artists & designers—50 from Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau; and ten from other countries. It was an open brief. The only requirement was to include the line Meet in Beijing and the official Beijing Olympics logo in the poster.
An image of China rolling out a red carpet, and the Chinese dragon, quickly came to my mind. I thought that it might be appropriate to send our nagas, the serpent spirit of Southeast Asia, northwards for a rendezvous with the Chinese dragon, a symbol of power, strength and good fortune. A gesture of exchange.
As the title Meet in Beijing appears on every poster in the exhibition (and thus redundant), I took the liberty to experiment with the letterforms—one line of text pushed north while another headed south, in the spirit of exchange and friendship. One feedback I received from China was that some English-speaking visitors thought I had written the title in Chinese!
“Many of my posters, even today, are worked by hand with a trusty photocopier machine. The images are then scanned and assembled in the computer for digital output.
In my personal work and my photography, I believe in the Accident—the unpredictable is part of the creative process.”
Malignant Millennium
Malignant Millennium Magnified
Titles / Malignant Millennium and Malignant Millennium Magnified
Client / National Art Gallery, Malaysia
Year / 2000
Designer / William Harald-Wong
I was invited by the Balai Seni Lukis Negara (National Art Gallery) to participate in a group exhibition to commemorate the year 2000.
I designed a pair of posters, inspired by an image taken by NASA—a star devouring another star. Quite terrifying, I thought to myself, but it was also something timeless and beautiful. Several current events also influenced the design: Kosovo, the shooting at Columbine High School (Colorado, USA), sectarian clashes in Indonesia, as well as memories of a famous assassination.
Although the Universal Dictionary defines the new millennium as a “hoped-for period of joy, prosperity, and justice”, it is undeniable that the dark forces that afflict man will cross the same threshold. These forces of destructive power are part of the whole cosmological order—of creation, destruction and re-creation.
Title / Lady White
Client / Five Arts Centre
Year / 1989
Designer_Photographer / William Harald-Wong
This poster was designed for a theatre performance based on the Chinese classic Madam White Snake, directed by Chin San Sooi. The photograph captures the moment Lady White transforms from a beautiful woman into her immortal snake form.
I photographed the actress Pearlly Chua (who played Lady White Snake) on the windy rooftop of the old Prime College in Jalan Klang Lama, Kuala Lumpur.
THE LANGUAGE SERIES
Title / Mata Samseng (The Delinquent Eye)
Client / Arjo Wiggins
Year / 1997
Designer_Photographer / William Harald-Wong
I have an interest in Asian vernacular forms and language.
Mata Samseng, roughly translated as ‘The Delinquent Eye’, is the title of a lecture to encourage design students to discover how form and function are sometimes shaped by culture and the social environment.
There is a big difference in the form of the shadow puppets from Kelantan, northeastern Malaysia (the illustration in the poster), and Java, Indonesia (the photographic image).
In Kelantan, the audience sits facing the theatre and only sees the shadow of the puppets against a screen (white cloth)—hence the puppets have bold, gutsy colours and a raw, primeval form.
In Indonesia, the audience can sit either in front of the screen and see the puppets’ shadows; or behind the screen, to watch the orchestra, and marvel at the elegant, intricately carved and finely coloured puppets.
LANGUAGE
The Malay word mata means ‘eye’. During the Malayan Emergency (the Communist insurgency of 1940–1960), the Chinese community coined the term mata-mata to mean ‘the eyes of the police.’
Samseng, on the other hand, is a Chinese word incorporated into everyday Malay. It usually means a hooligan or gangster. The Chinese word 三 sān (three) + 牲 shēng (domestic animal) could also mean an animal sacrifice, a secret society ritual.
Samseng could also be used by a doting mother in a teasing tone to describe a naughty child.
In this poster, I have coined the term Mata Samseng—loosely translated as a ‘naughty eye’ or ‘delinquent eye’—to urge design students to observe and question everything they see, to create anew or reinvent things from a fresh perspective.
The images above show the Colonial Government’s ‘Food Denial Operations’ or ‘Operation Starvation’—a tactic to deny food supplies to the communists hidden in the jungle. During daylight hours, there was strict control of movements of food, and curfews imposed from dusk to dawn. Rice is cooked and distributed under the watchful eyes (‘mata-mata’) of the Police and the Armed Forces.
Title / Bach’s Birdsong
Client 1 Leaflet / The British Council Malaysia
Client 2 Posters / (William Harald-Wong, self-initiated project)
Exhibitions Posters / Indigo travelling exhibition (global), others
Year Posters / 2000
Designer / William Harald-Wong
I was working on a leaflet Bachs Bibliothek for The British Council, and I found a reproduction of an old manuscript—the musical notation was supposedly handwritten by the famous composer himself.
After enlarging several of Bach’s unretouched musical symbols, I noticed that some of them bear a striking resemblance to birds. One looked like a duck, while another, a group of flying birds, like the black crows that gather at the local wet market.
This realisation became the inspiration for a pair of posters.
Bach’s Birdsong 1_Quack Quack
Is there a universal consensus as to how a duck ‘sounds’? The imitation of a duck’s quack quack can vary considerably from culture to culture, based on their linguistic systems.
Bach’s Birdsong 2_Caw Caw
Similarly, the crow’s cry, caw caw, when transcribed into different languages can be surprisingly different too.
Of particular interest is the Saribas Ibans of Borneo, a tribe that ascribes no sound for the crow. The Ibans, especially the older generation, regard all flying birds as sacred, and thus, do not mimic their sounds out of respect. Some birds are associated with death, including the bubut (the coucal or crow pheasant) that watches over the Bridge of Fear dividing life and death.
The Ibans, however, do have a sound for the duck because it is NOT a flying bird (the local species waddles around and does not fly).
THE SPIRIT SERIES
Title / Tree Spirit
Exhibitions / various
Year / 2004
Photographer / William Harald-Wong
I took this photograph in Siem Reap, Cambodia, on the road to the temples of Angkor. The message is clear. There is nothing else a designer can add to the image.
Title / Inspiration Lost and Found
Event / Icograda Design Week 2008, Daegu, South Korea
Client / Daegu Organising Committee
Year / 2008
Designer_Photographer / William Harald-Wong
Digital Imaging / Lim Pin Shen
Reflecting on working life with the daily drag of meetings, proposals and an endless stream of emails, where does one find inspiration?
A statue of Brahma, the four-headed creator of the universe (photographed in Vientiane, Laos) rises above the mundane, superimposed with an extract of an email interview with a designer, “How does your daily life inspire you?”
TYPE AND SCRIPT
Title / Yap Ah Loy
Event / Theatre Performace
Client / Five Arts Centre
Year / 1985
Designer / William Harald-Wong
Calligrapher / (to be credited)
One of my early posters before computers made their appearance in the design studio.
I had to cut out each element of the poster—lettering, calligraphy and image—and paste them using ‘Cow Gum’ (a liquid petroleum rubber based glue) on plastic overlays. It was all done in black-and-white, with handwritten colour instructions, so one has to imagine what the poster will look like in colour when printed.
Title / Treasures of the Nanhai
Event / Exhibition, Auction and Sale
Year / 2006
Lead Designer / Catherine Low
Calligrapher / E. Katmin
in collaboration with Y.M. Che Engku Dato Seri Puan Sri Mahirah
The treasures are ceramics retrieved from eight historical shipwrecks dating from 1370 to 1830.
(more to come...)