It’s that time of the year again, where we see the graduating batches of art school students from NAFA and LASALLE! Apologies to our polytechnic graduates, I missed out on the poly gradshow period this year.
Special shoutout to our friends at LASALLE, Teng Hong and Tim, who brought us around. Also our friends at NAFA who introduced their work to us!
Check out Timothy Ho’s work, he has made a tourist guide to Yishun! Covering a range of food spots, points of interest, and also cycling routes from point to point. Megan Chia’s work is a reflective take on how one processes the kopitiam experience in Singapore. How do we drink our nanyang coffee brews? How do we hold our spoons? What does our drink order tell us about our personality? Her work is a fun compilation of all these things.
But otherwise, it was quite interesting to see the range of work produced in 2025. In both LASALLE and NAFA we did have some friends who highlighted different student work, and it was an interesting take on certain design problems that were ongoing.
One observation of the creative students across the schools, was a highly personal touch to the work. I (Joel) come from a time where creative work did lean a lot more corporate, but it seemed like most projects dealt with the design issues with a personal touch. In that sense, art and design are a lot closer in modern day than before.
Maybe this might be a push back against the industrialised world of before, and to the new eras of art expression with personal tech and the individual voice. The creative needs to be extremely unique, if not they might be easily washed away by other simplified design trends.
That being said, other than our friends works, I also really enjoyed this work – Play 199X by Kim Hyunjin. It reminded me of Aphex Twin, Matrix, and even Big Bang era of work. I was definitely sold on the Game Boy graphic on the front. Nostalgia is always a strong win in my book!
Our intern, Joshua Wee, shares his POV:
Lasalle and NAFA Design Show 2025 Review
The LASALLE and NAFA Graduation Showcases were a labyrinth of curated and mulled over projects, showcasing local student talent and ideas. The works were diverse, ranging from products aiming to solve social issues to experimenting with form and type. Among the hundreds of projects, one of them stood out to me.
The project Zai Research Lab by Keafe Yeo addresses the climate crisis through speculative CrossBreeding of plants, creating 88 hybrid species designed to survive extreme future climates. Zai blends traditional Chinese botany knowledge with experimentation, standing out as a unique concept. This project reminded me of the book, Three Body Problem, written by Liu Cixin. The overall sci-fi vibe and the idea of surviving inhabitable climates as the core motivation to create such scientific intervention are similar in both Zai and the Three Body Problem.
If you were unable to attend the shows do check out the work online at these sites respectively:
The LASALLE Show:
LASALLE School of Design Communication:
NAFA Grad Expectations
https://www.nafa.edu.sg/thegradexpectations/class-of-2025
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