If you were to mention the name Jackson Tan to any designer or design buff in Singapore, you would almost certainly hear a healthy amount of reverence when they described his works or projects.founded the art and design collective known as PHUNK back in December 1994. Jackson was 22 years old at the time, and fresh from LASALLE College of the Arts.
They are iconic, meaningful and powerful. I realised that my “superpower” was the ability to create simple symbols that can communicate complex stories and messages. That obsession grew to authoring and designing my own role-playing game book and comic books in primary school and my own brand and band logos in secondary school.
It was the 90s, when MTV, club culture, style bibles from the West like i-D, Face, Interview, Ray Gun and streetwear labels such as Stussy, X-Large and FUCT were rising in influence. Just after our graduation, we wanted to start our own streetwear label. We chose the name PHUNK and started to design and print our own T-shirts.
We realised very early on that we were different from our peers and the only way to work with those brands was to reach out directly to them. The internet enabled us to send our own designed fonts to Garage Fonts, a type foundry co-founded by David Carson, the famous designer of Ray Gun magazine. ART-ZOO inspires curiosity, creativity and empathy through art and play. It is an imaginative world on the other side of the rainbow filled with colourful creatures and landscapes. The ART-ZOO is an adventure to be embarked on by children of all ages.