Singapore Memories specializes in Orchids of Asia and bringing them to you as perfumes, room aroma, essential oil, bath bombs made from there therapeutic & fragrant orchids. Singapore memories’ olfactory work ranges from commercial scent to scent art.
In this spirit we have partnered with three amazing Singaporean artists to created limited edition packaging, which will be displayed only at Design Orchard in 2022
Introducing our 2nd artist, the very accomplished Daiso One. Daiso only believes in pieces that create a unique piece of art, a work that will resonate with his style and also the brand he is working with.
For Singapore Memories, he wants to play around with scent related words or something special that describes each perfume or its essence. In some cases, he has chosen to simply play around the name of the perfume, while changing the style and colours. His unique graffiti styled product pieces and his unique take on his cherished art form will bring an unexplored aspect to Singapore Memories’ product packaging.
Daiso One had always admired power of scents and smells. His personal belief is:
“the kind of perfume one uses says a fair bit about the individual. It's all about individuality and smelling good.”
While he was always fascinated with perfumes, as a designer he is venturing in unchartered territories, which is what he likes to do anyway. He loves pushing the artistic boundaries and he has decided to do that again with Singapore Memories’ product packaging.
“I've never worked on creating artwork for packaging before let alone a perfume company. The freedom to work in my own style and incorporating it with Singapore Memories branding was too good an opportunity for me to pass.”
A true risk taker, he doesn’t believes in passing a good opportunity! He sees opportunities everywhere and grabs them by the head. Which he what he did when he came across art world. He turned this accidental encounter into a full blown profession and hobby. During his time in university in Melbourne, Australia he was studying communications as a major. As part of the program, he was required to study there was graphic design. This graphic design unit came to him as a surprise, albeit a pleasant one. This course was rather advance, particularly for a novice like him, who had no prior knowledge of either art or graphic design.
As a routine, he was placed in first year and second year units, which required him to experiment with materials. He was also required to conduct a lot of street research. During these walks down the Australian streets, he discovered the unsung world of graffiti and street art.
Truly fascinated, he kept researching on the subject of street art and continued with the art form. The college assignment, which began as a rather simple task, soon enwrapped Daiso‘s full attention in an amoeba like fashion, taking a life of its own!
Daiso being Daiso, he didn’t stop there. His second inspiration came while watching a Banksy documentary and he decided to amalgamate stencils into his assignment. He chose a modern and rarely used medium, “photoshop” to create the stencils.
Next step was of course to go buy the paint and finish the college assignment. But no! Not Daiso!
He did go to the local graffiti store to buy the paints. But truth be told, he never used those paints for college submission. But these paints were used for his first passion project and went straight on one Melbourne wall.
As you can guess, his next few months were spent experimenting in Australia with different mediums of street art such as stickers, wheat paste posters, paste-ups, character based street art, tagging and etc.
Most people do not know about the various art forms, mediums and creativity that goes into making a fantastic street art. Daiso felt the same at the time and kept learning and exploring anything that came his way.
Eventually, he found that he was most interested in traditional graffiti which was a letter or typography based artform. This made him explore this traditional form more and he has not stopped since.
He is not driven by money or fame. He feels fulfilled when his design process final morphs and take shapes on a wall!
“The sense of having my work on display in a public space was one of the fulfilling part of being an artist for me. The nature of graffiti/street art being temporary was another push factor. This was the reason I became an artist.”
Since he doesn’t chase about fame, we wonder what keeps him going?
In his words, he loves meeting new artists and learning from them. Seeing different styles and getting to know artists from all over the world keeps him passionate in the art form. In many cases, the artists do not speak the same language, making verbal communication impossible. But there is language of art, which is easily understood by artists and is enough to get the both excited.
“Even though we don't speak the same language we all understand the art form and can communicate through that. There is always a scene in every country so I always try to find a point of contact before visiting to check out their scene.”
Daiso’s art taught him to look for beauty in fleeting, temporary things. As a result, he has learnt to live in the moment and he also learn to be the best version of himself at all times. Graphic artist on the street understand that there will be new art over theirs soon. The new art could be better than their, but surely it will be different. This taught Daiso to embrace difference and humbly accept others artists work, while always improving his own.
“The whole idea of graffiti / street art being temporary makes you always want to be better than the person who paints over you.”
There is an honour code amongst street artists! Anyone can paint something over other’s art, it could be done just next morning or by tomorrow evening. The unwritten rule of graffiti / street art is "if you can't burn it don't go over it" which basically translates to "If you can't do better, don't paint over it". This healthy competition pushes all street artists to do better and this is what inspires Daiso on a daily basis.
“Naturally I would have the drive to do better the next time so the piece (painting) stays up longer.”
More recently, Daiso has started digitizing his art. This is to bring this special art form to wider audience. After 7 years of painting, he realized that translating the artform into a digital format was one of the most useful skills. This came in very handy during 2 years of disruption resulting from Pandemic. As you can imagine, he can’t head out to paint as often as he would wish. The pandemic forced many industries to rethink, and it also helped Daiso think about his work and he moved towards doing more digital works
One of his recent best decision is to buy himself a new iPad. In fact that’s his first! And there is another first in his life….. He is a new dad!
“Being a dad I have a very little free time on my hands. Purchasing my first iPad in 2020 was one of the best decisions I've ever made. This helped me dive into the digital art world. Translating traditional graffiti into digital works.”
We asked him about the best piece of advice he ever received? And we are amazed by his answer! We can all take inspiration from that. He very easily and simply says, “Keep practicing and never stop sketching or painting. If I would have stopped practicing, I don't think my artform would have evolved to what it is today.”
With those inspiring words, he starts explain where he gets his artistic inspiration, which is “Anywhere”. It could be a pattern that he sees on the street, an advertisement on YouTube, a graffiti video, Instagram posts, colour combination of someone’s clothes or even drawings that his students create and display within the school. He take inspiration from anything and everything.
He is also inspired by people which include several artists, but one person that tops it all is his partner.
“My wife has played a major role over the years to keep pushing me to experiment over the years, she’s a major inspiration to me because she is an extremely strong woman. My crewmates from The Other Guys crew and also artists around the world such as Raws, Dvate, Misterbows, Does, Demsky just to name a few.”
Even though Daiso doesn’t believe in regrets, but he wishes he had more time. Now that he is a young father, he wonders if he could have worked harder in his earlier days. Perhaps this would have sped up the learning journey and the progression would have not taken so long.
He encourages everyone to adopt, accept and learn the digital medium at an earlier stage. In today’s world, these open up unseen opportunities in various areas.
Work hard, play hard! Best drinks are those which are shared with the loved ones and in his case, he love to unwind over a drink with his lovey wife on a Friday nights. He finds his wife to be his supporter, mentor, friend and inspiration
Having gone through various changes in his life, he is openminded about possibilities, mindset changes and belief shifts. Of these perhaps, the open-minded is the best virtue for him. He doesn’t think too much when creating the artwork. He simply enjoys the process. He is organized and always has a plan before starting a new project. He prefers to work quickly and finish it asap. When done, he sits back and looks at it for various angels, trying to see what can be done to improve this. If not, what could have been done to improve this or what can be learnt for future.
All in all, finding a way to improve his skill!
“Singapore Memories is honoured and proud to be working with the only Tamil graffiti writer in Singapore.” – Singapore Memories Director
Daiso would love your inputs on his work. You can reach him via:
http://www.youtube.com/daisoone ,
https://www.instagram.com/daiso_one/
http://www.facebook.com/daisoone
