The Designer Who Cannot Draw

His ongoing project Hawker Colours¹ documents these spaces not as nostalgia, but as evidence: a way of understanding culture through pattern, repetition and use. For Tan, design is rarely about invention in the heroic sense. It is about noticing what already exists, asking why it looks the way it does, and tracing the invisible systems – economic, social, historical – that shape everyday objects. In Tan's hands, these details become ways to explore much larger questions about identity, value and how culture is maintained.

Hawker Colours is also a fitting entry point into Tan's wider practice. Whether experimenting with materials and processes or shaping ideas, his approach remains consistent: design is not simply about solving problems or producing objects, it's about creating opportunities to see familiar things differently.

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The long way around: Becoming a designer

Tan often describes himself as a "designer who can't draw," partly because it dispels the myth of innate "creative genius" that still surrounds design education. Growing up in Singapore, he never considered himself to be particularly creative.

After initially studying business, Tan made a late pivot into industrial design at the National University of Singapore. It was not an obvious fit. Drawing, considered a foundational skill, was a struggle. Classmates occasionally poked fun at his sketches. "I felt very inadequate," he says, acknowledging that design culture often equates visual fluency with creative intelligence.

But something else began to emerge. While drawing came awkwardly, making did not. Working directly with materials – cutting, assembling, testing, breaking – felt intuitive. Rather than sketching in two dimensions, Tan realised that he could think in three dimensions simply by working on the object itself. The material became the drawing.

That instinct would become the cornerstone of his practice. Years later, when Tan received the President*s Design Award in 2018, his mother reportedly told him, with a hint of surprise, that she had never thought of him as creative while he was growing up. For Tan, the comment was confirmation that creativity is not a fixed trait, but a muscle that can be developed.

Working without labels

Today, Tan describes himself primarily as a designer, though not without hesitation. His work comfortably bridges the gap between art, craft and social commentary.

"Artist" feels uncomfortable, he admits; not out of false modesty, but because the term carries too many assumptions about authorship, expression and originality. Industrial design, by contrast, gave him a framework for problem solving, production and systems thinking. It taught him how things are made, circulated and consumed.

Intent matters more than terminology. For Tan, good design is not just about doing things more efficiently, it's also about understanding things more clearly. A well-designed object can function as a form of visual communication, shaping how we see the world around us. In this sense, design becomes a cultural tool that addresses histories, habits and tensions which might otherwise remain invisible.

This belief underpins much of Tan's work: that creativity is an inherent human aptitude, not a rare gift reserved for a talented few. He insists that artistic skill and creative thinking are not the same thing.

Get your hands dirty

Unlike many designers, Tan's practice is driven less by premeditated form than by process. He says he likes to "dive right into the object," allowing ideas to surface through trial, error and repetition rather than through a resolved sketch. His studio is filled with boxes of suspended experiments; materials that resisted his intentions, techniques that stalled midway, processes set aside rather than discarded. Occasionally, returning to these fragments with fresh eyes leads to an unexpected breakthrough.

"I sketch with materials," he says, like a kid shaping Play-Doh. Through sanding, masking, blasting, pouring and reworking, unforeseen possibilities begin to appear: an accidental texture, a surprising structural behaviour, a method that suddenly suggests a new application. Tan describes this approach as "designing the process rather than the object." He likens it to cooking: a technique such as steaming may be used to make a dumpling, but reimagined, the same method can produce something entirely different.

Sometimes, cooking is the direct inspiration. He describes the process of resin casting for his Pour Table, which he developed while experimenting with viscosity and surface tension: 'I was actually inspired by my wife's macarons. She had encountered similar difficulties in achieving the right consistency for the batter to hold its shape."

This playful, experimental approach requires time; something he guards carefully by prioritising self-initiated projects over commissions. Some techniques take years to develop without yielding tangible results. But listening to materials: understanding how they respond to pressure, heat, removal or gravity, is where design thinking often begins.

Porcelain: precious and prosaic

Porcelain occupies a central place in Tan's practice, precisely because of its contradictions. As he likes to say, "a Ming Dynasty vase can sell for millions, while the same material is used to make toilet bowls." Porcelain is both exalted and utterly prosaic, fragile yet industrial, precious yet disposable.

Tan is the first to admit he is not a potter. What fascinates him is not the act of throwing clay, but the cultural and economic value we project onto the finished object. His early encounters with porcelain often took place not in museums, but in the backs of old shops, where once-coveted decorative pieces sat abandoned on dusty shelves – dead stock rendered unfashionable by shifting tastes.

Rather than creating new forms, Tan began working with these familiar objects, searching for ways to reinterpret them without pretending to restore their original prestige. Through extensive experimentation, he developed sandblasting techniques that allowed him to remove sections of glaze to reveal the white bisque beneath.

This subtractive approach introduced an ethical tension. In works like Spotted Nyonya, traditional Chinese-Peranakan patterns are partially erased, raising inevitable questions about cultural defacement. Tan is careful how he navigates this: he does not work with antiques (indeed, many of the pieces he sources are mass-produced), and the discomfort the work generates is deliberate. It asks us to confront how we value these designs, without sidestepping the fact that the reworked objects will sell for far more than the original junk-shop finds. Design, Tan suggests, does not need to resolve tension; it can hold it.

Tradition, interrupted

Spotted Nyonya and Striped Ming are among Tan's most recognisable series, both negotiating the uneasy space between reverence and disruption. In Striped Ming, traditional glazed porcelain vessels sourced from thrift stores are masked with striped patterns inspired by resist-dyeing techniques common to textiles such as batik. When sandblasted, the exposed glaze is stripped away, leaving a stark rhythm of white and colour.

The result is neither restoration nor parody. These objects are pulled from obsolescence and reframed within a contemporary design language. Extending this approach, Singapore Blue turns to the long history of blue-and-white porcelain – an aesthetic shared across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe – and places it directly in the hands of the user. A blank porcelain vase is paired with a blue, erasable marker, allowing markings that are provisional, revisable and never fully fixed. The object becomes a metaphor for a young nation: resilient, pliable and continually shaped through use.

In Spotted Nyonya, Tan's gesture is more overtly provocative. The multicoloured surface of Chinese–Peranakan ware is resist-blasted, leaving a dotted pattern of traditional motifs, evoking both pop art and industrial processes. Like pop art icon Roy Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots, this is a process that appears industrial but is actually done by hand. Here, the act of removal itself becomes the conceptual device. Rather than preserving the ornament intact, the work considers what it means to honour tradition without preserving it, and whether cultural heritage survives reinterpretation or depends on it.

Tan offers no definitive answers. Instead, he allows the tension to remain unresolved, trusting viewers to sit with their own responses.

More than a Merlion

If there is a unifying narrative across Tan's work, it is place – specifically, Singapore – observed with warmth and a light touch of nostalgia. His early Singapore Souvenirs project approached national identity with humour and critique, playfully testing the symbols through which the country represents itself. Over time, however, something shifted. Singaporeans began to take pleasure in seeing their everyday realities reflected back at them, not as caricature, but as recognition.

This resonance is partly shaped by Singapore's status as a relatively new nation, having gained independence only in 1965, yet one with a rich visual heritage stemming from various immigrant cultures. Tan's work explores the tension between newness and continuity, and between the modern state and the habits, materials and visual codes that predate it by centuries.

He is inspired not by grand monuments, but by simple routines: riding the MRT, grabbing a caffeine fix at a kopitiam, watching an auntie prepare colourful kueh-kueh sweets or observing how plastic bags are folded into neat triangles for storage. His mass-produced Merlion Shopper bag, printed with numbered folding instructions, transforms a familiar domestic habit into a designed system.

Colour is also deeply local. The palettes that feature throughout Tan's work, such as mint greens, pinks, aquas and yellows, often draw inspiration from Nyonya ware and Peranakan culture. These visual languages remain embedded in everyday life. In Tan's work, these colours are not just decorative flourishes, but cultural signals that carry memory, utility and place in equal measure.

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Teaching as design

Tan is a full-time Associate Professor of Industrial Design at the National University of Singapore, alongside his studio practice. He believes that teaching is simply another form of design: the careful construction of an experience shaped by sensitivity to its users.

In recent years, he has become increasingly concerned about the decline of practical work in design education. The rise of digital tools and data-driven, human-centred design has, in some cases, replaced material experimentation. Students are encouraged to think, but not necessarily to create.

Tan responds by designing classes that prioritise bravery, curiosity and tactile problem solving. Getting your hands dirty and making mistakes are essential steps in the design process. He hopes students will leave with not only polished portfolios, but also the confidence to find their own methods. To think with their hands as well as their heads.
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Craft, Time, and what comes next

Tan's recent Pour table is a prime example of his passion for material experimentation. Developed through a lengthy trial-and-error process involving resin casting, the table is crafted without the use of a mould, instead relying on precise control of viscosity and curing time. Drawing inspiration from traditional Malay and Peranakan sweets as well as the surface tension of macarons, each layer is poured by hand, slowly and irreversibly. The process is labour-intensive – two people working over 14 hours for a single layer – and fundamentally unscalable. "Someone asked me if I was going to patent the technique. But who in their right mind would try to copy it?" he laughs. This resistance to mass production is deliberate, blurring the boundary between design and craft.

Looking ahead, Tan is optimistic that there will be a renewed appreciation for human-made items, particularly as AI and automation continue to advance. He hopes that design will continue to be recognised as both an economic driver and a cultural force that shapes how we live, eat and pay attention.

From developing porcelain cooking utensils for a Lexus collaboration to reinterpreting Peranakan beadwork using contemporary techniques, Tan's work is more about continuity and renewed appreciation than reinvention. Like the vibrant melamine hawker bowls that first caught his attention, Tan's creative energy is much more likely to be drawn to something more tangible, more everyday, even if a little overlooked.

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^{¹ For more on Hawker Colours, refer to article Hawker}