Rebecca Chew adds handcrafts to Esquire Singapore’s art direction

Rebecca Chew studied graphic design in Malaysia, under a program run by Nottingham Trent University. While there she fell in love with the printmaking studio and the darkroom. “They were two very strong smelling places that would come to inform my work later,” she says. Her career started at a newspaper publisher and she was designing Off The Edge a politics and culture magazine before moving to Esquire. “I chose publishing because I knew I didn’t belong in advertising or in a design firm dishing out annual reports and brochures for property companies,” she says. “I wanted to work with stories. Dealing with journalists and editors helped shape the kind of work I wanted to be involved with.”

Her work for the monthly men’s magazine caught our eye with an approach that employs handcrafts and woodblock prints that are in stark contrast to the glossy, polished art direction common in the publication. Throughout her career she has returned to the process of stitching, most notably creating vibrant masks inspired by the headwear of Mexican luchadors. “I was never into stitching but was bored with my usual illustration approach and decided to try something different in place of a brush and ink. For stitched, I printed the images on 80 gsm paper and made my first stitch since middle school,” she says. “The results were crude and the underside was carnage, but I enjoyed the imperfection and clumsiness. The meditative process of stabbing and pulling led me to reconsider my disdain for needlework.”

Earlier this year she commissioned Malaysian illustrator Jun Hun Yap to illustrate a series of portraits of the clients of Judy Clark, the American lawyer whose clients include Ted Kaczynski and the Boston Bomber. “The story was originally published by the US edition of Esquire in a different layout,” says Rebecca. “My reading of the piece brought to mind the King James bible – a book of redemption, sin, murder, torture and disturbed characters – an uncomfortably fitting backdrop for the text.”