Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2022 i Tatler Singapore

TATLER HONG KONG In this edition, acclaimed classical musician Xuefei Yang, the first guitar student to graduate in mainland China, shares her daily routine—from her diet and exercise regime to the rigours of her practice and performance schedule. TATLER INDONESIA Sea Soldier founder Nadine Chandrawinata talks about her fight for a greener and cleaner world, as well as her new role as a mother and the additional perspective parenthood has brought her. TATLER MALAYSIA No stranger to the world of fast-moving consumer goods, Mamee-Double Decker scion Vuitton Pang flexes his entrepreneurial muscles with the rapid expansion of his latest venture emart24, South Korea’s fastest-growing convenience store. TATLER PHILIPPINES Furniture designer, style icon, TV host and mother-of-three Stephanie Kienle Gonzalez gives an exclusive first peek into her new coffee-table book, Embracing…

Unless you are living off the grid, you will at least have heard the acronym “NFT”; the phenomenon has been taking over our social media feeds and daily lives for the past 12 months or so. You may have come across terms such as “blockchain”, “Ethereum” and “Bored Apes”, but have no real idea of what they are or why people care. But this craze has changed (and will continue to change) the way in which we produce and consume culture. If you’re as clueless as we once were, fret not. We have compiled a dummy’s guide to NFTs to help you, even throwing in some crypto term definitions for good measure. Read on to up your crypto cred. LEVEL 0: CRYPTO? NO. What is an NFT? NFT—you can pronounce…

Gourmands in Singapore are constantly looking for one-of-a-kind dining experiences. Now, a new breed of professionally trained chefs have set up their own private dining ventures at home. They largely present omakase-style menus and cater to parties of four or five each session. Their creations are unique, well executed and woven with personal touches. This is coupled with a more informal and intimate homey setting. Guests also receive the chefs’ personal attention throughout the evening. Bookings are hard to come by, but they are well worth the wait. Meet the young talents who inject plenty of flavour, personality and passion into their culinary concepts. SIDE DOOR Tryson Quek and Bannie Kang are two well-known names in Singapore’s F&B scene. After helming Anti:dote at Fairmont Singapore, as head chef and head…

Wang Chen Tsai-Hsia, better known as Madame Wang, established Shiatzy Chen in 1978 with a view to modernising the Chinese aesthetic without abandoning traditional silhouettes. The Taiwanese brand was one of the first to introduce neo-Chinese chic—a marriage of Western aesthetics with Chinese craftsmanship and cultural traits—to the global fashion stage. Chen Yung Hua represents a new wave of Taiwanese photographers who focus on images of women. The pair created a Chinese New Year campaign with the theme “red sorghum”: rich in colour and traditional charm, it depicts a journey home for the festivities. Here, the duo share their creative process and resolutions for the new year. What was the inspiration behind the theme “red sorghum”? Madame Wang: Red sorghum symbolises a spirit, a resilience. For this photo shoot,…

While sight and sound may strike many people as the most important of the five senses—research at Britain’s University of York has shown that the accepted hierarchy of senses is sight, sound, touch, taste and smell—smells, including perfume, can have a huge psychological impact. Parfumerie Trésor, the first store in Hong Kong to focus on multiple, independently owned perfume brands, opened in 2014 to showcase the power of smell and its relationship to personality. The shop’s founders, Benny Tung and Pauline Lau, approached psychologist Andrew Wong to work with them on a new perfume-pairing resource. The 16 Personalities, 16 Perfumes service suggests a perfume based on the personality type assigned to you by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular personality test. Tatler chats with Wong on the relationship between…

You trained in industrial design; how did you translate your skills to the jewellery world? I can see links between the two. For me, jewellery and design are both fields of controlled, strict and precise expertise, yet ones that require out-of-the-box thinking to create exceptional pieces. What did you hope to achieve with this project? A high jewellery boutique is a nice place; you feel safe there. But it also feels quite solemn and imposing. I thought it would be the ideal place for an unexpected project like this. We leave the scale of jewellery behind and move to that of interior design; we move from the scale of the hand to that of the body. I really want to set up an artistic dialogue with the space. It’s your…

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Kay Tse is one of Asia’s most influential recording artists and entertainers, having made music since 2005. Fast forward to today, and Tse has been photographed wearing French jewellery maison Boucheron’s Serpent Bohème collection. It is inspired by the jeweller’s founder who, believing snakes possess protective properties, gave his wife a serpent-shaped necklace for their wedding anniversary back in 1888.…

British-born New Yorker Miles Chamley-Watson’s audacious attitude and unique style have garnered attention from Richard Mille, who has entered a partnership with the fencing superstar. One of the most recognisable fencers worldwide, Chamley-Watson explains how important time is to his profession: “You can train your whole life, but the merest millisecond means the difference between gold and nothing. I train myself mentally in slow motion. I need to get in touch with my neural system, unblock my mind and establish a ‘flow state’.” He also discusses the similarities between the way he and Richard Mille approach their industries. “We’re both unconventional,” he says. “It’s a brand that’s all about taking risks. I have ‘risk’ tattooed on my hand and I look at it for inspiration each time I compete.” TIME…

The tension is rising. The stakes are high. One is a defending mixed martial arts (MMA) champion looking to make her comeback after a more than two-year absence following her marriage and motherhood. The other is on a hot streak with two world titles to her name and her star on the ascendant. Meet Angela Lee and Stamp Fairtex, two athletes who have experienced meteoric rises to the top of the women’s division at One Championship. On March 26, the duo, both hugely popular in their own right, will face off for the first time as they battle it out for the women’s atomweight world title, which Lee currently holds. “I do feel there is a lot more pressure on my shoulders and a lot more expectations after going through…

Medium: White clay, dried flowers and twigs Inspiration: Reminiscent of a Promethean mud human gazing back into its creator’s eyes, Pang’s creation began with him shaping his likeness with white clay, a familiar medium, using his passport photo as a guide for the facial structure and proportions. He spotted dried spiny flowers during a walk and liked the penetrative attitude they would impart as eyes, and his wife, Laura, added twigs, which worked to integrate the head with the background.…

On December 4, 2021, it was reported that the record for the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist, set by Jeff Koons’s Rabbit in 2019 at US$91.1 million, had been broken. The new record-holding piece, Merge (2021), had achieved US$91.8 million. But this sale was just the beginning of a controversy. The “artwork” was in fact made up of 266,455 NFTs, each comprising a single dot known as a “mass”. These variously sized and priced dots were purchased, in varying numbers, by approximately 26,000 buyers within a 48-hour window on the platform Nifty Gateway. Every time a collector bought a new mass, it would merge with those they already owned; further, collectors could sell their mass on to other buyers—leading, potentially, to the formation of…

Imagine a shipping container, cloaked in midnight black. You enter the void; it’s pitch dark. As you proceed inside, it gets progressively more oppressive. You can’t even see your hands in front of you and you’re relying on your heightened senses to make it through to the end. I’ll be honest. I turned back at the midway point. This was in 2009, and I was exploring Polish artist Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is exhibition at the Tate Modern, London. To date, I still get chills when I relive the experience. I can feel those cold, clammy hands of fear gripping me, that visceral emotion of plunging into the unknown, eyes blindfolded. The lack of light overpowered my senses and sensations, and it brought back repressed childhood memories of being scared…

Myanmar has been gripped by political unrest since a military coup in February 2021. For Golden Sunland, a B Corp-certified rice company co-founded by 2020 Gen.T honouree David Chen, the turmoil, along with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, has threatened the livelihoods of the local farmers it works with and made it difficult for the business to grow at its original pace. Chen started the company in 2017 as an iteration of his family’s rice business, driven by a mission that would help the Southeast Asian nation regain a part of its glory as one of the world’s top rice exporters. Golden Sunland serves as a “whole value chain enabler” that partners with the local farming community as well as industry players and international NGOs to ensure that rice production is…

From her introduction into high society as a 16-year-old at the Debutante Ball to her wedding almost 10 years ago and her transformation into a fashion plate with an eye for daring designers, you can say that Tatler Singapore was there to chronicle some of the most important milestones in Stephanie Lee’s life. But the one that will forever hold special meaning for Lee is the time she returned from an overseas fashion shoot with Tatler for the August 2011 issue with a dazzling ring on her finger—from none other than the leading man in her life, Choo Ken-Yi. And yes, the Tatler team was in on the surprise proposal he planned at the clifftop Karma Kandara resort in Bali over a romantic dinner for two. Now a mother of…

He may be the son of Sylvia Chang, one of the most acclaimed directors and actresses to have worked on Hong Kong, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese movies, but 30-year-old Oscar Wang is far more than “Chang’s son”. He is the founder of Shanghai-based design studio Open Work Studio, which created the Fendidi family, an adorable quartet of pandas, for Fendi in 2019, as well as Stella Friends, a series of endangered animal cartoon characters, for Stella McCartney in 2021. The Chelsea College of Arts alumnus also manifests his creativity as an interdisciplinary designer and a restaurant owner. Jumping on a call with Tatler while en route to Shanghai following his trip to China’s Changbai Mountain for the Kaws: Holiday tour, Wang explains how he is creating concepts across the fashion…

Perfumer Jérome Epinette has a famous nose. You may not have heard of his name, but you almost certainly would have heard of some of the fragrances he has designed—cue cult favourites such as Byredo’s Gypsy Water and Pulp, and Boy Smells’s new range, not to mention scents for Victoria’s Secret and L’Occitane en Provence. Epinette is everywhere in the perfume world. “It’s hard to keep track, but I’d say [I’ve developed] more than a couple of thousand [fragrances],” he tells Tatler. Epinette finds inspiration in everything around him, from “nature, painting, food, drinks, music, architecture, discussion and sharing emotions”, and for his latest creation, Tiffany & Co’s Rose Gold EDP, he drew inspiration from a well-loved natural perfume. “Rose Gold EDP is a modern approach to a very common…

Finding the ideal gemstone to set in the reimagined World’s Fair Necklace was years in the making. We knew we wanted to recreate the original necklace’s Art Deco form and we knew we had to rethink the design from a modern perspective, but the challenge was in finding a stone remarkable enough to feature in such an important, symbolic necklace. How it happened was serendipitous. In 2020, Tiffany archivists came across the original sketch of the World’s Fair Necklace. It depicted a large diamond instead of the aquamarine that the necklace later featured. Diamonds are very important to Tiffany’s heritage, so it became clear that the reimagined necklace would have to frame the most exceptional diamond we could acquire. Shortly after that, we were presented with the Empire Diamond—over 80…

For the past five years, Louis Vuitton has offered its take on the ubiquitous smartwatch with a series of connected timepieces that meld luxury with cutting-edge design and functionality. In the process, the maison has proven that by paying the same attention to detail befitting its bespoke luxury goods, it is possible to create equally precious tech products. The new Tambour Horizon Light Up is the latest iteration of this concept. AN ICON REFRESHED The Tambour Horizon Light Up marks the third generation of Louis Vuitton’s line of connected watches. What immediately catches the eye are its redesigned case and crystal. Named after the French word for “drum”, the Tambour, with its convex case middle and thin, minimalist bezel, has an iconic outline that resembles the instrument. The Tambour Horizon…

For Farizwan Fajari, the artist better known as Speak Cryptic, creating NFTs can be seen as a natural extension of his street art background. “The reason why people do street art is because they are sick and tired of waiting around and not having galleries to show their work. My thinking as an artist has always been about how I can show my work and expand my practice so it is accessible to more people,” says Farizwan. The contemporary artist, who is known for his complex black-and-white illustrated murals, often addresses themes of identity in his work. For instance, his most recent installation, The Same Side of the Moon Always Faces Earth, which was shown at the Light to Night Festival in conjunction with Singapore Art Week, is inspired by…

Delicate and ethereal, Ashley Yeo’s signature paper art pieces, which are sculptural wonders created by hand-cutting pieces of paper with immense precision, compel the viewer to take the time to soak it all in. And that is exactly her aim. “The exploration of slowness is a response to life in modern cities such as Singapore, where in general, we expect a lot of instant gratification” Yeo, the first Singaporean artist to be shortlisted for the Loewe Craft Prize in 2018, says: “I explore concepts of lightness and fragility, and I’m interested in materials that have such qualities. The exploration of slowness is a response to life in modern cities such as Singapore, where in general, we expect a lot of instant gratification.” Her practice, which includes drawings and watercolours, has…

OLIVIER YOAN French photographer Olivier Yoan has worked with brands such as Calvin Klein, Jimmy Choo and Roger Vivier. He is also the creative director of online platform The Ené, a directory of eco-conscious businesses and retailers around Europe. For this issue, Yoan photographed the fashion shoot (p.76). KAREN TEE Karen Tee finds joy in sparking inspiration and positive action through her work. Her love for writing is surpassed only by her love for yoga, which is why she considers the mat her second home. This issue, she interviews cover stars Stamp Fairtex and Angela Lee (p.130) as well as three of Singapore’s brightest young artists, Ruben Pang, Ashley Yeo and Speak Cryptic (p.138). DARREN GABRIEL LEOW A fashion and commercial photographer based in Singapore, Darren Gabriel Leow frequently contributes…

A TASTE OF CALIFORNIA Born and bred in California, known for its melting pot of cultures, chef David Tang recalls being exposed to various cuisines since young. While he grew up on a diet of home-cooked Cantonese and Vietnamese food thanks to his mixed heritage, he was also familiar with Western, Indian, Mexican and South Korean fare. Tang showcases the culturally diverse cuisine of The Golden State at his new modern Californian restaurant Rosemead, recreating the “food memories of my childhood”. Most of the dishes on the menu are imbued with the strong Asian American influences familiar in California, which is why you will find dishes such as the dry-aged Long Island duck. Reminiscent of South Korea’s bossam, or boiled pork wrap, the poultry is dry-rubbed with Szechuan salt and…

Y2K REVISITED In the ultimate early noughties nostalgia trip, Louis Vuitton has combined key Y2K trends, denim and monograms, in its new Monogram Jacquard Denim bags, which include the signature Speedy model and a new modern classic: the crescent Loop Baguette handbag. ON THE MOVE A sell-out success, the ongoing collaboration between Prada and Adidas welcomes a new phase in apparel, accessories and bags. The sustainable collection made of Prada’s proudly recycled and infinitely recyclable Re-Nylon fabric includes tracksuits and bucket hats along with elevated takes of the Adidas Forum High and Low silhouettes for a minimalist’s athleisure dream. COLLABORATED AWAY Two masters of artisanship, Loewe and Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, return with a second collaboration. The Loewe x Spirited Away collection, inspired by the 2001 cult classic film…

GOLDEN GLOW Double down on tackling dull skin with YSL Beauté’s Pure Shots Night Reboot Serum and Eye Reboot Concentrate. Infused with moonlight cactus flower extract and glycolic acid, they help to regenerate skin cells, making skin look and feel healthier. BOTANICAL BOOST Formulated with 95 per cent naturally derived ingredients, the Revitalizing Serum from Chanel’s latest No 1 de Chanel line harnesses the benefits of the house’s signature flower, the camellia—specifically, the red camellia. Grown and harvested in southwest France, this key ingredient assists with maintaining skin’s vitality and delaying the first signs of ageing. FIRM BELIEVER Nars’s newest serum aims to improve elasticity and revive skin’s firmness and natural glow. The Light Reflecting Firming Serum has a blend of gold-fortified peptides and red snow extract, which helps to…

INTO THE WILD Graff excels in working with diamonds and its jewellers have once again cast this classic into an exquisite selection of pieces for the Wild Flower collection. Stylish asymmetry defines this line, as do blossoming layers of white diamonds, which form pretty petals that wrap around the finger. SIMPLE PLEASURES Aurelia & Pierre’s creations speak to modern women who appreciate minimal design and classic luxury. Hot on the heels of its first high jewellery collection come new pieces featuring clean silhouettes adorned with coloured stones and white diamonds. NATURAL WORLD Italian fine jewellery brand Vendorafa is shining a spotlight on its history with a limited-edition collection that pays homage to archives spanning more than 70 years. Many of Vendorafa’s gilded creations interpret the ethereal beauty of nature; this…

What do you love about ancient talismans and why do you incorporate them into your jewellery? I’m amazed by their enduring significance and timelessness. I love that medallions have been used throughout history and across civilisations, but still resonate with people to this day. Historically, they have signified familial lineage or been believed to have protective properties, and it’s fascinating to see how something so ancient can acquire new meaning and continue to remain relevant. You’re also inspired by the art deco era. When I started designing, I fell in love with art deco architecture, particularly its emphasis on patterns, form and balance. My initial inspiration came from sculptural buildings and, as a result, my pieces were very angular and minimal. When did you first become interested in history? In…

IN FULL BLOOM Dior has added two new timepieces to its Grand Soir Botanic collection, which celebrates the brand founder’s lifelong passion for flowers. This love was often depicted in his embroidery and haute couture works, which feature floral motifs prominently. Each model boasts a breathtaking dial inspired by gardens in bloom, and is limited to just 18 pieces worldwide. INTO THE FUTURE Contemporary and complicated, Greubel Forsey’s latest sports watch is limited to 88 pieces worldwide and is available with a matching integrated bracelet in lightweight titanium. The architectural movement features the balance wheel and escapement on the dial, which sit alongside bold charcoal grey bridges for an ultra-modern look. FLIGHT PLAN In the days before the development of electronic flight computers, calculations were made using analogue cockpit instruments.…

NIGHT SCHOOL Following its popularity on social media, the preppy Dark Academia aesthetic is entering its sophomore year, this time at high-fashion school. If you are joining the class, consider staples such as striped shirts, knitwear, knee-high socks, loafers and a dark colour palette. BIG PANTS, BIG PLANS Relaxed tailoring reaches new heights—and widths—this season: wide, slouchy, baggy trousers look set to rule in the near future. Pairing ideas abound: crochet tank tops, crisp shirts, flowy blouses, matching jackets … get creative as you work out the most flattering fit for you. HEAVY METAL As in-person glamour returns, mirror-finish gold and silver are all the rage on the runways. Chunky chains are dominating clothes, bags, shoes and, of course, jewellery this season—a shortcut to instant impact. FRINGE BENEFITS Designers have…

As an artist whose work delves deeply into philosophical concepts such as life, death and reincarnation, it is perhaps natural that Ruben Pang lives his own life to the fullest. “If I have an opportunity to do something that I haven’t done before, that feels vaguely appealing or compelling, I tend to do it,” says Pang via a Zoom call from Sardinia, Italy. This quest to seek personal growth is what compelled Pang to relocate to the Mediterranean island in 2020, smack in the middle of the pandemic, at a time when most people would rather not cross borders. He muses: “I think you should choose to do the things that scare you a little bit. That’s how it has always been for me.” After all, this is a painter…

Although there are some high-speed aspects of the wine industry—wine investors saw some wines triple or quadruple in value over 2021—the wine world, as a whole, moves rather slowly. Thus, many observers have reacted with scepticism or bemusement as various major (and less major) wine players have plunged into the lightning-fast world of cryptocurrencies, blockchain and—trendiest and least well understood of all—NFTs. As somebody who also makes digital art and counts many crypto believers as friends, I’m less surprised than most by the wine-NFT mash-up. Once you get past the “but why?” aspects of the NFT universe, it does appear that NFTs can offer real benefits to the world of wine, especially collectibles. While the first wave of NFTs involved the sale of digital images, NFTs are now being used…