Graphic Design, Illustration, Poster Design
This poster design was illustrated as a competition submission for the Graphics Design Festival Scotland 2017.
Concept
As children, we were taught, moulded and raised to believe that as Malaysians, we will grow up in a peaceful and harmonious country amongst our friends and peers of diverse ethnicity and colourful backgrounds; a unified country of history, culture and prosperity. At school, we would all always have to participate in colouring competitions, to colour in graphic illustrations of a hopeful, ambitious, modern Malaysia.
However as time passes, adulthood blooms and the image of our beautiful Malaysia soon shatters to reveal the ugliness behind the fragile masks we’ve all worn, we’ve come to realise that our beloved country is not as harmonious as we’d hoped.
Our corrupt kleptocratic leaders continue to place race and religion as the main objective for policy-making, exploiting the privileges that the bumiputera (“native Malays”) have received for decades since independence, openly stealing from their people, and pushing aside other more capable citizens of different ethnicities; driving away our hardworking Chinese Malaysians, leaving our Indian Malaysians to suffer in poverty and threatening the livelihoods and basic human rights of our fellow tribesmen like the Iban or Orang Asli.
If we were children now, how would we colour these illustrations? What would we colour in? Honestly, I’m still that little kid on the inside, hoping and believing that Malaysia is and will continue to be a place of peace and harmony, but in reality, it just isn’t. And I’d like to be able to speak this truth, just as a child would.
"A colouring contest" is a poster designed to uncover the current state and turmoils faced by fellow Malaysians under the leadership of kleptocracy, racial biases and corruption through the eyes of an honest young child.
“Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children” - Oliver Wendell Holmes