As the founder of Singapore-based studio WORK, Theseus Chan shows the graphic designer’s role in mediating transnational cultural production across art, fashion, and design. Chan pushes the conceptual and experiential capacity of the design of printed matter, often by testing the borders between creativity and commerce, the book and the object, and machine made and hand made. This traversing of boundaries is encapsulated in WERK, a quarterly magazine which Chan has published since 2000. WERK experiments with printing techniques and with concepts of displacement and deconstruction in the use of images and typography.

WERK: Exhibition is a poster for an exhibition about WERK and Junya Watanabe’s debut menswear collection—launched under the Japanese label Comme des Garçons for Spring/ Summer 2002. Emblazoned with text that describes the exhibition and the nature of WERK, type on the poster is laid out without spacing and printed in neon and highly contrasting colours. The poster’s design echoes Watanabe’s collection, which features messages printed in block lettering and paintbox colours.

The affinity between Chan’s ‘anti-design’ approach and the ‘anti-fashion’ ethos of Comme des Garçons—both of which challenge the conventions of design—led to further collaborations, including WERK No. 19. Published to celebrate the opening of a Comme des Garçons store in Singapore, the issue’s theme—what it means to be ‘like boys’ (comme des garçons, in French), or to be a woman in a man’s world—is interpreted by nine female artists in essays, photographs, and artwork.

The magazine’s unique covers were hand glued and stencilled by an all-female team and feature Chan’s own Comme des Garçons hang tags, magazine tear sheets, and spray-painted letters. The covers caught the attention of Rei Kawakubo, the founder of Comme des Garçons, and she decided to reproduce the vibrant cover artwork on shirts and trousers in the Spring/Summer 2013 menswear collection.

WERK has been a platform for publishing the work of designers and artists through various materialities and production techniques. For WERK No. 13, the magazine’s die cuts respond to the layered compositions of Belgian artist Jan De Cock, while the use of two paper stocks and a half-inch-thick elevation mimic the fibreboard and plywood that De Cock used for his installation at Tate Modern in 2005. Similarly, WERK No. 21 was an attempt to embody the work of designer Martine Bedin, a member of the radical group Memphis. Each section of the magazine has a page cut with a tactile edge in the form of a repeated geometric pattern, derived from the silhouettes of Bedin’s designs.

Published by Hong Kong–based boutique On Pedder, Pedderzine was conceived with Chan in 2006 as not simply a lookbook, but a medium for experimenting with print and visual storytelling. Published in 2009 during the financial crisis, Pedderzine No. 5 addresses the phrase ‘cash is king’ in the form of bound counterfeit US fivedollar notes. Pedderzine No. 14 celebrates Hong Kong as the birthplace of On Pedder, with collages of the city’s vernacular elements and a set of logograms inspired by joss paper and Chinese ideograms, meant to look like humanoids with shopping bags.

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