School of Creative
Industries
Furqan Saini
Aa an award-winning art director and image-maker, Furqan both believes in and embodies the value of passion. With 20 years of experience under his belt, his main practice and philosophy of his craft of image-making in fashion is the juxtaposition of outward visual spectacle with introspective, intimate storytelling. Having lived in New York and Paris, he has relocated back to Singapore and is an adjunct lecturer across both Diploma and BA(Hons) programmes in the School of Fashion, LASALLE College of the Arts. He also runs his own practice consulting with diverse fashion brands throughout Asia, and creates evocative multidisciplinary digital art.
Work
Teaching philosophy and research interests
Furqan's approach to education in the arts is one that resolutely believes in the importance of transformative pedagogy – empowering agency and critical thinking within students to consider meaning-making in the world, cultivate multiple perspectives and nurture technical competencies. His research interests lie at the intersection of emotion, memory, visual storytelling, gender/queer studies and fashion image-making.
Thesis abstract
Geographies of emotion: Fashioning a feeling through relational and transformative pedagogies
Emotions are an indelible part of the human condition but they are often not a central part of canon or curricula, much less in pedagogies for fashion image-making. Geographies of Emotion (GOE) is both the name of this thesis and its ensuing research project. This is an exploratory journey into the role of emotions in fashion image-making, constructed through a relational transformative pedagogy in which the research is grounded. Supporting this research are case studies gleaned from student projects to create emotive video works of the same name. My thesis studies emotions and memory as powerful antecedents to creative art-making and analyses how the students entered this space of creation, established through a relational transformative pedagogy.
Relational pedagogy employs social interactions and relationships to build trust, especially in works with emotions at their core. Transformative learning theory facilitates paradigm shifts and deepens my relational pedagogy for fashion image-making. The hope is to transform my students’ consciousness of the fashion image beyond the transactional to one that promotes and provokes social change.
The objective of this study is to consider how GOE decentres the fashion image as one that is merely surface-level and repositions it as a vehicle for artmaking that engages emotions. It is facilitated through a broader pedagogical strategy that not only imbues students with technical competencies, but also calls them to embrace emotions as a way to make and re-make meanings about the world and their place within it through the fashion image.