Lasalle College of the Arts

YOU can't rely on talent alone to make it as an artist.

What you need is an open mind, passion and lots of hard work.

New students at Lasalle College of the Arts will spend their first year unlearning what they know about art. They will then be imbued with a new attitude towards art, to constantly explore and develop new ideas and methods of creating it.

This will be done with the help of their lecturers, many of whom are established artists, designers and performers.

Said Ms Dahlia Osman, lecturer-in-charge of drawing at the Faculty of Foundation Studies: "I have come across talented students who have fixed ideas. They don't want to let go and explore new ideas. It is harder to teach them than someone with an open mind."

Those who join the school after their O levels have to take a one-year foundation programme to prepare for entry to the Bachelor of Arts (Honours) course, with specialisation in arts management, design, film, fine arts, media arts or performing arts.

Rigorous course

Ms Osman was chosen by the Singapore Tourism Board to be an artist-in-residence at the World Exposition 2005 in Japan for four months. She was also involved in the setting up of the Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

She has worked as a set designer for several theatre productions, and has produced commissioned pieces, including Kudaku Lari, a bronze sculpture at the Singapore Turf Club.

She started teaching part-time at Lasalle in 1994 while studying for her diploma in fine arts.

Ms Osman, who took a full-time teaching position last year, enjoys interacting with her students. She especially likes the informal student-teacher relationship that encourages students to contribute to an exchange of ideas.

"We are more like friends. But we are serious about work and getting the job done," she said.

Another accomplished artist and educator is Mr Wolfgang Muench, dean of the faculty of media arts. He is from Karlsruhe, Germany, and studied fine arts in Stuttgart and Vienna, Austria.

He held research and teaching positions in Germany and Hong Kong before moving to Singapore in 2003.

Mr Muench, whose speciality is interactive media, was an artist-in-residence at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in 2002, and at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in Ogaki, Japan, in 2003.

One of his art installations is an interactive piece called Bubbles, which lets participants interact with floating bubbles on a screen.

Mr Muench hailed Lasalle as the most exciting place for art education in Singapore.

"The approach to teaching and learning is very similar to the successful approaches in Europe," he said.

Like Ms Osman, he said students need to be open-minded.

"It is a slight problem with students here as it doesn't seem to be the main emphasis in secondary school," he said.

"Students need to be daring to try new things, and to be able to critique and think out of the box."

Ms Osman and Mr Muench both faced parental objections when they chose careers in the arts.

It took Ms Osman a year to convince her father to let her have a go at it.

She said: "I had a hard time back then. But when I enrolled in Lasalle, it was like another world, one that I could exist and excel in."

It has since become her mission to help young people gain confidence in this field.

Lasalle has 70 full-time and 180 part-time lecturers in five faculties.

Its director of corporate communications, Mr Sylvester Toh, said: "Our lecturers bring to the classroom years of relevant industry experience from all over the world.

"It is their mission to help students understand the importance of being plugged into the global network of the creative arts and design, and inculcate in them the values of initiative, passion and endurance in their chosen discipline."

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