Winston Oh

Patron

May, 2019

Twenty years ago, Brother Joseph McNally planted the seed of Travelogue by suggesting that I should share my love for travel and painting with LASALLE students.

We spent the evening at a dinner function comparing our personal experiences of finding inspiration that came abundantly on our travels. Clearly the excitement of encountering new and different visual, physical, and emotional stimuli triggers and heightens our powers of observation and emotional response.

Travelogue was conceived to enable LASALLE students and graduates to venture abroad to immerse themselves in a new environment, with different culture, language, landscape, climate and architecture; to record and analyse their response to their new experiences; and to exhibit their creations on their return. Using, one expects, the skills and training they have acquired from the college.

It warms my heart to observe over the years, the evolution of this project from humble beginnings to become such a well organised and structured programme that has attracted such brilliant and exciting participants. I look forward to Travelogue each year, not only to the exhibition, but to meeting and engaging with the students whom I find intelligent, articulate and so creative. I am also secretly learning about contemporary art, of which I knew nothing at the beginning, and will finally get to grips with it in ten years’ time.

Travelogue exists only because of several key people in LASALLE who nurtured and honed it and who should take all the credit for it. Milenko Prvacki, then Dean of Fine Arts, took the helm for many years. Ian Woo has been the stalwart from the beginning. Together with the lynchpin Adeline Kueh, they are synonymous with Travelogue. I am so touched that they are still enthusiastically engaged in this programme, and I value their friendship and guidance over all the years. We are also grateful for the invaluable help from Hazel Lim and Jeremy Sharma who have shepherded the students through the programme.