I've always admired an artist who can say a lot with just a few lines (much like I can admire a writer who can say more in 25 words than I can in 2000 with a superfluous use of commas and an extreme predilection for parenthetical asides) so today's fireside chat takes place with Winston Tseng, a graphic designer synonymous with such former skate brands as Popwar and Enjoi. However, this interview is not recent; it dates back to 2016 when I was frantically trying to feed the internet beast over at Gorilla Flicks to justify my only reliable monthly paycheck. That said, it can still be found via a semi-quick search in the great Google gyre of digital garbage, but for the sake of cheap and easy promotional fodder to feed our own worldwide beast and support this latest release with Winston, I'm simply regurgitating it here—with bonus content! Just like the miscellaneous contents of a parental bird's stomach.
Before doing so, however, a few things do bear contextual mention. First and foremost, I earned my questionable journalistic chops in the irreverent and juvenile pages of Big Brother magazine. Humor, sarcasm, satire, and asinine intent were very much a part of the puerile process, a lot of which may no longer be appreciated, much less understood. Enjoy! Secondly, this interview was prompted by a big time corporate freelance job that Winston did for Urban Outfitters, hence my initial "serious" questions, but once those are out of the way it quickly devolves back into the realm of skateboarding we all know and love.
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Sean: So, the whole reason for this interview is to plug your upcoming project with Urban Outfitters. How’d that come about?
Winston: It’s a new program called Artist Editions, where they’re working with different artists to release limited edition tees and other things like patches and pins. Each artist gets their own little collection that kind of stands on its own, which is pretty cool and different for me. I’m used to working with companies on designs that ultimately have to include the brand's name or logo, so it was a nice change. As far as how it came about, I’m not sure how they decide on their end who to work with. They just contacted me and told me they were going to be starting this program and asked if I’d be interested. There were artists released before me that I wasn’t familiar with, so it’ll be cool to see who they work with in upcoming editions.
Did you have total creative freedom with your work or did you hit any corporate speed bumps along the way? I only ask because the few times I’ve flirted with the more corporate clients, the art director usually requests “edgy” ideas right up until the higher-ups get involved. Then it’s more like "how close can we get to the edge of edgy."
No corporate speed bumps that I experienced or was aware of. They didn’t request anything in particular, they were pretty open and left it up to me. That said, I didn’t really try to get “edgy” or even “edge of edgy” with it, I did some self-censoring and approached it differently than I normally would've if I was working with a skate company. I just sent them a few ideas and they picked their favorites and it just went from there. The whole process went really fast.
Your work tends to deal with a lot of racial issues. Do you think you can get away with more racial cracks than say a cracker like me might?
Every so often in skateboarding an artist brands a company with their work, say like Jim Phillips to Santa Cruz or VCJ to Powell Peralta, where it was odd to see them later doing work for other companies. Obviously you’re still synonymous with Enjoi despite having left the company a while ago. How has that transition been for you?
How does a surname like Tseng get a given name like Winston, anyway?
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Okay, now that we're back in the present sense of time and circumstance, I'd like to quickly note how Winston's work spilled out into the streets over the last several years in the form of guerrilla social commentary. Every so often one of these controversial graphic antics would take on a wild life of its own, as witnessed most recently in the city of Philadelphia with a certain political endorsement by the Eagles franchise and the mainstream media mayhem that ensued. Hell may hath no fury as a scorned woman, but apparently a triggered commenter comes in a very close second and truly can bring out the absolute best in humanity.
Anyway, it was this anarchic art in the streets of Winston's that led to his curation in last month's "American Punchline" group show at the Subliminal Projects gallery in Los Angeles and the subsequently resulting StrangeLove products for "Empowering Girls" and "Preparing Boys." The future has never looked so far in the past, so please do your part today and prepare the children for the apocalypse of tomorrow.
Honestly, I'm not sure how to wrap this up… this post has been all over the fucking place so I'm just going to cop out and let Whitney Houston bring the noise and this to a close: