Super Cool, Super Nature

They're pretty super alright: merrily blurring the line between art and design, creative and commercial, design agency Super Nature's forward-looking and fun approach to creating experiences has seen the design agency move from a small New Zealand city, to the buzzing metropolis of Shanghai, winning big name clients, accolades and admiration all along the way.

Teaching design in Whanganui, New Zealand afforded Malaysians Lin Yew Cheang and Yeoh Guan Hong the time, environment and research opportunities to develop some of the ideas around issues of physical form, interactions and projections. There, they met then student, Billy Wen Hao, the Chinese third of Super Nature, and together with University College of Learning lecturer Debbie Hahn, founded Hyperthesis Visual Lab.

The collective made their name with projects such as outdoor installation, Beneath, which saw mysterious, phantom-like sea creatures projected onto the facade of Sarjeant Art Gallery.

A job offer from digital agency Wieden+Kennedy took Billy back to Shanghai in 2005, but the group continued collaborating on both commercial projects for the likes of Nike, as well as art installations, including one for media and arts festival, Get It Louder. Yeoh and Lin Yew travelled to China for the show, were seduced by Shanghai's creative potential, and, feeling the need for a change from Whanganui, moved to the city in 2008. Thus, Super Nature was born.



"We're designers, but we're also artists, explains Yeoh. We focus on the area between art and design. In terms of business and how we present ourselves to clients, we're of course designers. But at the same time, we challenge ourselves to do lots of experiments; we try not to be solely business driven or very commercial, and I think that's why our clients like working with us. If we keep repeating the same thing, then that's not good for anyone. It might be easier, but it's not what we want."

An example: on arriving at Super Nature's lane house office, I am greeted by a wall of boxes, all containing, it transpires, millions of pure white feathers. They're for an installation for Nike, which by now will have taken taken place in Beijing. The sports brand have been heavily promoting their Nike Free line of shoes, a new design that is apparently light, soft and makes the wearer feel, well, free in a weightless kind of way.

Taking these messages on board, Super Nature came up with a rather wonderful-sounding installation comprising a huge glass cube, filled up to knee-height with white feathers. Journalists were invited inside the cube to play, bundle, roam, whatever, and enjoy the weightlessness of the materials, their softness and the simple pleasure of messing around with loads of feathers, whilst a light projection follows their movements, casting vibrant colours onto the otherwise pure-white area.

"It's important that the installations are fun – that way people will remember them. It's interesting seeing what happens when we do them in galleries as opposed to open spaces. People react in a certain way. In a gallery, people feel very self-conscious and worry about touching or breaking things, but if it's in a really open space then people want to play and enjoy, and that's what we want people to do".




Another Nike project, Nike Mercurial Vapor Superfly II was aimed specifically at teenagers, and sought to showcase the shoe's traction technology and futuristic look. Super Nature came up with something that looks like a cross between a spaceship's control panel and a dance mat that allowed users to visually and physically experience the shoes features: a pressure-sensitive step pad projected a simulated scan of users' feet onto a clear acrylic screen, analyzing things like weight, shift and environmental conditions. The children, according to Yeoh, loved it and left with the clear message that these shoes are technical, futuristic and very, very cool.

"Clients expect something crazy from us, that's why they choose us. Some, of course, are more commercial than others, but that's a challenge too – how to define the brand creatively in the way the client wants".

Indeed it can, although the collective still make time to pursue their own projects, purely for art's – or is it design's – sake. C.C.C. (which stands for the rather less catchy co-articulation colour construction) was made for the 2009 Shanghai International Science and Art
Festival and involved the trio working with their most challenging material to date.



"So far water has definitely been the hardest material to work with. We wanted to keep the projected image inside the water so that it looked multidimensional" To the uninitiated, it's hard to imagine something as simple as water testing an agency used to working on such technical projects. Yeoh explains, "In normal water you wouldn't see the image because it's too clear. We added colour to the liquid so it looked kind of muddy so the image could stay in the water. The challenge was adding just the right amount of colouring – too much and the image looks blurry; too little and it won't stay". The installation, which responded visually and aurally to movement, won the 2009 Shanghai International Science and Art Award.

Similarly, Super Nature were selected by Converse to create an art installation for their 2010 Summer campaign, 'You're It', which saw the brand collaborate with young artists globally. "They wanted us to imagine ways to bring light into their campaign", Yeoh recalls. "We only had two weeks to develop the work and weren't allowed to use any expensive material – it all had to be stuff that you'd find at home, which was a challenge". The eventual work, Me Wonderland, is a sort of crazy, interactive merry-go-round that saw multicoloured lights flash and spin in response to sound, circling above childhood objects coated in white paint. "When you're born, everything is blank, and it's then that the colours come. At the end, we switched the lighting to UV so the objects glowed, it was like a disco!"



The lifespan of these beautiful and sometimes madcap creations is short – their sheer scale makes them virtually impossible to store and so the collective carefully video document each and every stage of the creative process. It's really quite poetic: Super Nature mark just the beginning of a brand's experience, but what's of real importance, both to their clients and the collective themselves is the reactions they prompt, the memories they create and the fun that they spark.

As Yeoh eloquently explains, "We're just providing the concept and the set up; the experience is something created by the people who interact with it – we want people to enjoy it and really play with what we do... All we want is to keep doing something unique, and keep creating."

For further information or to get in touch with Super Nature, check their website here