Winston Tseng interview
HUCK talks to the art director of Enjoi about his unconventional entrance into the skate art world and what it’s like to have one of the most coveted jobs in the world.
More like this...
Winston Tseng is Enjoi Skateboards’ art director, and if you know the score about the brand, you’ll know damned well that his work fucking kills it.
Through Winston’s witty, hypercritical eye, Enjoi has grown to stand out almost exclusively amongst the herd of board brands that have yet to stray from the industry machine.
HUCK: When did you interest in art come into play?
Winston Tseng: I don't really know... or maybe I just can't pinpoint exactly when it was. Ever since I was a little kid, I liked to draw a lot and make stuff, blah-blah-total-cliché-blah. I think my earliest memory would be when I was 7 or 8-years-old and started collecting baseball cards. I remember being really into the different designs, and I would constantly draw and ‘design’ my own types of cards. I'm sure that wasn't a normal thing to do so maybe that was the beginning. But even then, it wasn't a conscious understanding or interest in art. I've just always been a visual person I suppose.
Did you go to art school? Was it beneficial to what your ended up doing?
No I didn't go to an art school, I actually went to UC Berkeley. I loved college, but not for the academics or anything, more for the social stuff and living on my own for the first time. I studied mathematics and economics, so you can imagine how ‘fun’ that part of it was. I don't know what I was thinking – I wasn't actually – I was 18 and supposed to decide what to do with my life, so I just went with what seemed practical.
To this day I'm still not sure my degrees are beneficial to what I'm doing, but probably not so much. Definitely not if you ask my parents... they're still disappointed that I didn't grow up to be a banker or something like that.
What was your upbringing like?
I grew up like any other Asian kid in our little-beach-town-suburbia-bubble - just doing what all the white kids did. I didn't have it hard or anything like that, I played baseball, basketball and soccer when I was younger and then gave it all up immediately when I discovered skateboarding. That was in 8th grade. It consumed my life and I was obsessed with skating and everything that came with it, including the graphics. I think that's true for the majority of skaters, but I might have been a little more interested in the art aspect than my friends were. In my mind, I was always analysing what I liked or disliked about certain board and tee graphics, or how I would have preferred it done a bit differently.
Whose art did you look up to?
I didn't really have any ‘art heroes’. I think partly because I had no idea who the people actually were that were making skate graphics and partly because I still didn't have any understanding or appreciation of the ‘art world’. I definitely followed the graphics from different companies but the company behind a graphic didn't really matter to me so much. I just liked stuff if it looked cool to me, simple as that.
How did you get into designing skateboard graphics for a living?
This is a question I get a lot, especially since on paper, I'm probably not even qualified to be doing what I do! So the story goes that after graduating college in 2002, I quickly realised that I didn't want to do anything involving math or economics and I wasn't interested in any of the types of careers that my degrees had supposedly prepared me for. My summer internships during college were all doing some sort of graphic design but I had just never seriously considered it as a career. I decided then that I wanted to keep working in the graphic arts, and my goal/dream was to work in skateboarding.
So I moved back down to LA thinking I needed to be in the Mecca of the action sports industry. I was having a hard time getting a job at all because I didn't have the art or design degree that most employers wanted, so I ended up taking pretty much the only job I could get. It was doing some pretty boring web design stuff at this company that specialised in internet faxing... no joke. Meanwhile, directly across the street from the office where I worked, there was a skate shop – Oneighteen Boardshop. I started going in there a lot and just lurking on my lunch breaks and after work. I got to know the people there and I had the idea that I would do the graphics for their shop boards and tees. So without telling them, I started secretly creating all these board graphics for them in my spare time. Months later, I brought a folder full of designs in to show them and basically told them that I wanted to do their graphics for them and that I would do them for free. They were into it!
Where do your graphic ideas come from? How much of your day is spent thinking of visual ideas?
If only I knew where my ideas came from, I'd go there all the time and maybe then I wouldn't be so behind with my work and constantly desperate for them. It sounds psychotic but without exaggeration, I can say that every waking moment of my life is spent trying to come up with graphic ideas. It might not be the main thing I'm focused on at that moment but somewhere inside my head is always analysing what I see or saw before and processing it.
For me, every graphic idea has two parts: the concept/message/joke/point and a visual representation of it. Often times, I'll get what I call these little ‘half ideas’ where I think of a message that I want to get across but I can't figure out how to represent it visually or I'll think of something visual but won't have any concept behind it. Sometimes I'll figure it out relatively quickly, sometimes I'll sit on something for months before I figure out the other half of it.
There’s a hysterical sarcasm in your work, do would you describe yourself as a sarcastic or cynical person?
Thanks, I'm glad you appreciate it. Sure, you could say I'm sarcastic and cynical. Other words you could use to describe me include: selfish, bitter, moody, disagreeable and a ‘hater’. I'm probably all of these things a little more than your average person. But you wouldn't know it if we just met: I hide it well.
Where do you like to draw your ideas from?
Most, if not all, of my ideas are just representations of my own views and sense of humour. From my work, I think someone can get a pretty accurate idea of the way the world looks through my small slanted eyes! There might seem like a lot of references to pop culture because I think things like that are really funny. A lot of the time, it makes no sense to me at all why certain things are ‘popular’. It's like ‘does everyone really like this trend because they choose to, or are they just mindlessly following the masses?’. It's usually the latter ones that end up in my work.
Do you do any personal artwork outside of your current work at Enjoi?
Only fairly recently have I started to pursue some personal art projects. I'd like to dedicate more time to it but it's been hard. Everything I do for Enjoi comes very naturally to me, conceptually and stylistically. So yeah, I think my personal work is similar to my Enjoi stuff, just without the pandas of course!
Subscribe to HUCK for six issues
Only £20 (UK) / £43 (EU) / £58 (Rest of the World).
Winston Tseng interview (text) by Jay Riggio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (2)
Please note: Your comment may be held in moderation for approval by an administrator to prevent spamming. This usually doesn't take long, please be patient.
You might want to take it down and improve the security of your site!