Alumni Lai Yu Tong (Visual Arts, 2014) and Sarah Yap Soke Kee (Visual Arts, 2015) were nominees of this year’s McNally Award for Excellence in the Arts, an award presented to LASALLE College of the Arts’ most outstanding student of each year's graduating cohort! Yu Tong, who pursued Fine Arts after graduating from SOTA, is praised as a sensitive and culturally aware arts practitioner whose works respond to the conditions borne out of modern living. Sarah went on to do Interior Design at LASALLE and she strives to merge arts and design together, incorporating the two into her own unique style and quality.

Read the full McNally Award for Excellence in the Arts nomination list HERE.
More about Yu Tong HERE.
More about Sarah HERE.

In addition to the nomination for this prestigious award, we celebrate Yu Tong and Sarah’s achievements in their respective pursuits.

Yu Tong held his solo exhibition at DECK from 14 September to 15 October 2019. Titled "It's strange I feel like I've seen this one before”, the exhibition featured recent works where a local newspaper has been used as source material to examine image culture, consumption, and living in Singapore. Working with images in a time of image saturation, Yu Tong employed gestures of collection, appropriation, reduction and arrangement as primary modes of artist production.

Inspired by tree stumps and fingerprint whorls, the carpet designed by Sarah was selected as the winning design of the exclusive Balsan X LASALLE collaboration. Created specially for Balsan’s 2019 collection, the carpet was displayed at the LASALLE campus green till 31 Oct 2019. Sarah won the opportunity an all-expenses paid trip to visit the Balsan factory in Paris and learn more about their high-quality and eco-friendly carpets. Read more HERE.

Congratulations to Yu Tong and Sarah!