Commissioned Art as a Design Tool

Four projects show how commissioning can address cultural context, visual weight, brand meaning and material integration — not just size and colour. 

Commissioned art is often presented as a way to get the right dimensions, palette or format.

For designers, its more useful role is solving something particular to the project: how a collection relates to place, how a large work sits within a room, how an organisation can be present without putting its branding on the wall, or how artists and specialist makers can contribute to the same interior idea.

These four projects began with different problems. 

When cultural specificity is the brief

For DBS Private Bank, the collection needed to speak to place and to the bank’s key Asian markets without reducing them to a set of recognisable symbols. 

Yeo Siak Goon’s Garden City of Glory (above), offers one response. Singapore is clearly present: the former Supreme Court and City Hall appear among foliage and painterly marks. But it isn’t a conventional cityscape. Yeo draws on both the city’s history and his own experience of it, allowing past and present to occupy the same painting. 

Elsewhere in the collection, cultural context comes through practice rather than subject matter. John Martono's work brings painting and hand-stitching together on silk. Fan Shao Hua works from a deep knowledge of Chinese painting while pushing the language into contemporary abstraction. Tarini Ahuja’s practice draws from ideas found in Indian hand-block printing, including repetition, irregularity and the presence of the maker’s hand.

The useful distinction for designers is this: cultural relevance does not have to be added as imagery.

If cultural context matters to the project, artist selection can do much of the work. Choose practices in which the relevant histories, techniques or materials already exist, rather than selecting an artist first and asking them to insert a heritage motif afterwards.

That tends to produce a collection with more individual voices too.

Scale for Visual Weight

Scale is one of the most obvious reasons to commission an artwork. For a recent corporate project in Singapore, Tay Bak Chiang's Cloud Bridge was commissioned specifically for a boardroom. At 100 × 225 cm, its horizontal proportions were developed in response to the length of the room and meeting table.

Dimensions alone don’t tell you how large an artwork will feel. Tay’s compositions use simplified forms and substantial areas of open space. Cloud Bridge therefore has physical presence without putting the same amount of visual pressure on the room as a highly detailed or densely coloured work of identical dimensions.

That matters particularly in a boardroom, where the artwork may remain directly within someone’s field of vision for an hour rather than being passed in a corridor.

So an artwork brief for a large space should go beyond width and height. Viewing distance, dwell time, visual density and surrounding materials all affect scale. A 225 cm painting is a measurement. How that painting behaves in the room is the design decision.

Translate the brand 

The instruction to make artwork “reflect the brand” can produce predictable results: corporate colours, familiar symbols, references to the company’s industry. 

Alvin Tan’s Rising Together for a corporate office takes a less literal route.

The large wall mosaic is made from recycled aluminium cans. From a distance, the individual components resolve into an image of Mount Fuji; viewed close up, the material itself becomes much more apparent.

The Japanese reference connects to the company’s origins. The recycled aluminium carries the sustainability element. Neither requires the artwork to resemble a piece of corporate graphic design. Before deciding what an artwork should look like, separate what the organisation wants to communicate from how it should be expressed visually.

A value might be translated through subject. Another might sit in the material choice or production method. Company history may give the artist a point of departure without becoming the subject of the artwork itself.

The organisation can then be present in the logic of the commission without needing to be visually obvious

Build a family of commissioned elements 

The conventional picture of a commission is fairly neat: client chooses artist, artist makes artwork, artwork gets installed.

Some projects are much less linear.

At Oakwood Premier Singapore, Fiidaa Art worked developed four bespoke photographic works by Terence Tan for Oakbrasserie alongside handcrafted accessories produced with specialist makers 

For hospitality projects, this wider view can be more useful than treating every artwork as an isolated object. Photography, artworks, objects and accessories may have different makers and functions, but they can still respond to the same interior concept.

This is familiar territory for interior designers. Bespoke furniture, finishes and joinery routinely involve several specialists. Art can be developed with the same attention to material, fabrication, installation and the relationship between individual elements.

The artist brings the visual proposition. A specialist maker understands what a material or production method can do. The designer understands the space. The art consultant helps keep those conversations connected without losing the integrity of the work.

A better question for the brief

The useful question is therefore not simply:

“What can we customize?”

It is:

“What does the art need to solve?”

Sometimes the answer is cultural context. Sometimes it is visual weight, organisational meaning or the need for several commissioned elements to work together… and sometimes an existing artwork already answers the brief perfectly well.

Commissioning becomes useful when the requirements are specific enough that the right answer does not yet exist.

Fiidaa Art works with designers, architects and organisations to develop art collections and commissions from early concept through to production and installation.