Vince Low: Seeing Faces in Lines

By Alif Omar Mahfix  •  in Features
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source: Vince Low

Some of you have probably stumbled upon Vince Low’s series of scribbled portraits on the internet, what not with it being featured by international online publications ranging from The Huffington Post to Complex. Despite that, you probably don’t know much about the man behind it beyond the fact that the project began as an awareness campaign for the Dyslexia Association of Malaysia. From that, you’d probably extrapolated that Vince is himself dyslexic and that he is an artist, just as we did initially. Well, we were correct on one count: Vince does have dyslexia. As for the latter conjecture…

“I started illustrating about 5 years ago at Grey Group Malaysia, before that I was a Creative Group Head,” he tells us before the big reveal; “… I’ve never done art as an artist before – I was just in advertising.” Whoa, we went collectively, like Keanu Reeves circa Bill & Ted. That can’t be right, can it? This is a man whose works have gotten global traction without any PR hullabaloo – one of the rare occasions when a Behance account got noticed with little hype behind it. And then there’s also something ineffable to the incomplete look of his finished artwork – if JUICE were to play the art critic role, we’d mention how the flurry of lines forming the faces are metaphorical of how a dyslexic would see words; displaced, blurry, blinking, and disjointed.

This man’s got to be an artist artist, y’know, with multiple exhibitions to his name!

“There’s no relation between dyslexia and the style I chose, actually. I just wanted to choose something simple but difficult to execute,” Vince informs us. Well, happy serendipity then? A dyslexic, according to Vince, does have the uncanny ability to solve problems without fully understanding why they are capable of doing it. Relating this to an incident in his childhood when he took apart a broken radio, had a good look at it, and put the parts together to make it work again, Vince says that there might be something to this ability that works on a creative level as well. He might not have planned for the scribbling style to work with the dyslexia subtext on a deeper level, but it did.