Vince Low: Seeing Faces in Lines

By Alif Omar Mahfix  •  24 Oct 2013 in Features

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Sharing with us his childhood experiences, Vince was the archetypal undiagnosed dyslexic. He had no one to socialise with in primary school as other students looked down on him – choosing to label him as stupid. Without many friends and incapable of studying, he started playing truant and mixing up with the wrong crowd. “Since the good kids didn’t let me in, I joined the other type of kids – the gangsters – I felt visible for the first time and not the kid who sat in a corner ignored, anymore,” he tells us with some hints of regret in his intonation. However, he was lucky enough that his father never gave up on him despite graduating high school with unfortunate results. “He knew I was good at drawing…” and that was all he needed to know, encouraging him to pursue advertising.

Curiously, we thought there might be a connection between dyslexia and creativity. Vince isn’t so sure himself; “Before I knew I was dyslexic, I thought it was because that I didn’t study a lot – if you didn’t use the left side of your brain as much, the creative side – the right – will take over.” But after finding out that he has dyslexia, he does entertain the possibility of a correlation between the two. Despite that, he states that dyslexics aren’t always creative. Citing a study done by the Dyslexia Association, he reveals that 70% of schoolchildren have the condition.

“I can assure you that all the mat rempits in Malaysia are 100% dyslexic – they are not creative, but then again, how can they take an old motorbike and turn it into a superbike?”