Harpist and art collector Laura Peh brings together her passions for music and visual arts with another creative endeavour—publishing art picture books for children
While conversations around blockchain, cryptocurrency and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) reached fever pitch in 2021, these emerging technologies took a tumultuous turn in 2022. But it also led to new ideas and experimentations.
This transformative nature of Web3 has captured the imaginations of many, Laura Peh included. The concert harpist and art collector was even roped into discussions about starting an NFT platform. “I had to learn everything from scratch, going through about 90 pages of Google [searches] before I actually grasped what was going on,” she shares. While the project did not come to fruition, Peh thought it was a good idea to compile all that knowledge into a book, breaking down the complex terms and concepts.
The book Blockchain, NFT, Cryptocurrency is the latest release—and the first title in the Digital Natives collection—under Cinnamon Art Stories, the children’s book series published by Cinnamon Art Publishing. The boutique publisher of illustrated books is Peh’s passion project born out of the pandemic. In 2020, she left her art gallery job in Hong Kong to return to Singapore. “I wanted to use everything that I’ve learned [so far], from music to art history and business, along with my experiences travelling [around the world] to make something educational for kids,” she says.
Growing up, Peh never was a voracious reader. “I didn’t read a lot growing up. I wished I had read more. We had books in the house, but it was just on the shelf.” Her interest in music grew instead. She started playing the piano at age six, the violin at seven, and the harp at nine. By age 14, she went to Paris to study music. It was only in Europe that “I started attending high-quality concerts, plays and operas, and going to museums”.
She also started taking evening art history classes at the Louvre, before she moved to London to pursue her music degree. In the UK, she did internships with museums, auction houses and galleries, and even did a master’s degree in art business.
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It is thanks to this multifaceted exposure to the art world that she considers art education as important. “I think it’s a way of thinking, because the way you think, the way you analyse things is quite different. When you look at a painting, or you hear music, you pick up all the little nuances, from texture to timbre. It forces you to think in a different way.”
So it is no surprise that Peh went with Exploring Art as the first collection, featuring six artists: Louise Bourgeois, David Hockney, Gustav Klimt, Piet Mondrian, Nam June Paik and Wu Guanzhong. “I was looking at how the books would look when they were presented together. We needed at least one female artist (Bourgeois), one Asian artist (Wu), and one innovative artist (Nam). I also included a blue-chip contemporary artist (Hockney) and two artists of modern art (Klimt and Mondrian),” says Peh, who is the author of this series.
Through these books, with their unique content accompanied by beautiful visuals, she hopes to kindle a child’s imagination and spark their curiosity about the world. As of February this year, Cinnamon Art Stories has released 12 titles, with more in the pipeline to highlight the breadth of its portfolio.
Along with the Digital Natives collection, it also released a Mindful Consumption collection centred around sustainability, starting with animal proteins, from fish to cattle. Other collections in the works include Discovering Music.
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