By Phoebe Wong Pulling open the drawers of the drawing cabinet in designer Rex Chan’s studio reveals stacks of sketchbooks and all manner of drawings – hand-drawn and non-hand-drawn, flat and three-dimensional. Chan navigates between sketching, memory drawing, rendering, illustration and painting. Terms like sketches, memory sketches, live drawings, illustrations, layouts and even renderings can sometimes be used interchangeably, but there are subtle distinctions. Drawing is to design students what free writing is to novelists: a form of self-expression and a preparatory state. Among these countless drawings, three batches are particularly captivating: first, 3,000 cards, primarily created between 1982 and 1986, with intermittent additions until 1989; second, more than 30 pencil sketches from 1989; and third, approximately 240 collages using printed ephemera, created since 1996. In my conversation with Chan, I was particularly interested in understanding the relationship between his background as a designer and his diverse drawing practices. It became clear that many aspects lacked simple, deterministic, cause-and-effect relationships; at best, one could discern certain correlations. Some memories were buried deep, and even the …