Feature Article
CHINA NOW!
- in the lead-up to the Olympic Games the United Kingdom celebrates the biggest
festival of Chinese culture in its history.
Installation at the exhibition of 'China Design Now' at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Copyright V&A Images.
Over 1200 events across the UK this year have celebrated China Now, a massive festival of Chinese culture across the nation showcasing art, design, cuisine and culture, science, business and technology, education and sport, presenting the view of a vibrant, dynamic 21st century China in the lead-up to the Olympic Games. The festival aimed to build partnerships between artists, cultural leaders, schools, businesses and communities across the UK and China, offering an insight into China's rich heritage and bringing the diversity of modern Chinese culture to life.
"I believe China Now has a very positive purpose as it seeks to advance the UK public's understanding of contemporary China," said Madame Fu Ying, Ambassador of the People's Republic of China to the United Kingdom.
Just one of the events associated with China Now was China Design Now shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London exploring the explosion of new design in China. The exhibition aimed to understand the impact of rapid economic development on architecture and design in China's major cities as the nation opens up to global influences and responds to the new hopes and dreams of its new urban middle class. China is now the world's biggest market for mobile phones, and will soon overtake America as the second largest consumer of luxury goods.
Curated by Zhang Hongxing and Lauren Parker following four years of research involving close collaboration with institutions and individuals in China Lauren Parker said, "the exhibition has captured an extraordinary moment in Chinese design and the rise of China's consumer society. There is truly a sense of design frenzy in China right now."
The exhibition, which concluded on 13 July, was as pioneering as the individual artists, companies and organisations in China which have shaped a new era of design during an unprecedented period of rapid growth and change. Case studies included Yue-Sai Kan who launched one of the first cosmetic companies in China; Chen Yifei, one of China's most commercially successful artists; and Wong Kar Wai, director of the film In the Mood for Love which inspired renewed nostalgia among fashion designers in China for the glamour, romance and fashions of Shanghai in the 1930s.
Representations of the recent wave of creative consumer and lifestyle magazines were balanced at the beginning of the exhibition by the tentative steps of post-Mao pioneers of graphic design who wrestled with new Western influences. The journey is incredibly short. A breathless pace of development was documented as the exhibition moved through time to the present, revealing a stunning result in design which is at once a new China with less ties to the old, yet retaining a semblance of influence of the past which will arguably distinguish Chinese art in the future in this important cultural rebirth.
Though 'Made in China' has become a familiar tag on every conceivable product, the spectacular creative energy in modern China is barely known. Co Curator Zhang Hongxing said, "design in China's cities has changed beyond all recognition in the last two decades. This is a moment when you can start talking about things being designed in China, not just made in China."
China Design Now focused on three rapidly expanding cities on or near the coast of China - in the south at Shenzhen where graphic designers explored new directions in the 1990s, to Shanghai where consumerism has encouraged incredible fashion and lifestyles, and Beijing in the north where monumental architecture for the Olympic Games is transforming the skyline of this ancient city.
In Chairman Mao's era the concept of a designer was virtually unknown. There were simply a handful of 'artist workers' who toiled for state-owned companies or institutions in the guise of designer. Mao's death in 1976 saw the wheels of change slowly turn, and in 1980 the small fishing village of Shenzhen became the nation's first Special Economic Zone, now the world's largest manufacturing and printing centre. Today it has a population of 10 million with an average age of twenty-seven. It was here prospective graphic designers flocked in the 1980s and 1990s to learn new techniques in this pocket of increasingly globalised China.
After the Communist revolution in China in 1949, many residents of Shanghai, the 'Paris of the Orient' fled to Hong Kong, but now many emigrants and their descendents have returned, creating a rebirth in consumerism with exclusive shopping and dining areas, as well as a renaissance of the Shanghai chic of the 1920s and 1930s when Shanghai was the third largest financial centre of the world.
While Shenzhen was pitched as 'Frontier City' in China Design Now, Shanghai was themed 'Dream City', and the final stage of the exhibition, featuring Beijing, was labelled 'Future City' for its more physical transformation of the city through ultra modern architecture. It was only in the 1990s private architectural businesses were allowed to operate in China under their own auspices instead of being affiliated to the state. Like designers, there are now official institutions for architecture, and architects are keen to develop a voice in design which fits with the modern face of China without fully rejecting the traditional.
Another telling barometer of change in China is its 'Four Great Things' - traditionally the symbols of success and influence to which one should aspire to own. In the 1960s and 1970s bicycles, sewing machines, watches and radios were the 'Four Great Things.' In the 1980s it was colour televisions, refrigerators, washing machines and cassette recorders. Today, unthinkable during the time of Chairman Mao (1893-1976), the 'Four Great Things' which indicate the good life in China are houses, cars, computers and mobile phones.
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View of the exhibition of 'China Design Now' at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London shows the development of new fashion in China. Exhibition design by award-winning London-based architects Tonkin Lui. - V&A Images