08 Apr 2008 0745H

On “Chinese Design Everyday”

Is there such a thing as Chinese design?

Of course there is design produced by Chinese, either Americans of Chinese descent or Chinese in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan, or Singapore. That is Chinese design after a fashion. But is there a vernacular we can call Chinese design? What makes it so?

I would aver, as the exhibit or rather, its curation seems to indicate, that Chinese design is Chinese only to the extent that it “speaks” to and is “understood by” Chinese.

Thus, in viewing the exhibit, I was struck by how graphic design, being a communications medium, is given over to the same impulses, traces, and gaps that spoken and written communications are prone to. In short, design is really a language and with it is imbued all the frailities and strengths that humanity is prone to. Its relevance and power thereby is only carried forward by visual “utterances” and references to the everyday cultures that produce it. However, density of East Asian urban population did not seem to be one of those influences.

So what is it we’re seeing here? Are we seeing traces of top designers, who were educated in the city’s polytechnics, or in western universities, and thereby were taught how to see through western eyes and how to draw with western hands? Or are we seeing something else, in how the exhibit was itself curated, the pieces carefully culled from many which were excluded? What is it that I am looking for amidst all these artifacts?

In examining the traces of the designs, I realize that in my own search for a “pure” Chinese design vernacular, free of influences from, and references to, the Soviet-style romanticism of Communist state art, or from the western colonialist commercial romanticism in Shanghai and Hong Kong design vernaculars, I myself harbor hidden western metaphysics, unspoken logocentric notions, and a longing for a pure language. It is likely impossible to refer to a period when design ever was composed of signs without referent, if only because design itself is not only a language, whose power depends precisely on its ability to link meaning with images and type, but it is an artifact of history as well, produced by modernity, shaped by capital, and so it is inflected with the traces and references that produced it. Such a search for a realm of pure ideas, a search for a language of ideas without referents is ahistorical and exists only as a dream.

Chinese Design Everyday runs until the 13th at the Design Exchange in Toronto. I have a small collection of photos from the exhibit.

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Filed under Branding, Product Design, Visual Communications

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