24 Jan 2010 0913H

Recent thoughts on Chinese design

Is it possible to talk about Chinese design when all Chinese designers have been taught about ways of looking, thinking, and form giving by Westerners? That the very value of design comes to Chinese design because of its engagement in the global late capitalist market flows of goods and services? A priori, I draw on the long body of work that tells us that ways of thinking, looking, and shaping are not without their own biases. They have their own histories, and that these ways of knowing give rise to presences that suppress absences and silences in order to legitimize and perpetuate their existence. In other words, design would appear to meet the criteria for what Foucault would have called a discursive formation. So if it is the case that western form-ways have basically colonised Chinese design, what does this mean for the future? Is it possible to disentangle Chinese design from the colonial yoke, so to speak?

I’m thinking no. The genie’s already out of the bottle. In essence, there is no design style that is sui generis “Chinese” per se. Perhaps even the notion of design itself, although it poses as universal, actually is historically conditioned by the West as a kind of discursive formation. At the risk of prematurely speaking, one cannot talk about Chinese design because Chinese designers have not begun to build a national discourse of their own, the narrative of seeing, thinking and shaping for themselves, out of “native”, pre-colonial design history, to solve their own problems using “native” ways of doing so, and not “imported” ways of doing so, such as constructivism, modernism, so on. Largely, when they use such techniques, they’re really only copying from others, doing “what the market tells them” will work, what someone has taught them.

Chinese Design, therefore, properly only refers to the act of form-giving in a more or less Western manner, with pre-colonial or traditional Chinese flourishes, by people who are Chinese or are designing for Chinese and maybe to a degree by foreigners living and working in China. This differs from big-letter Chinese Design because the work seen today does not stem from a purely, uniquely Chinese historical aesthetic tradition, but from the chaotic and tumultuous centuries of engagement with Western ways of form giving, as we see with product and advertising work, i.e. communications design from Hong Kong and Shanghai before the Second World War, and then of course the mainland engagement with the Soviet realist propaganda after 1949, and of course modernism and its discontents take over in Hong Kong after 1949 as well.

I doubt there will be a rejection and revolution in this regard, and I think it is too late for any rejection to be successful so as to “restart” Chinese Design ex nihilo. But, if this were undertaken, a wholesale rejection of western form ways, fashions, trends, and the like, basically, a return to pre-colonial Chinese aesthetics, perhaps then we might be able to talk about Chinese design as its own discourse. Perhaps because colonialism is part of the historical condition, therefore it is inescapable to talk about Chinese design without reference to the colonial masters.

Anyone who talks about Chinese design today cannot however elide or exclude this colonial form of intellectual history as if it does not exist, although it is telling to me why this has not been criticized more loudly. Chinese design cannot also, as I am seeing in a paper from Design Issues, be simply academically explained away by simplistic and outdated colonialist notions about Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, collective identity, so on: every such simplistic textbookish stereotype can be countered by the rich, direct knowledge gained from actual observation of the real conditions on the ground and the lived experiences of people, their histories, their aspirations and failings.

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26 Jan 2010 1817H

bill ropp writes:

interesting article….I had consulted for a Chinese consumer products firm for over 7 years, traveled to China 60 times since 1995, and during 2008/9 developed and staffed a design department of nationals in both Industrial design and Graphic design…what I noticed was that they had great skills in all the latest computer programs, good drawing and creative skills, but were directed poorly by marketing…..these designers had poor access to information therefore their design solutions were mediocre at best (and thet did no research on their own…&expected to be TOLD what to do) ….the other frustrating thing about China is that the entire country is taught that the way to succeed is to “be like everyone else”….while westerners are taught to succeed by being different and innovative…through creative and analytical thought…Chinese management is (EXTREMELY) poor at making good business decisions therefore has no confidence in their designers…the country has a long way to go – changing the mentality and teaching people to “think independently” in all functions is the key to their success..
untill senior management changes it’s ways – the people below will not change either……

26 Mar 2011 0710H

Julia Maple writes:

The latest characteristic of the Chinese people seem to be to take the Western recipes of success and to implement them, in a way of another, in their country…Not to seek their own cultural and ideological identity, but to borrow others’. They take the latest phones, cars, you call it, and copy them. The Westerners came to them, in order to use a cheap hand labour, encouraging them to become mass producers. I do hope they’ll begin to recover their original, creative powers, but…they need time.

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