TALKING THE PRACTICE: DISCUSSION ON GRAPHIC DESIGN

16.03.2020, On Nut BTS, Bangkok

Pianpian He (PH) & Max Harvey (MH) — Finished as in being in a state of completeness? We think this could mean several things. For some, it could be that decisive moment when a work is strong enough to be presented to a client. For others, it could be when a project has been approved, delivered and paid for. We have heard the question being asked to artists mostly, especially painters. “When is a work finished?” For designers, the easy answer is when the deadline comes up. Tic. Toc.

We wouldn’t know how to answer this question with exactness, a part of it relates to instinct, but in a project, whether it is commissioned by someone or something you do for yourself, you try to attain certain goals you set for yourself. A lot of that has to do with control, but we have a lot of issues with that word nowadays. We have been working on a bi-annual journal with writings on Southeast Asian culture called paan. The first issue, titled Crossing Fire-line, contains four original articles commissioned by the editor Jiahui Zeng. It also features one photo essay and seven poems. All texts are presented in at least two languages: mainly Mandarin and English. The project has been ongoing for about a year and half already. It’s been lagging behind because we are under a budget that isn’t realistic for the amount of work a multilingual publication requires, but also because we’ve encountered production setbacks as well as political problems. We have previously announced the project to be out this last December, however the content of the publication ended up being alarming for the printer. The same printer already had wet proofs and a few book dummies produced for paan. Although the printing company can hardly tell what the publication is really about, it appears they deemed the content to be “too sensitive”, which is to say that at a glance, the content does not look all rosy rosy, that its visual qualities and the language used within its pages seem not to put China in its best light. Nonetheless, paan isn’t about any of China’s involvement in and with anything. The texts tell specific stories about people of politics in post-war Asia and recount critical moments in the recent history of Asian societies. Yet, while carrying such characteristics, this publication is not allowed to exist. We have a budget that is sufficient to get the production of the publication ongoing, but our contact isn’t willing to proceed out of fear for its enterprise. In the following weeks, a few other printers followed-up with the same kind of responses. We were once told, “a catalogue of works, of paintings, would have been fine to produce, yours has way too much text”.

This is an example of a project where we do not have an entire control over the outcome. All parties involved are working towards the same goal without feeling the pressure of a self-inflicted drop-deadline. Since the making of printed publications reached a stage where many question their relevancy, we’ve become even more sensible over the conception of this particular publication. This year has been a year where we’ve had the most hardships at work, with project incompletions, time lags, interruptions–the latest being the coronavirus.

“Weird times”, everyone said.

We think the goal would be to let ourselves make works that visually never feel fully completed, or works that can be completed by others.

pic. 1 — Poster announcement for paan.

pic. 2 — Logo for paan in the shape of a betel nut leaf.

pic. 3 — “paan” is the Indonesian word for betel nut, a common snack in Southeast Asia. The logo design of paan is inspired by the way street vendors prepare the delicacy when selling it. This way of layering the ingredients is common on the streets of some Southeast Asian countries where saving “counter space” is essential.

16.03.2020, On Nut BTS, Bangkok

PH & MH — Speaking of commonalities, conversations are always the most important, but you need to find at last a collaborator who is willing to converse. That ain’t easy. Through conversations you have a better understanding of your role in the project. Ultimately, you can find someone whose attitude is close to yours. Here in China, the general vibe is that employers have very little patience with graphic designers and since turnarounds are extremely fast, things can get out of hand very quickly. For example, it is not uncommon to be asked to design and implement an exhibition in 3 weeks time. We remember while in the United States doing a relatively small book for a period of around 10 months. That’s a stark contrast. If all the parties involved in the book-making process are all immersed and very meticulous in their work, the project’s timeline can stretch for long. In China, it is a little bit different. It has to do with this culture of “moving forward” and get it done, as “done” being more important than “it”. However, working with us is to automatically sail against this mindset. We usually make things more complicated than they are and we do them rather slowly. We do not do it on purpose, but it might be perceived as such. We like to analyze the content of a project before we go forward. It is necessary to approach it in this way. Usually, where clients see smooth sailing, we see rocky hills, with lots of potential problems and ultimately contradictions.

I don’t think we pay too much attention on those overlaps between the different professions we see. When things go well, work usually just goes forward, we do not really spend too much time formulating, after the fact, why it went well. You basically want to call your collaborators your friends. There were certainly rugged moments but we don’t want to tell the tale.

18.04.2020, Sai Ma, Nonthaburi

WS — No specific anecdotes, but I have observed that the nature of design work and collaboration becomes different depending on the professional worlds the design was called for. It would be too easy to reduce the differences into dichotomies of work that is created for personal, non-market driven pursuits versus work that must function in very specific business driven contexts. Neither is ultimately good nor bad in my opinion, and truthfully I am aware that the two contexts in fact do bleed into one another more often than not.

It is super interesting that you mentioned the differences in production timelines between China and the United States—how each is working and living with very different comprehension of what fast means. Or what normality means for that matter.

Usually when there is limited time and money, it is logical to optimize the amount of resources you put into a project, whether that resource might be time, number of revisions, or the critical examination of the project scope. The latter is what I think is the most valuable thing a designer can offer to the table. Financial sustainability is absolutely important to the longevity of a design practice, but I believe it is also absolutely important that we “bother” our collaborators with challenges, questions, and thoughts on their given prompt. I try, and I’m not sure if I always succeed, to do this with all my collaborators, no matter if the work is “market-driven” or not.

16.03.2020, On Nut BTS, Bangkok

PH — I’m from China, and I studied visual communication as an undergrad in my hometown Changsha. There were only two choices back then in the Chinese art school system, you can either choose from fine arts or design. I was interested in art and film, but didn’t want to be an artist nor a filmmaker. Design also seemed a bit “fancy” to me, I was very suspicious of it when I started my studies. The most common design works one would be acquainted to were pieces of advertising and products.

Famous Chinese designers normally would have two kinds of portfolios: personal and commercial. I did an internship at a design studio ran by a famous Chinese graphic designer, but I was bored there, because most of the works we were doing were for pharmaceutical companies, mostly packagings. Good thing I made really good friends who were at the time studying graphic design at the RCA in London. Around the same time, I started doing some research about art schools outside of China. Information was limited since Google, YouTube, Instagram are all blocked in the mainland. I spent ages online using free but terribly slow VPN softwares, and from that I got to know the graphic design program at Yale.

In 2013, I met Max who just moved from Canada to China and we started working together. Meanwhile, I did some projects that were on the edge of art and design, but didn’t really show them to anyone. My design education back then taught me design is about problem solving, people were into visual identity projects, Kenya Hara and Muji, or focused on the promotion of the potential symbiosis between the traditional Chinese cultural and the business sector. Therefore, I knew people would think my projects were of no use.

In 2015, I got into the MFA program at Yale. It’s interesting whereas at Yale, the attitude is the absolute opposite of my undergrad, I almost just continued doing those weird in-between projects, but with better support. It gives you confidence.

MH — I quite agree with what Pianpian is saying up there, I do believe certain personalities cannot advance in certain environments, it depends on how you are wired. Certain environments are your complete opposite. It is always worth seeking for that space where you feel you can grow a little more. Or you find the place that can enable you to re-wire, but you have to experiment a little.

As for my background: I am a teacher in Hunan Normal University and I also run a studio with Pianpian in Changsha, China. I was born in Rivière-du-loup (Québec), Canada. I really dislike cars, it’s astonishing that in 2020 we still have to stop at gas stations to fuel a tank.

Win Shanokprasith is a Bangkok-based, Thai graphic and UX designer. He was born and raised in Bangkok, but had also spent a number of years in Baltimore and New York where he studied painting and worked various jobs (some of which pertain to graphic design while others completely unrelated). His background in painting somehow informs his design practice in very strange and haphazard ways—all of which he enjoys. Win currently holds a full-time position at a large tech company based in Nonthaburi. Whenever he’s not doing that, he’s engaged in projects and conversations with BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY.

27.03.2020, Changsha, Hunan

PH & MH — Graphic design is actually as much a part of society as any other discipline. Pianpian admires filmmaker Chris Marker, who likes to refer to himself as an amateur filmmaker. This amateur attitude is also actually saying, don’t go into your profession with the mindset that you know everything, because then you are not likely to move forward. It also involves the fact that our work with different types of creators is actually a learning process. Every time we get a new design project it is as if we’re facing a new subject, or walking into an exhibition that someone else curated, or diving into an article that someone else wrote, etc. You try to get the meaning behind it and find a right tone, and eventually express that understanding with suitable visuals and writings. It’s an interdisciplinary job, and that’s why we love it.

Graphic design itself has already evolved into something else. Designers can be artists, writers, curators, editors, it allows us to see other futures for graphic design. It’s also possible that eventually more young people will choose graphic design as a career, as well as being creators of positive content. We also hope to see these kinds of developments in China as well, as there is no such scope for graphic design over there at this time, there is little interaction between different disciplines and the expression “graphic design” is almost derogatory.

pic. 4 — Chris Marker’s cat Guillaume is urging him to get back to work.

20.03.2020, Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok

PH & MH — What we are looking for is fever, tiredness, dry cough, aches and pains, nasal congestion, runny nose, sore throat, shortness of breath, and perhaps even anosmia. The paranoia is palpable.

16.03.2020, On Nut BTS, Bangkok

PH & MH — Perhaps using a book we completed last year would illustrate but not answer that question in the fullest.

ArtDBL is a local (Shenzhen) art media outlet founded in 2015 that uses an online platform as a means of distribution. The content they cover is unique, the language is different from many other Chinese news platforms, and they have gained a considerable audience in just a few years. One of the most common platforms they use is WeChat, the most popular mobile app in China, which has a user base of almost one billion people and functions in many aspects of people’s lives: work, friend-making mobile payment, and publishing. In WeChat, there is a function called “Moments”, where you can see stories and posts coming from your friends’ circle. The app also offers a public account feature that gives businesses, organizations, and individuals the right to “publish”. You can apply for such a public account to post articles, promote a product, or write a private diary, etc. Of course, you are nonetheless monitored by the Party at all times, because, well, that’s what it does. So, if you are not careful, your account can be instantly deleted without any notice.

Our friend of ours referred us to ArtDBL in early 2019 and they came with the idea of compiling into a printed book all of the texts already published on their online platform. The texts are about the historical character of the city of Shenzhen in relationship to its local art scene. The title of the book translates into Shenzhen Dizziness, and we would like to copy here an excerpt of the foreword, which was written by the editor, Zhong Gang:

Shenzhen is a city whose multidimensionality deserves to be contemplated and researched. In this heterogeneous metropolis where a mixture of gambling style governance and global economy unite as one, time and space expand and collapse. All-encompassing and under the pressure of constant growth, the city evolves and lays bare its structures to the observer.

Unmistakably, the developments of the arts could not evade the “need-for-speed” model that is deeply rooted in the logic of the city. Fast paced economic growth, outsourced production, duplication, air freight and maritime transportation, along with the other sequelae investigated in this book, all emerge as the symptoms of the last 30 years of progress.

Looking at Shenzhen from a political and economical standpoint, we can consider it as being “particular”. We can also examine how this “particularity” contributed to boost the city’s mode of development from an art perspective. Shenzhen isn’t your typical art metropolis in comparison to well-established, or say, traditional cultural hubs: it is relentlessly growing and mutating. With the influence of the heavily promoted Hong Kong Art Basel and its strong market stimulation, Shenzhen itself has become a burgeoning art market. Once tranquil, then suddenly frantic under the presence of the art biennale, and then shifting again towards more diversified ways of art making, Shenzhen’s artistic production has been gradually shining overseas while nevertheless being modeled and carried away by capital.

What we found really interesting in this book is how personal each account of the city is. It illustrates well how several artists have been dealing with the city, and how they navigate their art practice within it. There is also a clear awareness that, thus far, Shenzhen’s art scene isn’t like Beijing nor Shanghai.

The text in the book is set in a font size larger than those in most Chinese paperbacks, we have done so to make the reader feel a bit uneasy, but this is not a case for purposefully impending legibility. Books in China published by regular Chinese publishers are more or less all typeset the same way, at similar sizes, and with rather crazy wide leadings (granted that Chinese is perhaps easier to read with a larger leading). The arrangement of text in a page isn’t something that people want to consider. Millions of books have their text typeset in the same way – as long as the text is comfortable to read, nothing else is needed. A lot of knowledge developed in the West about layout-making / grid-making did not transfer to China until recently. With all the digital platforms available at hand (made without typographical consideration), advocating for good typography in say, a printed novel, isn’t really going anywhere.

Printed on the cover is the two-word title “Shenzhen Dizziness”, which is composed of 4 Chinese characters 深 Shēn，圳 Zhèn，眩 Xuàn，晕 Yūn. But we have broken the title by typesetting Shēn (half of Shenzhen) and Xuàn (dizzy) in a black serif font, while Zhèn (other half of Shenzhen) and Yūn (dizzy) are set in a condensed sans-serif and printed in yellow. We automatically read by associating the font styles together, and if we do so it reads XuànShēn YūnZhèn, which means nothing specific. One has to force the reading backwards in order to read the title properly, a puzzle rather easy to solve for any Chinese readers. The funny part is that the people’s reading of the title is indeed influenced by this intentional mishap. Through this visual dislocation we echo the theme of the book. In addition to this, we also proposed to include at the end of the book a small visual archive which includes images and texts from earlier publications and articles that focus on Shenzhen’s art circle. This section wasn’t part of the original brief, but we thought that some visuals would help building a kind of registry of sorts…

The book was published last August (2019) and was sold out in less than a month – something we truly didn’t expect. Kinda nice to not only to see so much support for indie publishing from readers, but also to realize that designers can own a bit of their projects. As we see it, the value of the book itself is greater than its design, but without the design or the designer’s contribution, who puts together the content into one physical entity, it is harder to capture the essence of several scattered online articles as a whole.

pic. 5 — China, Guangdong province, Shenzhen, Dafen oil painting village, Dafen Village is one of the largest production centers for the oil painting market.

pic. 6 — Book spreads from Shenzhen Dizziness.

pic. 7 — There are five different thumbnails on the spine of the book at the location where publisher logos are usually inserted.

27.03.2020, Changsha, Hunan

PH & MH — The other day at the gallery we discussed specifically how people have a kind of aversion of printed or projected texts that are set in “unconventional” manners. We were relating this question to concrete poetry and how through design education graphic designers develop a sense for adding meaning to texts by giving rhythm to words in space. It is a way to write and design that isn’t suitable for commerce as it is a recipe for ill communication. But graphic designers are usually concerned with how text looks and how it is being read. That is where the conflict originates. We wouldn’t say graphic design is poetry, but it can be motivated by la poésie.

16.03.2020, On Nut BTS, Bangkok

PH & MH — Uff, that question is no good. We’ll just give a bad answer: would it be when a large amount of people universally agree that the work is somewhat great, deciding it deserves a pat on the back? In this trade, success and appraisal are currencies, and they can be very easily manipulated.

Max also points out when he was in school a while back he’d go see an exhibition with friends and some would ask: “what was your favorite piece”? And as for students’ work from a student show, the same question goes like “which piece is the most successful”? We can’t possibly answer that.

18.04.2020, Sai Ma, Nonthaburi

WS — I think there is a difference here between art and design, in the affair of their criteria for success. It is difficult to put into words how a work of art is successful, yet whenever I encounter a piece that resonates with me, the feeling is always strong and physical. I think a work of art is successful when its impact lingers, and my encounter with it grows into more thoughts, questions, and conversations.

A successful work of design on the other hand feels immensely easier to qualify and articulate. Unlike art, design is usually conceived as a solution to a specific set of problems whether it be functional or formal. In product and user experience design, the design solution is often both a strategic as well as an aesthetic one. It is easy to articulate how these design decisions will answer the specific business problems that gave birth to them. Yet unlike business actions that yield traceable numbers easily used to identify their success, the work of design often gets lost within these business outcomes that it still becomes hard to know just how much of that numerical success was actually a contribution of the designer.

But yes, when designing I do always think about the criteria of success that the work of design should achieve. When I used to paint, however, and this comes back to my first question to you,

I am more concerned with the puzzling task, oftentimes an impossibility, of bringing a painting into completion.

When people think of the act of designing, it is easy to think about the work that goes into making the final design deliverable or product.

27.03.2020, Changsha, Hunan

PH & MH — This is a problem that designers often face and one that is very tricky. For us, it’s again a process that we slow things down like we’re making trouble. First, we gotta consider whether or not the other party has the right people to implement the level of graphic design we ought for. Then, we go from there with the resources we have. However, we find making such identity guideline documents utterly boring, and unfortunately they often come as a necessity. But why so boring? Because it is somewhat as if doing the same project twice, or as if watching a movie with the director’s commentary on, and the said director only literally describes what is happening in the scenes, in the sleepiest of tones. There are more interesting ways to “narrate” or give instructions, as for instance with featurette Fear of Drowning, in which director Peter Greenaway comments on the subplots of his own movie Drowning by Numbers, or with Girl Chewing Gum by John Smith (1976), in which the plot is the commentary in disguise.

The activity of giving directions could simply be more enlightening. These branding documents are usually just way too pragmatic, dogmatic. Secondly, you gotta make a platform that is flexible enough to leave ample of space to the organizer and its team. The thing is that everyone must be really pumped! All parts must converse intelligently to one another, it has to be witty somehow, and stay contemporary. We realize we don’t have answers to all that’s implied in the question you have asked, we are still figuring stuff out as a studio. Of course, the worst is when your platform is totally misused, when originally inexistent gestures are added into the mix, and this happens mostly when your collaborator does not know how to edit written content, lacking in having an editorial direction. Worst case scenario is when [this question was left unfinished]

16.03.2020, On Nut BTS, Bangkok

PH & MH — Most people we interact with have their discussions more inclined towards content, the rest is up to each individual, and each designer hopefully has its own personal visual approach. Perhaps connoisseurs recognize those aspects but won’t really discuss it directly, the emphasize will be on what the actual thing is and what it says. We do not usually participate in discussions on form. And with this mindset we go.

18.04.2020, Sai Ma, Nonthaburi

WS — At the office where I work, the design team tends to talk less about form and more about the business function of design, more specifically how target customers will respond to the product experience and whether or not it will solve their problems.

There is a difference in the scope of work of graphic design and product design. Unlike product design, whose arena of expertise is in conceiving product experiences that allow its users to achieve very specific goals, graphic design I think is really about giving form to words, images, and therefore ideas.

Because ideas are lighter and more porous than products, they can travel far and can transform and expand along the way as they intersect and build upon other traveling ideas. Graphic design is important because it helps promote this propagation of human thought, so that more words, more images, and more ideas can be brought into this world.

I very much like this way of thinking about graphic design.

16.03.2020, On Nut BTS, Bangkok

PH & MH — Using the analogy of cooking, we prefer looking for new ways to mix varieties of raw ingredients – with the risk of making tasteless, terrible meals, rather than perfecting with brio already existing recipes. It is also very important for us to show things as they are. Remove the frivolous so you can clearly see what’s inside. “Style” doesn’t sound particularly honest, it can easily be applied to something and become a salesman’s talking point. Style is just another selling tactic. Max always talks in his classes anecdotes about when, in the early 2000s, corporations started to rebrand and add 3D effects to their logos, while changing their logotype from neutral sans to rounded sans, in order to look friendlier. A big wave of rebrands happened at the time, the same moment social media platforms emerged. The short essay “‘Talk Magazine’ Discusses the Politics of Style” by Harry Gassel and Eric Hu in our opinion discusses this quite accurately.

We are not sure we agree that people try to truly differentiate themselves within this competitive market. Businesses usually capitalize on trends and something must be repeated to become one. It seems to us like it’s the opposite. There are specific points to adhere to in order to excite both viewers and design aficionados, and people around the world take good notice of  the likes and the followers counts. We’ve seen for quite some time now a tendency towards a stylistic that would belong to some kind of “technoïd modernity”?

There is a place where designers should be more united with each other and it is with the sharing of resources. Thinking about the flower market in Bangkok where all the shops are sort of selling more or less the same flowers, at least in appearance. It may seem like a very bad way to enter an already fierce competition, but the vendors can also use this unity as a force to prevent some problems such as retail price, rent and space, etc.

Isn’t it the case at the flower market?

Designers can come together. But the most important thing is to not be dominated by the market, which would eventually lead the designer to lose himself and become some kind of living tool. manystuff.com was a very good platform in the past, but they unfortunately stopped updating in 2016. Of course, it had its own share of detractors but please give us a break would you? It at least had a focus. Many designers now use are.na to archive some of their own research material. There’s also Dinamo’s variable font tool, which allows users to freely upload their own fonts and turn them into variable fonts, or Node’s Bookups…

30.03.2020, Changsha, Hunan

PH & MH —  Isn’t also reflected in people’s use of language online? Everyone uses the same lines, also everyone seems “empowered” by doing so. Now corporations are empowering too! And no matter what you do, it is done along with a few meters of “social distancing”. Everything is hashtaggable – all that unrelated stuff. It’s a very big question and it is a bit hard to answer. We can speak of post-truths. The credibility of the information becomes lower and lower. Recently, fake news about the coronavirus became particularly prevalent on Chinese networks, and it’s surprising to see people being so irresponsible with what they are writing. The internet, while empowering individual citizens, is also being turned into a megaphone for nasty, complacent people. USA alike. In China, in addition to these individuals, there is also the political control and the “purification” of online content, making the issue of truth even more complicated. Have we mutated into simple receivers of information? This coronavirus outbreak has led to an unprecedented outpouring of skepticism from the Chinese netizens, which has led you-know-who to take the country by surprise by deleting, rewriting, or even speaking out in order to preserve face.

Going back to online and offline, we feel that they are two existences that do not really conflict with one another but do not necessarily mutually support one another. In Max’s own view, a lot of what is printed now is much more considered than a huge chunk of online publications, so that’s a good thing. But he always mentions that since everyone shifted to their online existence, a lot of what stayed in the offline existence is falling apart. You mentioned about maintenance earlier and that’s basically what this is all about. So much attention is paid to the online economy while a lot of infrastructures are going way down. It’s amazing to see the crumbling state of some public infrastructures in cities in the United States. Yet, the online existence experiences something totally different, so much maintenance in there, gotta keep dem views up. We don’t think it is only about who is responsible, or where are those taxes going… When people are immersed in the digital, whether it is by being distracted with news outlet drama or Netflix, they are forgetting about the physical world. Meanwhile, they are being played by the powers that be.

A lot of companies have both physical and digital entities, as the products need to get somewhere, somehow, but lots of them evade the taxes used for the maintenance of the public infrastructures they use. And now, well, we are forced to stay at home, seeing lots of news outlets claiming that the world will never be the same after the crisis, insinuating we will be bound to our screens even more so, in this new type of economy. Fear-mongering, English-written, unnecessary articles.

To conclude, as designers, we are fascinated by the value of a book as an object that lasts for at least 150 years, that also perpetuates a tradition of craftsmanship, but that can equally carry novel conceptual ideas.

pic. 8 — Collected screenshots of now censored and deleted comments on Chinese social media. To counter, netizens squiggle on top of the screenshots to trick algorithms, then repost them on the internet afterwards in the form of pictures.

27.03.2020, Changsha, Hunan

MH — There are certainly many differences between doing design in Changsha and New York, and we can only consider our time in New York as a passing-by. Again, both are cities of 8 million people, but you’d be surprised at the cultural differences. We don’t have much interest in talking about New York, and choosing to live in Changsha and do what we wanted to do is definitely an experiment. Design is often associated with big cities, it seems like one would need to be in Beijing, Amsterdam, Berlin in order to “make it”. Because, those places are where culture happens (and supported). In that sense, the city we live in isn’t cool at all. Often, our work comes from out of town and we have to travel a lot or network a lot. Living in Changsha, the cultural life is definitely deeply rooted in tradition and the Hunanese identity – this can get repetitive.

But this absence gives us time to take a closer look at what is a “modern” vision of China. In particular with Changsha (capital of Hunan), which is categorized as a second-tier city. There are many of these secondary-type cities in China, and we think, in some aspect, that they actually represent the country’s vision better than Beijing or Shanghai.

Back to comparing the two. We find that Chinese clients are quite open to the formal possibilities of design. Comparatively, it may be that in many cases there is an “underlying” visual expectation, or market expectation to how design should look like in the USA, most certainly from the mainstream, but even within more marginal circuits. Until now, we cannot pinpoint where this openness comes from.

pic. 9

This set of photographs was taken in Changsha and showed unusual moments of “visual communication”. Two of them show placebo texts. You know, those you would find in designers mockups. However, here they are shown in their final and conclusive stages, post-production. One of them, set in a script font, repeats the word “your sample text here”. This was actually taken in Vienna Hotel (a chain) while being quarantined. There, the roman script form is accepted as a standard element of exotic decoration. It is on the same level as tattooing onto oneself Chinese characters that you cannot pronounce. For most, it is acceptable. But we wonder who gets away with this? This is also part of the cultural imagination of design here. Obviously, we haven’t conducted a thorough research or contacted the minds behind these works. We aren’t interested in doing that. But we see them as moments, flashes, things that are made in a flash and that aren’t considered – especially when they involve dual languages, with English always asserting China’s position as an international economic force. That is where this exoticism stems from. But only the look suffices whereas “most cannot read it”. Flaunting the look’n’feel of a much fantasized West, may it be Disney’s West or Daniel Libeskind’s West, is absolutely sufficient. Grotesque and unconcerned, they bring us much joy and offer quite a pied de nez to every identity guidelines ever written. Your text here.

pic. 10

This set of images were shown at the Hunan Provincial Art Museum in Changsha this January. The exhibition is a retrospective of 101 years old Chinese graphic designer and artist Zhou Lingzhao who is also from Hunan Province. He was first a painter and painted everything, but as he explains “painters also encountered many social needs in society back then. To meet the needs of society I became a designer”. The people say he is the designer of the Party’s national image. For us, he is the designer whose work has been best implemented all around and in the whole known universe.

The exhibition features some of his figurative paintings, portraits, landscapes, and designs. Most of the design works were made for or were related to the Communist Party. For example, he participated in the design of the national emblem, he painted one of Mao’s portraits in Tiananmen, etc. Amongst the various and very “red” works he did, two caught our attention. The first is an armband designed for the performance of the 5th Resistance Drama Troupe in Burma in support of the Expeditionary Army (1942). The armband features  masks and a “V”, which also stands for “victory”. The second is a logo design for the Changsha Children’s Theatre Company made in 1938, which shows a white dove stretching its wings, signifying that even the symbol of peace has the duty to fight back.

pic. 11, pic. 12

Lastly, two photographs of “weird” buildings in China. This includes the Beijing CCTV building designed by OMA in 2012, a building also affectionately known by its nickname “Big Pants”. The other image depicts a building with a shape of a big golden coin, the Guangzhouyuan Mansion, designed by Italian architect Joseph di Pasquale in 2013. President Xi at a conference on culture in 2014 said “No more weird buildings”, he then expanded on how harmonious architecture should be. But what kind of architecture is weird? In Chinese cities, you can often see lots of “strange buildings”, which some say are the result of corruption. For the sake of merit and face, some officials tend to imagine buildings that are formal exaggerations. Hiring a foreign construction firms also seems to be in vogue.

PH — I recall my time as an undergrad: “the design history we studied was all coming from the West”. China’s long history does not lack in knowledge of aesthetics. However, while modern design thinking is inherently not prevalent in China, the education of design history in Chinese universities can be very confusing to college students who have never seen the house that Le Corbusier built or do not understand why the Bauhaus is important.

MH — With a few years of teaching experience in China, I have noticed that anthropomorphism is a way many designers use to conceptualize objects and make them more relatable. By giving things the form of an animal or a thing, you give it symbolism and a narrative. In the end, there is a fine line between a neutral symbol and one that triggers the deeper sentiment of belonging to one unique greater entity. I think it is unnecessary that every designed object does the latter. This is where we disconnect from this method of design-making. This design approach is quite different from the West, where abstraction has been largely accepted.

16.03.2020, On Nut BTS, Bangkok

PH & MH — We stayed in Bangkok for about two months and we were absolutely charmed by the city, it is certainly a place like no other. We loved to interact with literally everyone. It is difficult to describe it in words, perhaps the word “affectionate” is properly suited. We are struggling to describe how we felt from seeing the graphic design throughout the city, and not knowing the language doesn’t help either. But there is one thing: we were definitely shocked by how important physical appearances seemed to be to function well in this society. This was a little disorienting during the first few weeks. Literally anything advertising is promoted by sexy models, of both sexes. And they are everywhere, promoting everything. And cosmetics! No one has ever enough cosmetics! No other cities we have previously visited can equate this. The flip side of this is: beauty, which cannot be a fault in itself.

pic. 1 — Image courtesy of the designer, Pianpian He and Max Harvey.
pic. 2 — Image courtesy of the designer, Pianpian He and Max Harvey.
pic. 3 — Creative Commons Cold Sweet Paan by Biswarup Ganguly is licensed under CC by 3.0
pic. 4 — Marker, Chris, C 2018, Chris Marker, La Cinémathéque française. (Scanned by Pianpian He).
pic. 5 — Creative Commons Shenzhen May-2017 by Mitch Altman is licensed under CC by SA 2.0
pic. 6 — Image courtesy of the designer, Pianpian He and Max Harvey.
pic. 7 — Image courtesy of the designer, Pianpian He and Max Harvey.
pic. 8 — Screenshotted by Pianpian He.
pic. 9 — Image courtesy of Max Harvey.
pic. 10 — Zhou Lingzhao’s graphic works, http://www.hunantoday.cn/article/201912/201912241731331368.html
pic. 11 — Creative Commons CCTV building in Beijing is licensed under CC by SA 3.0
pic. 12 — Guangzhou Circle is licensed under CC by SA 3.0