NEW CHINESE DESIGN at the VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON

NEW CHINESE DESIGN at the VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON

China is huge. China is becoming topical. Yet China remains a mystery to most people in the West. ‘Made in China’ has become a familiar tag, but the spectacular creative energy in modern China is barely known. During the last twenty years, the Chinese have rediscovered their pre-socialist past and begun to combine their own traditions with global influences to produce a cultural rebirth. At the heart of this lies a new culture of design.

This exhibition will take you on a journey along China’s coastal cities to experience the country’s creative landscape. The journey starts in the far south, where graphic designers in Shenzhen began to explore new directions in the early 1990s. Next we move up to Shanghai. Here consumerism and urban culture have combined to produce astonishing fashion and lifestyles. Finally, we travel to Beijing, where monumental architecture for the Olympic Games is transforming the skyline of this ancient capital.

China Design Now explores China’s dreams and hopes over the last two decades, from individual designers to the nation as a whole. It is our hope that this exhibition will bring contemporary China closer to you.

This new exhibition about China at the Victoria & Albert Museum intends to fill the gap between the end of the Mao era in the mid-1970s to the present day. It was Chairman Mao's intention that every Chinese man and woman should own a bicycle. That was the goal of the regime, whereas private car ownership, was obviously regarded as symptomatic of Western capitalist decadence and forbidden. Private ownership of cars was permitted before the Communist takeover, began to appear again in the late 1980s and is now actively encouraged. But it's hard to see whether China has really overcome its recent history, forging onto become a capitalist country or whether it still has a foot in the past.

This exhibition is all about China breaking into the international marketplace. There are few symbols of the old regime on offer here but there are images and symbols from Chinese history and culture, such as the ideogram, the basic writing unit of China. Calligraphy is a prime symbol for China's insertion into the international design marketplace and the ideogram is the most plausible unit of linguistic commerce, since it is quite obviously so alien yet fascinating to Westerners. (I'm thinking here of Ernest Fennellosa's book about the Chinese language and Ezra Pound's use of the ideogram and Chinese poetry in his Cantos) There are also loveable images of pandas and the kind of miniature design and sculpture found in Japan seems quite common too. Web technology featuring some short yet fascinating films about culture and society in Beijing, including material about the culture of magazines, newspapers and the latest girl band, can also be viewed.

There are also depictions of new Chinese architecture, whether the new architecture made available for the Olympics in Beijing, or the design for Terminal 3 at Beijing Airport, designed and built by Fosters and Partners also responsible for Stanstead airport in the UK, or an underground museum built to resemble previous archaeological finds at the same site. As with Mao's bicycles, there is still a lot being done to safeguard the environment or to preserve the past.

The exhibition offers insights into recent developments in China, which, we are told, is going up like a rocket. For all that, China still exhibits strong tendencies towards authoritarianism and Totalitarianism, as we know, and not simply design mayhem as the exhibition implies.

Paul Murphy, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

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