China’s East-West design debuts in U.S.

Exhibition China Design Now reflects the changing country’s impact on art.

CINCINNATI (AP) — A poster of a man’s intertwined legs — one clad in a pant made from traditional Chinese dress and the other in a Western suit pant — offers a taste of the kind of East-West mix showcased in an exhibition making its American debut.

China Design Now, opening Saturday at the Cincinnati Art Museum, provides a look into China’s changing cultural landscape and at how social and economic reforms have impacted its emerging design industry.

Designs from China’s graphic artists, fashion designers and architects illustrate an explosion of creativity and innovation, said museum director Aaron Betsky.

“We know about the explosion of creativity in art with well-known Chinese artists now central to the art scene, and we saw some of the new architecture during the Olympics,” Betsky said. “But this show demonstrates how China is really inventing a story about itself through art and design.

The exhibition, which will be at the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Ore., in October 2009, was organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It made its world debut there this spring.

It leads visitors through three of China’s key design centers — Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing — showing the development of China’s emerging design culture and the designers driving it.

“These young designers are creating all this amazing work that you don’t get to see or wear outside China,” said V&A Exhibition Curator Diana McAndrews. “But I believe that’s starting to change.”

Cincinnati’s version of the exhibition was designed by Chinese architect Yung Ho Chang, who evokes the style and character of the three cities through different textures, materials and construction methods.

Chang, who heads the architecture department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., said he hopes the exhibition’s design and content will help people discover the China that he knows.

“In the U.S., you are only exposed to two aspects of China — problems from an ideological point of view and economic growth,” Chang said. “This is one of the first chances for the American audience to see this really energetic, lively scene of creative design.”

The exhibit moves from the graphic and visual design of the manufacturing capital of Shenzhen to the fashion and lifestyle design flourishing in Shanghai and on to a Beijing reinventing itself as a global capital through architecture and urban planning.

In the Shenzhen section, books, CDS, album covers, toys, and skateboards help illustrate the design work produced in the former fishing village that is now China’s manufacturing center with a population of about 10 million and an average age of 27.

Video clips from Chinese cinema, including Wong Kar-Wai’s 2000 film, “In the Mood for Love,” evoke the romance of the cosmopolitan Shanghai of the 1930s — a nostalgic image influencing much of the fashion and lifestyle designs sought by China’s new urban middle class. Furniture, crockery and fashions — including a circular-shaped dress made from one piece of green felt and ending in a high collar at the back — are among the designs produced for the growing consumer culture.

In the Beijing section, visitors can see photographic images of the National Stadium spotlighted in the 2008 Summer Olympics and nicknamed the “Bird’s Nest” due to its nest-like shape. There also are models of smaller architectural projects including Chang’s Split House — a contemporary-style house divided by a traditional Chinese courtyard.

Consumer-products maker Procter & Gamble Co., which is a sponsor for the Cincinnati exhibition, has a design center headquartered in Guangzhou, China.

P&G’s design director for China, Richard Kong, said while modern design is a relatively young industry in that country, it is starting to make its presence known globally. China’s design innovation and creativity has been fueled in part by a “fearless mind-set to try new things,” Kong said.

“There isn’t a preconceived notion of what design should or should not be,” he said.

Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, believes the exhibition fills a gap in what Westerners know of Chinese culture.

“We know about Chinese art and architecture and the stereotypical culture we see from the food and Chinatowns in this country,” Antonelli said. “But we have been missing an important piece of the puzzle, which is design.”