Hasta La Ideas

Reporting by Stephany Zoo

This year’s Design Shanghai was absolutely packed with visitors, to say the least, as the mixed international and local Chinese audience managed to fill the vast Shanghai Exhibition Centre. Compared to many other design fairs and exhibitions, Design Shanghai was extremely well advertised to the Shanghai public—the lines for general entrance and the Collectibles were astronomically long, but this was quite a welcome sight, showing the general public’s growing interest in design and design culture.

Design Shanghai featured exhibits featuring over 40,000 designers. Because the event is planned by predominantly foreign organizers, there were unfortunately not as many homegrown designers, but there were a couple of gems we still managed to pick out.

In terms of emerging designers, the CIID Awards were the highlight, recognizing 120 interior designers with the “Outstanding Young Interior Designers of China” Award based on several criteria: performance during 2011 and 2012 in terms of impact, design programs, work experience and participation in competitions. The organization did a fantastic job of identifying and curating a diverse range of interior designers, from those who sparkle a room with traditional elements to designers with who create with entire futuristic ensembles.

Powerhouse design duo Neri&Hu and rebel designer Naihan Li both had fantastic exhibits with their latest products. Naihan prominently featured her Skyscraper Candles, which has expanded in the number of countries and cities. Neri&Hu collaborated with Jaguar, the exhibition’s key sponsor, and Wallpaper Magazine to re-engineer the distinctively British picnic basket with a Chinese perspective and carbon fiber.

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With over 70,000 people descending on Miami for Art Basel Miami Beach, its no wonder that the buzz surrounding the Design Miami sister show is getting louder with every year. This year’s strong showing represented the increasingly international nature of the design business—the gallery list including Galerie BSL from Paris, Spazio Rossana Orlandi of Milan and Victor Hunt from Brussels alongside American favorites R20th Century and Cristina Grajales.

Primitive forms and the wonders of mother nature inspired designers to create objects of bizarre beauty. Nacho Carbonell’s otherworldly works were as dramatic as Design Nucelo’s monolithic metal tables that paid homage to the bronze age. Crystals and geodes continue to fascinate designers like Hella Jongerius and emerging-ceramicist Charlotte Cornaton with their spiritual properties and natural variations.

UUfie – Peacock L (at top)
Spazio Rossana Orlandi, Design Miami
Canadian-based UUfie crafted the dramatic Peacock chair from a single sheet of Corian. The mesmerizing grid casts a lovely shadow and a theatrical profile for its debut at Design Miami.

Hella Jongerius – Gemstone Side Table
Gallery Kreo, Design Miami
The iconic Dutch designer was inspired by the depths of color that occurs in natural stones like agate and malachite. Layers of translucent resin and plywood stack to form a revealing cross-section for this asymmetrical table.

Studio Job – Monkey Business
Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery, Design Miami
A Swarovski-studded monkey wearing a fez stands guard over a brass treasure chest. It’s not a scene from an Indiana Jones movie; it’s the latest conversation-starter from Belgian designers Studio Job. An embedded LED hints at what treasures might lie inside the chest.

Richard Phillips – The Playboy Charger
Venus Over Manhattan Presents Piston Head, 1111 Lincoln Road
Ferrari’s art car show in the Herzog & de Meuron-designed 1111 Lincoln Road explores how artists like Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Tom Sachs and Ron Arad have transformed the beloved automobile into sculptural works. The exhibition also included the first viewing of artist Richard Phillips’ collaboration with Playboy, the “Playboy Charger.”

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The third annual Beijing Design Week kicked off four weeks ago to the day, and once again we took to the hutong to document what is arguably the largest design festival in the Eastern Hemisphere. It’s certainly the major event for China’s not insubstantial local design scene, and the fact that it attracts a fair share of international guests and exhibitors (mostly from Europe) is a testament to its relevance and scale in the global design circuit. According to a note from the press office that turned up in my inbox this morning, more than 1,000 designers presented their work to over 5 million visitors.

As an American-born Chinese who has been visiting Beijing for over two decades (I spent a few extra days with my family this time around) I felt compelled, for better or worse, to put the burgeoning art and design scene in perspective as a kind of parallel heritage. Thus, I concluded my coverage of BJDW2013 with a hybrid thought piece / photo essay that eschewed specific objects in an admittedly overambitious attempt to identify the meaning of the whole damn thing. But in the interest of presenting empirical examples of what, exactly, is going on in Beijing today, here is a visual survey of some of our favorite projects from 751 D.Park, Caochangdi artist’s village, and, of course, Dashilar, the singular neighborhood where I embarked on the weeklong journey through the Beijing design scene and where I ultimately returned on the October 1 holiday, the day before I left.

Although some of the Guest City exhibitions felt a bit heavyhanded—751, in particular, was a bit too commercial for my taste—there were a few gems among the SALON/ exhibitors in Dashilar; LAVA, Klaas Kuiken & Dieter Volkers, and Sander Wassink were standouts among the dozen or so young Dutch designers who’d been invited to partner with local students to create work on-site. Meanwhile, I was glad to see new projects from Micro/Macro—Sara Bernardi followed up the CON-TRADITION collection with Yi, Er, San, Wu, Ling, as well as a jewelry collaboration with Miranda Vukasovic—and Mian Wu, whose new work was exhibited alongside techno-textiles by Elaine Ng Yanling at Wuhao Curated Shop. So too was I struck by the urban fabric of Beijing itself, specifically the contrast between the hypothetically habitable sculptures by international starchitects and the grassroots experiments in the labyrinthine hutong.

Still, if I had to choose a single best project from Beijing Design Week 2013, I must say it was one that I got to bring home: Drawing Architecture Studio’s A Little Bit of Beijing is not only a felicitous souvenir but also a little bit of incentive to brush on my Chinese for next year.

View Gallery →

Beijing Design Week 2013:
» Dashing through Dashilar – First Impressions
» Studio LL Launches with Du Pin & Drum Stools at Caochangdi
» Wuhao Presents New Work by Mian Wu & Climatology by the Fabrick Lab (a.k.a. Elaine Ng Yanling)
» CAFA Students Present the Museum of Bicycle Parts in Dashilar
» An iPhone 5S Architecture Tour – Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid & Steven Holl in Slo-Mo
» Common Objects: Soviet and Chinese Design 1950-1980’s
» Zhang Ke, Matali Crasset & Others Explore the Future of the Hutong
» Drawing Architecture Studio Presents ‘A Little Bit of Beijing’ (à la Chris Ware)
» The Real Dashilar / Closing Remarks

Related: Ben Hughes Presents ‘Design for the Real China’ – Competition Deadline on Oct. 31

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I was a bit surprised to discover, at some point between my second and third excursions to the neighborhood of Dashilar, that the press kit for Beijing Design Week included a few photos documenting not the myriad pop-up exhibitions or experimental renovation projects on view but rather glimpses of everyday life in the hutong, shorthand for Beijing as a whole. Unimpressed with the exhibitions we visited on a jetlagged first day in Beijing, I had it mind to seek the “real” Dashilar—whatever that might mean—during our second foray, hoping to highlight the non- or un-designed 99.9% of the neighborhood in the interest of making some kind of statement by capturing the beauty of the mundane.¹

So I was a bit dismayed to learn that the press office at Beijing Design Week had beaten me to the punch, and I couldn’t shake the uncanny feeling that my unorthodox reporting had somehow been preemptively subverted into another instrument of propaganda. Indeed, the ‘official’ description of Dashilar, per Beijing Design Week, is “a special zone within Beijing’s old city,” “showcasing the regional characteristics that are the charm of the increasingly international Beijing.” Mythologized as a nexus of past, present and future—authentic Beijing condensed into a square kilometer—Dashilar has been cast as an instance of learning from past mistakes, which makes this kind of reporting is squarely aligned with the government (qua developers) agenda. Not that it’s really worth further speculation: Beijing Design Week is, by definition, an exercise of soft power (the softest, my friend joked), a vehicle for China to assert itself as a global destination for culture… which, of course, it is and always has been.

While it would be optimistic to extrapolate from Dashilar as anything more than a testing ground at this point, it’s certainly worth exploring the impressively thorough documentation at Dashilar.org. Although most of the website is Chinese-language only, navigating to the first menu item on the second of the three ‘sheets’ will take you to a page with several tiled links (in Chinese), each of which links to a bilingual PDF presentation. I recognized them as poster presentations from Dashilar, covering everything from the Historic Situation [PDF] to the Strategy Overview [PDF], as well as an overview of the PILOT program [PDF].

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I’d regretted breezing through the NY Art Book Fair this year—I braved the crowds on Saturday afternoon, and the hour I’d allotted myself was not nearly enough time to filter the sheer visual (and yes, tactile) onslaught of printed matter. But a souvenir from Beijing Design Week more than made up for it, and for all the limited editions, handmade zines and other rarities available at MoMA PS1, nary a booth would have had a copy of A Little Bit of Beijing. In fact, I haven’t been able to find any information about Li Han and Hu Yan’s three-volume graphic novel anywhere online: The book is published by the Luminous City imprint of Tongji University Press—luminous-city.com was offline as of press time—while the website of Drawing Architecture Studio (Li and Hu’s practice) is currently “Under Construction.”

So it was a happy coincidence to discover A Little Bit of Beijing at 751 D.Park, in an appropriately charming venue to boot: Luminous City had set up shop in a passenger train that had been converted into a gallery. (To further compound the confusion, the expository text also credits architects Li Xiangning and Atelier Bow-Wow’s Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, who are behind Made in Shanghai and its progenitor Made in Tokyo respectively.) Along with framed prints along the walls, translucent reproductions of the artwork had been set in the windows of the train to striking effect; even magnified several times over, it’s quite clear that the vibrant line drawings are painstakingly detailed.

Chris Ware’s signature style is the obvious reference point, and indeed the artists acknowledge a debt to Ware, as well as Jean-Jacques Sempé, as source of inspiration. I gleaned as much from the introductory text to A Little Bit of Beijing, but I’m not too proud to admit that my reading ability is far too limited to attempt proper perusal of the book. (Limited though my vocabulary may be, I do know that the third character of the title, 儿 [er], is an untranslatable reference to Beijing’s local dialect.) Thankfully, the illustrations effectively speak for themselves, and their richness transcends language, even in the case of the conventional comic-book panels that depict short vignettes.

As far as I can tell, the captions are descriptions of the scenes

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