mercurious

Design Professor reflects on experience teaching design in Beijing during Summer of 2007.

As a professor of media design at Parsons The New School for Design, I was invited on Chinese grant funds to teach a month-long intensive design workshop at the Art and Design Academy at Tsinghua University in Beijing as part of China’s recent national initiative to embrace Western modes of thinking and educational approaches. Tsinghua is one of China’s most prestigious and perhaps well-funded institutions, often compared to MIT as a bastion of brainy, competitive, but brilliant national minds. Judging by the newly opened art academy building designed by American architectural firm, 70 million RMB (US$ 9.3 million) is a small price to pay for a world-class design education facility. Indeed, compared to our cramped quarters at Parsons, somewhat scattered throughout real-estate challenged Greenwich Village, I was afflicted with space lust as I wandered, upon arrival, through a dizzying maze of studios, workspaces, classrooms, offices, galleries, art supply and book stores. The academy even sports a Starbucks-style coffee shop where baristas pull lattes for a fraction of the cost of our all-too-familiar daily grandé. The more I discovered about the Tsinghua Art and Design academy, the more I appreciated how the university, and by-proxy, the Chinese government, invests heavily in the importance of a Westernized (or maybe Globalized) higher learning design education. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder if America’s investment in our own creative capital could measure up. The last time I checked back home, primary and secondary art education was being eviscerated in favor of test prep education, art college enrollments were flat and the national mood was generally complacent and decadent. Clearly, being here, it is understood that China’s globalizing ambitions imagine itself someday becoming the world’s creative agency, and not just its factory.

This idea is underscored when considering the process of designing many of the identity systems for China’s current national obsession: preparing for the 2008 Olympiad, as it extends its unique culture, language and hospitality to the rest of the world. Typically in the West, design products, such as a visual identity system, are outsourced to a private design agency, through an arduous and competitive design bid process. Rather than become the mother client for its homegrown but nascent design firm industry, China tapped its own universities, in keeping with its deeply historical respect for scholars. Instead of farming out the work to lowest bidding, but hottest design and branding firm, the Beijing Olympic Committee ‘hired’ its own university design professors to create for the Olympics 2008. In particular, the official mascots of Beijing 2008 were conceived and born in these shiny new halls of the Art and Design Academy under the direction of Professor Wu, a high-ranking member of the Party. Although, somewhat insipidly and overly cute by Western standards, the set of five mascots cleverly epitomize cultural memes of China, symbolize aspects of the Olympic spirit, the elements of nature, and even form a language pun in Mandarin, when their names are properly sequenced. They are unmistakably an inside job. Until the court of public opinion meets next summer along with merchandising sales and media ratings, the verdict is out on Fuwa, the Five Friendlies.
During my workshop with a group of 23 second-year Tsinghua Art Academy undergraduates, I easily encountered their reputation to be hard working, competitive, and brilliant. However, I also confirmed some of the stereotypes originating from preconceived notions about Chinese students. These students lacked some of the core conceptual capabilities notable in their Parsons counterparts, especially the ability to think critically and innovate rather than absorb and merely emulate. They also seemed to suffer from an obsession with cute character culture, an influential import from neighbors Japan and Korea.

I knew that I was brought here to broaden their perspectives, and export not only my practical experience working in the New York City interactive design industry, but also to engender an appreciation for original thinking, true creativity, and help them discover more sophisticated design frameworks that extend beyond character artwork. At the same time, I knew that it would be senseless to attempt re-education in my own Maoist ‘Cute Cultural Revolution’ and repress their love for all that is cuddly in favor of an American style hyper-pragmatism as I critiqued their design forms and motifs. Instead, I would need to devise a means to hybridize the decidedly modern but Eastern compulsion to express profound concepts through a cartoon character, with our decidedly post-modern Western fixation with design models that valorize a purity of form in a luxuriously ironic package. Perhaps, the Beijing Olympics offered the ideal opportunity to combine these two perspectives as subject matter for a design project well suited to nurture the advancement of both my Tsinghua students and my own at Parsons. My statistically insignificant dent in the trade deficit with China during this month of export — the precious resource of American ingenuity — would need to return another kind of investment. This exchange had to reinforce my understanding of what needed to be imported back to Parsons in hope of contributing towards preserving, if not reinvigorating, our own national endeavor to lead the world in idea creation.

There’s a giant generation of Chinese artists and designers starting to emerge into the global creative economy. Former Red Guards and victims of the Cultural Revolution, alike, raised these young minds. They possess a passion to succeed where their parents did not, perhaps could not. The US must acknowledge this newly emerging Red Studio in the anticipation of a marketplace of ideas and economies that will only become more intertwined with Chinese-American interests and competition. After the closing ceremonies of Beijing 2008 conclude, and the torch extinguishes, incalculable tons of unpurchased Five Friendlies Olympic junk will probably be land-filled or ‘donated’ to Africa. It may seem a colossal waste of resources on cuteness, but China’s Red Studio will enjoy having penned history’s greatest Olympic mascot, and perhaps most merchandised state sponsored character design.

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Project: Olympic Mobile Visitors Guide ↑