CHINA DESIGN NOW - A REVIEW

CHINA DESIGN NOW
THE V+A

A short distance from the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington there is a shop full of cool Scandinavian design. Elegant and curvaceous modernist creations by Marimekko and the like.

It offers a stark contrast to (and perhaps a ordered and restorative balm after) the cacophony of the current featured show at the V+A – “China Design Now” which runs until the middle of July.

The exhibition offers a reminder of Napoleon’s famous words: “Let China sleep for when she wakes the world will tremble.”

Indeed it could be sub-titled:” whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.”

The show is all about design in modern China – graphic and architectural ideas in particular.

Three cities are featured from the east coast of this continent of cultures -Shenzhen, Shanghai and the Olympic capital Beijing. Little is revealed about the vaster hinterland.

There is also little to put any of this in any historical context. Instead we are offered a welter of sensation. The overwhelming feeling is of bewildering confusion – of the Western notion of the fragile beauty of Chinese design and art confounded by a dam burst of youthful ideas – borrowed, stolen, pasted or smashed together from a thousand and one primarily Western youth culture sources to into an exotic hybrid.

One young visitor said she was appalled by the thought that millions of young Chinese children were growing up with this mishmash as their visual backdrop.

It is hard to find coherence or what we’ve come to think of as traditional elements of Chinese beauty here.

There are some fine modern variations on Chinese calligraphy, but primarily one can admire the sheer vitality and energy on show, of ideas going in a thousand different directions.

This is a world being endlessly born – something that parallels the nature of China since its entrance into the modern world. It’s a new cultural revolution and, rather akin to Mao’s political event, it grows by despoiling the past.

The section about the transformation of Beijing for the Olympics is revealing. When I visited nearly a decade ago the vast avenues were already becoming lined with modernist creations.

But behind them were still a maze of old streets – the hutongs or neighbourhoods.

Since then Beijing has gone into overdrive – exorcising the old and creating whole neighbourhoods of dramatic post-modernism. Just as with the smaller Canary Wharf area in London this blooming of a thousand new buildings offers a dazzling display.

But it is being done at a price - the seeming carnage enacted on a culture that has been swept away. It is easy for the Western mind, often fixated on the romantic to bemoan this.

After the visit to Beijing one feature I wrote talked of the willow-pattern prettiness of Behei Park in the early morning – its lake around a white Dagoba fringed with trees and people practicing t’ai chi. I was criticised for this by a Chinese friend - and for some elements of our film - for conjuring a romantic and backwards looking image of contemporary China.

Perhaps the criticsm was valid from the perspective of a young Chinese who saw change and modernisation in a wholly positive light. Quite correct from the perspective of creating a new nation where everyone benefits from its growing economy.

For them much of the past serves a commercial purpose – luring tourists – but in other respects signifies oppression by a now defunct ruling class and poverty.

The new China emerging now is getting wealthier and offering its citizens opportunities we in the West take for granted.

But such reservations about these changes also highlight the different things that are valued now in a West that went through many convulsions as it moved into the modern age.

In the UK we walk through the gutted hearts of many an old town or city and see fragments of our “heritage” poling through the soulless malls of multinational shopping outlets. We feel regret for a history now lost beneath the concrete and wish such a fate could be avoided elsewhere.

Now we seek to create a balance carefully between the benefits of continuing modernisation and a desire to preserve the best of the past. This is in stark contrast to the increasingly dominant idea in previously impoverished parts of the world which are modernising as fast as they can.

Such concern about the careful preservation of the past can be seen as a luxury that cannot be afforded.

We in the West seek to see our dreams of cultural continuity and of places in a finer harmony with their past in cultures that have trailed behind our embrace of the modern world. And we resent the sort of idea of progress that rocks that dreamboat.

In the Arabian Gulf for instance, the nomads of the desert have forsaken their tents and impoverished lifestyle for the vast gallop to modernism of Dubai or Abu Dhabi.

It is a shame, we feel, as we perceive something of what we see as the romantic Bedouin soul being lost among the concrete and glass. Such a perspective might be the folly of what Edward Said defined as orientalism.

For would we have accepted living in wattle and daub as serfs if a parallel world of wealth, comfort and improvement were on offer?

It’s a complicated question. The China being born today seems alien and challenging – but perhaps it embodies what western liberals once praised about Maoism - the challenge of constant revolution made solid.