An interesting video clip investigates the tradition of a 'flea market' of home-made pin badges and T-shirts at Beijing's Midi Festival, China-s largest outdoor music festival. Hence we get a crash course in design associated with various underground music scenes: rave zines, CD covers and rock videos.
The exhibition focuses on three cities as emblematic of modern China, emphasising Shenzhen's youth culture (the average age of the inhabitants is 27), as well as its frontier status. One of the most interesting pieces is a book designed by Guang Yu, Catalogue of Paintings by Chang Jin (2004), in which traditional thread binding, with holes stabbed through the left-hand margin, has been adapted so that the threads connect to form the artist-s name. A further series of works, grouped under the banner 'Ideograms', showcases the ways in which contemporary graphics exploit the possibilities of Chinese characters and traditional calligraphy. As the successful testing ground for a new 'Socialist Market Economy', Shenzhen was well placed to benefit from a dialogue with Hong Kong and beyond, as exemplified in the bold and inventive work of graphic designers such as Wang Xu and Kan Tai-keung. The exhibition-s designation of Shenzhen as a 'frontier city' seems apt in the light of a poster by Freeman Lau for Fifteen Hong Kong Graphic Designers (1994): a matchbox in the corner is emblazoned 'Hong Kong-, while in the centre a star formed from burning matches evokes Mao's ambiguous slogan, 'A single spark can start a prairie fire'. The rapid transformation that turned a group of fishing villages into a special economic zone bordering Hong Kong, and subsequently a city which today has 10 million inhabitants, is reflected in posters by pioneering graphic designers both north and south of the border. Indeed, the show starts in a promising manner, looking at the graphic design boom in the Southern city of Shenzhen in the early 90s. If objects both encode and influence ways of perceiving and being in the world, then a design exhibition provides an excellent vehicle to explore the ways in which individuals, collectives and companies are creating and disseminating new interpretations of cultural identity.
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