Gentle defiance through design

By Wen Chihua
Publisher:China Daily - Publication Date: 28-12-2007

They look like the kids next door--clean-cut, perfectly polite and terrifically trendy. But the works of these 15, post-'80s-generation designers betray their hidden rebellion.
Exhibited in the Seasons Plaza on Finance Street, one of the most expensive commercial areas in Beijing, the works of these young designers are expected to "bring the concept of culture into consumption", says Deng Rushun, general manager of the plaza. This is what "our target customers - mostly well-heeled, white collar workers - want to have".
At the three-week-long Exhibition of Chinese Young Designers, which started last Friday, Bo En, a 76-year-old veteran and grandfather of two, was offended when he saw Luo Ji's Jitmu toys--the Devil series and the Clown series.
These handmade, cloth playthings are not the usual huggable, lovable kids' stuff. Luo, instead, created creatures such as one with a deformed white body with an eyeless, button-mouthed head wrapped in black bandage.
"What's going on in this designer's mind? Is he trying to scare our children or vent his inner anger towards society?" says Bo, pointing at the 30-cm-tall, 10-cm-wide toys.
"Call me hardliner if you like, but I won't allow my granddaughter to have one."
Luo, a diminutive man from South China with a fair complexion, shrugs off the comment, arguing there is a little devil in everyone's heart. The only difference is whether that devil has been awoken or remains sleeping.
"My toy is just an outer expression of that inner devil. It's too bad if someone like the old man feels scared because they have no courage to face that devil," he says.
The 25-year-old acknowledged "violence" is the devil that has been crawling around in his heart since his parents were laid-off from state-run enterprises in 1999.
His mother and father borrowed money and set up a small stationary shop in order to put Luo through an art design study programme in a local college in Hunan Province. "Our living conditions were very depressing. I felt like an ox trapped in a well; the more I tried to escape, the angrier I became."
One day, he got the inspiration for a toy from a mummy, and today, he always uses his mummy-like dolls as outlets for his inner resentment. "This toy is a good vehicle. I make money when people buy the toys, and I get my ideas about displeasure across," Luo says.
Luo averages 6,000 yuan to 7,000 yuan (US$821-$958) a month from sales of his Devil and Clown series on E-shop.
Selected from hundreds of candidates across the country, the works of the 15 designers, are "quite relaxed, humorous and playful", says Hong Huang, CEO of China Interactive Media Group, which hosted the exhibition.
"We hope people will enjoy the art and buy the goods as well," she says.
A well-known multimedia artist in China, Wang Jianwei, says that integrating their resentful ideology into something decorative and playful is an important characteristic of these young designers. "Compared to their counterparts of earlier generations, youth today are more practical and are calmer about confronting social problems," Wang says.
He explained that his parents' generation used guns and knives when they chose to rebel against the existing social order. "My generation was born in the 1950s. We mimicked hippies, wearing long hair and untidy jeans to reject conventional values," he says.
The youth born in the 1960s, he says, talked about the social order in sarcastic voices.
But for the youth of the 1980s, "their defiance of the existing cultural and social order is very subtle, hardly recognisable".
Wu Jia, mother of a schoolgirl, believed in subtle defiance when she tried to buy a cartoon drawn by 25-year-old designer Zhang Shihao.
"The drawing is delicate in terms of its composition and lines. But, I'm against its sexually suggestive content," Wu says.
The cartoon entitled Cheek-to-Cheek Dance reflects a touch of the style of Japanese Ukiyo-E painting. It shows an unfolding session of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman with intertwined arms and legs.
Zhang says that Japanese Ukiyo-E painting and animated movies have influenced him greatly. However, he says: "Mine is an Ukiyo-E reflecting on China's urban lifestyle today--vain, showy and luxurious. It's understandable, however, that some have problems being honest in their hearts and acknowledging that life is not as pretty and pure as they think."
Shopper Wu Jia was fond of the calendar "eco" shopping bag series--12 sacks printed with Chinese characters denoting the month.
The bags are designed by Yao Ye and Li Xibin.
"I like their idea of combining energy saving with the concept of fashion," Wu says. "It's chic and environmentally friendly at the same time. I bought one of August, because both my daughter and I celebrate our birthdays that month."
The eco-bag, as well as other works in this exhibit, all show some sort of rebellious drive, says Liu Sola, an internationally acclaimed musician and author. Liu established her fame in the 1980s with the hit novel You Don't Have Another Option. Regarded as a milestone in contemporary Chinese literature, the novel presents a group of rebellious music students, including the author herself, using music to express their desires for, and anger towards, the social order.
"Each generation has its own way of making its voice heard. These young designers have a strong, antiauthoritarian ideology. But the way they express it is quite modest," Liu says. "That's because the dualistic value system my generation experienced no longer exists. In other words, they're lost in the current time of pan-cultural value systems.
"They're left wondering what they should challenge when they try to rebel. In a way, they are struggling more now than we were then."
Nevertheless, Liu Sola really appreciates their design work. It's "very artistic, punk-like and useful". She spent more than 1,000 yuan ($136) on their works, including cartoon books about Chinese punk culture from the Cult Youth group headed by Zhang Shihao in Beijing and notebooks designed by Si Wei and Jin Ningning from Shanghai, who named their design studio Perk.
Actually, the Chinese name of the studio is Po Ke, or "Broken Shell", Si Wei says. "Maybe, no one pays attention to broken stuff," Si explains. "But something valuable can grow out of it. We feel that's us; we're nobodies today, but we're not pretentious and could be something big someday."

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