We chatted with Liu Gang and Feng Boyi - two of the curators of the Self Unself exhibition that opened in Suzhou this month - to get their views on the current position of Dutch design in China.
by Gabrielle Kennedy
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Curator Liu Gang is fascinated by Dutch design. But he wonders out loud how the current crop of graduates will fare compared to their predecessors without the generous government subsidies that left room for so much experimentation.
“It was an amazing system, “ Gang says. “They had the luxury to experiment and fail. I always wanted to curate a design show showcasing those failures. It would be interesting for the Chinese to see how many times one needs to fail before one can succeed.”
Gang has a great perspective on why the Netherlands’ supported its designers. “The subsidies were smart,” he says. “I think the government recognized that the Netherlands is a small country so instead of trying to be politically influential, they decided to make a difference or let’s call it an ‘interference’ on everybody’s dining-room table. It is like the Dutch are always there without anyone even realizing it.”
Art critic and curator Feng Boyi, who brought Ai Weiwei’s show “FUCK OFF 2” to Groningen in 2013, thinks it will take time for the Chinese audience to fully grasp the Dutch design perspective. “A lot of the projects in Self Unself entail stories, processes and points of view, which are very new to Chinese audiences,” he says.
Boyi believes that a museum setting is the ideal environment to introduce Dutch design to a Chinese audience. “It is important to remember that in China the disciplines are stricter,” he says. “Design is still only really understood in terms of functionality. A museum gives me the opportunity to show how design can be expanded to include social issues and personal journeys.”
But the exchange is two ways. Chaos is something that the more systematic Dutch can learn a lot from the Chinese about. “In China we have a different sort of power structure and the way things are planned and organized often makes no sense to outsiders,” Boyi says. “But it is in this chaos and rapid development that opportunities for creativity and good chemistry arise.”
According to Boyi, the biggest hurdle to building a fundamental design relationship with the Netherlands is Chinese education. “The system here is very tight so it is harder to encourage free thinking,” he says. “Even art education is very monotone and if you interpret art and design as the pursuit of freedom and independence then we have a lot of catching up to do.”
Ideally Boyi would like to see more of his homeland students come to Europe to learn. “The benefit goes beyond just how the Design Academy Eindhoven teaches,” he says. “Even being in a country like the Netherlands with such a free society is a big stimulation in itself. It will give Chinese students more room to explore what they are hungry for. Social design is the big thing right now, but that can only start with a strong sense of self and it will take more time for Chinese students to find that. Our graduates still see design in a more limited way - as providing a solution for a client with a commercial agenda.”
Liu Gang agrees with Boyi that the best place to nourish exchange and dialogue between China and the Netherlands is initially in museums. “The Chinese have a lot of museum space and the Dutch have a lot of content that explores the discipline in new ways,” he says. “We are a great match … and I really believe in the importance of cultural exchange.”
This July Gang visited Eindhoven to get a better feel for what is going on. He was most struck by Atelier NL. “I think they are very special – the way they attack design almost like a typographer would. Everything is so systematic."
“Most designers remain focussed on finding the best solutions via familiar processes,” Gang continues. “It can become quite narrow because everyone is looking for the same thing – the best thing. But Atelier NL researches all the options to make each one work. In the ‘Clay Machine’ we are exhibiting in Self Unself they dug out earth from each farm they visited – each sample has a different identity, which they work with and maintain. They never narrow down their choices and they avoid techniques that only allow for one option. They leave things open so they can simply choose earth, not the best earth. This is a very fresh approach, which I have not yet seen in China.”