Is London Still the Center of the World?

Ou Ning

Everything Material, Something Immaterial
UK Chapter of Get It Louder 2007
Exhibition catalogue published by British Council

In the 1990s, we mostly understood London through pop culture: the Punk movement, indie labels, graphic design. In the era before the Internet, what China could grasp of what was going on in London was already a few years old if not more. Later via Hong Kong—the British colony closest to us—I was able to keep up with 4AD albums and Rick Poynor’s books until gradually I was able to keep pace with what was going on in London, basically. To someone starved for information, or rather someone restless to do all in his power to break through the anomie of his own cultural life, London was at that time one of a very few centers in the world with the power to attract.

A so-called center of the world actually does not exist in the real world, but rather in each individual’s heart. When you indulge in or grow absorbed in a certain kind of something, other things go unnoticed, or become peripheral. In this way, the place where the things you love are naturally turns into the center of the world. For example in 1994, I had just left university, and was fed up with the shallowness and ineffectiveness of an adolescence spent in the poetry and literary crowds. I started to advocate new music as a way of coming into contact with a broader range of people, and thus I discovered British independent music and the dazzling visual world that went along with it. Having seen so many designs by Vaughan Oliver, Jonathan Barnbrook, Why Not Associates, Me Company, and Tomato, I eventually fashioned myself into a graphic designer. In the period when I was so fond of using graphic design to promote new Chinese music, I saw London as the center of my field.

Although I first introduced Vaughan Oliver to Chinese readers in my writings in 1996, it was not until February 2001 that we were able to meet in his V23 Studio in South London. That was also the first time I had set foot on British soil. At that time, the anthology that Rick Poynor had edited for him, Visceral Pleasures, had just been published by Booth-Clibborn. It was a full treatment of his practice as a graphic designer, and his career seemed to have just reached a peak. Even so, Vaughan Oliver still wore a pair of beat-up blue jeans, and always maintained V23 at a scale of three employees. This designer who liked to watch football as much as he liked to read Beckett had never lost his independence. Sadly, Ivo Watts-Russel of 4AD had already left London for Los Angeles, and the fabled collaboration between V23 and 4AD had already neared its close. In the U.S., David Carson’s magazine Ray Gun was already in decline, and Émigré had shrunk from its original large format to a smaller trim size. A twenty-year golden age of graphic design brought on by the Macintosh computer was in its final throes. That year, I did not find any truly groundbreaking graphic design, but rather came away most impressed by the works of the “Young British Artists” I saw in the collections of the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate Modern. The tamer among these works were later displayed in 2007 in an exhibition called Aftershock in China.

As I pointed out earlier, in most situations, by the time things from other parts of the world make their way into China, the circumstances which gave rise to them have changed. The independent British graphic design movement which spread like wildfire during the 1980’s and 1990’s was no exception—by the time it was finally exhibited in China in 2005, it had already become a topic of historical research in London. Rick Poynor, a witness to and researcher of this movement, brought his new book and exhibition Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties to China. The first time I met him was not at this retrospective full of works with which I was already extremely familiar, but at the first edition of Get It Louder, the exhibition of young art and design from China.

By this time, China had already changed drastically: economic reforms were continually deepening, the GDP was still growing, political power had been smoothly handed off to the fourth generation of leaders, the Olympics and World Expo were already set, urbanization was in full swing, and the entire nation was swept up in fervent imaginings of re-ascendance as a superpower for the twenty-first century. Young Chinese designers and artists were studying all over the world, and using the Internet to encounter information from abroad or hone their creative faculties. Participating in the first Get It Louder served as a way out for them. In that noisy exhibition hall, explosive and giddy, Rick Poynor appeared refined and elegant, taking notes in his small notebook as he viewed the exhibition, seemingly taken by the social content and independent spirit of the works of so many young Chinese designers.

Get It Louder and the exhibition brought by Rick Poynor come from the same starting point in spirit, but the fact that they happened in the same year (2005) and the same place (China) is pure coincidence. It was like a date long overdue, one side young and bashful, the other gradually growing old, both regretful the encounter had not happened earlier, unable to cope with it all. Perhaps such regretful encounters are a thing of the past—globalization long ago made boundaries among regions shapeless, and the age of asymmetrical information is gone for good. So is London still the center of the world? In order to answer my own question, I returned there in June, 2006. This time I had another responsibility: to find the city’s newly apparent, freshest, hottest creative power, and draw it into the second edition of Get it Louder in 2007, allowing them to react immediately to China’s newest reality.

Emily Campbell is the director of architecture and design at the British Council in London, and later accepted the invitation to serve as the U.K. curator of Get It Louder 2007, thus opening for me another way into the strangeness of London. She arranged meetings for me with many young people active in product design and new media, most of whom had studies at the Royal Academy, coming to be known by their graduation works, forming small groups and companies after graduation, and gaining renown in London by virtue of their experimental creations. The Design Museum added an outdoor exhibition space called the Design Museum Tank specifically to encourage this kind of creation, and started awarding yearly design prizes as a way of strengthening recognition of British design. What astonished me was how the definition of British design is not hinged in any way on the nationality of the designer, but rather includes all designers who either live and work in the U.K., or who were born there but now live and work elsewhere. This working method obviously represents a more open attitude than the construct of the “YBA” several years ago, and updates the concept of nationality in traditional political models, coming closer to the needs of the globalized era. One could also put it this way: London is more ambitious than ever before.

Shumon Basar, another invited U.K. curator of Get It Louder 2007 teaches at the Architectural Association School, and is active in curating, media, publishing, and other fields. He allowed me to see a new kind of London intellectual with a wide field of vision. The independent magazine that he co-founded, Sexymachinery, mixes daring concepts, freshly experimental texts, an interactive editorial practice, and extraordinary graphic design. Each issue is a different size and uses different paper and binding. It carries on a European tradition of small-scale arts and literature publications that began with Dadaism. The curatorial, urban research, and architectural design office Newbetter that he founded with Joshua Bolchover participated in the massive research project “Shrinking Cities,” and through their own curatorial practice, they have raised doubts toward the traditional relationships binding artists, galleries, museums and architects. The book Did Someone Say Participate?, which he co-edited with Markus Miessen, invited many international artists, architects, and scholars to debate spatial practice and intellectual boundaries, manifesting their wide-ranging scholarly and human resources. Shumon Basar’s vision is not limited to any single specialized field: he knows contemporary art and pop culture both like the palm of his hand; he is not only interested in British politics, but in the economic expansions of China and Dubai as well.

The arrogance of London still exists, but it has gradually come to embrace others. In 2006, the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist left the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and was invited to join the Serpentine Gallery, where he used his frenzied mind and unceasing artistic activity to inject London with a new vitality. Together with Rem Koolhaas, in a pavilion that Koolhaas designed, he hosted a 24-hour interview marathon, interviewing 62 people including politicians, architects, authors, artists, filmmakers, economists and others. Afterwards, he brought London’s first major exhibition of contemporary Chinese art into the Battersea Power Station, that iconic building on the Thames. Precisely for this exhibition, I returned to London a third time, bringing the works of twenty Chinese sound artists to install in the turbine hall of the Battersea Power Station, where they conversed loudly with the sweeping spaces of this industrial icon designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.

Jay Jopling and his gallery White Cube have never strayed from the mission of representing British artists, but the ever keen and entrepreneurial Charles Saatchi has begun to buy his way into Chinese contemporary art and has opened a Chinese edition of his website. During the Serpentine Gallery interview marathon, the famous graphic designer Peter Saville claimed that “the intelligence culture of the world still exists in the West.” This sentence represents the view of many people in London, but Rem Koolhaas is certainly not among them. Ever since he began researching the Pearl River Delta ten years ago, and particularly since he took on the CCTV project a few years later, Koolhaas has become an advocate of China. His colleague in the Netherlands, the editor of Volume Ole Bouman, holds an even more extreme viewpoint: “Rather than the best minds and talents flocking to the West, now the best minds of the West have become consultants in China… It may simply be China's turn to decide over the destiny of mankind, over geography, over value systems, over symbolic orders, over all the key concepts by which we organize our lives.” (Volume 8: Ubiquitous China, 2006) (Chinese people love to hear this kind of talk, but it is easy to let it get to one’s head.)

As for China’s rise or not, London is not as frightened as the U.S. Rather, everyone has their own opinion. Even if London on the weekends is full of parties until dawn and drunks are everywhere, on questions of the world’s direction, the city remains calm. The bookstore at the ICA is full of books from different periods by Slavoj Zizek, I would pick up one at random and flip to the copyright page, always noting that they were all published by Verso. Since 1989, this London press has published Zizek’s works, and many of Zizek’s books published in China are translated from the English. I am 38, and came to read Zizek a year ago, along with Zygmunt Bauman, who himself left Poland for the U.K. Is London the center of the world or not? This question is no longer important. The world of the future may lack a center, or it may have many centers. After returning to China, I rushed to contact the three U.K. curators of Get It Louder 2007 Emily Campbell, Shumon Basar, and Joshua Bolchover, aiming to set plans for the fourteen London designers and artists we had selected to come to China. Why? Because London today still has many things that interest and absorb me.

May 20, 2007 Beijing.Translated from Chinese by Philip Tinari