The Country Where Dreams May Come True

Ou Ning

ICON Magazine 057, March 2008, London
Translated from Chinese by Yu Hsiao Hwei, Paris

In 2007, the Hong Luo Club designed by Ma Yansong was realized in the Miyun district in the northern suburbs of Beijing. He was 32 years old then. This single-structure building with beautiful three-dimensional curved surfaces was his first design to be realized, whereas his professor at Yale University, Zaha Hadid, was already 43 when one of her designs Vitra Fire Station was realized for the first time. Ma had been an intern at Hadid’s firm in London, and returned to Beijing to start up his own architect firm in 2004, at the age of 29, exactly like Hadid, who also started to work independently when she was 29. However, Ma realized his maiden project 10 years earlier than Hadid. It can only happen in today’s China that an architect at such a young age could realize his own buildings.

Ma’s good luck started in 2006, when he won an international competition to design the 56-story landmark tower building, Absolute World, in Toronto. This achievement made him widely known, and he is the first Chinese architect in history to win an important landmark building competition in a foreign country. His winning project, dubbed the Marilyn Monroe Building for its smooth, sexy curves, will be realized in 2009. Today, his MAD architects firm has offices in Beijing and Tokyo, more than seventy employees, and his activities spread across China, the Middle East, Europe and North America. Among his numerous projects are some large-scale ones in China, which will be realized in the course of the next five years. English is the common language used in his firm. Every year, a good number of architects and students of all nationalities come here to apply for a post or an internship, and everybody works hard, sometimes even all through the night. This busy scene is an epitome of many young architect offices in Beijing and Shanghai.

China’s rapid economic growth, and its grand and spectacular urbanization movement and social change have attracted a great number of young people studying abroad to come back to the country to search for their own dreams. The construction of a series of sites and halls, and the city’s infrustructure triggered by the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, as well that of an astonishing number of private buildings, not only provide opportunities for famous international master architects to design imaginatively unrestrained projects, but also offer a vast ground for young architects to display their talents. Other than architecture, the design fields that are closely related with life and consumption such as graphic design, fashion, industrial design, and new media design are also thriving with great vitality. Chinese cities are full of ambitious young people who try to seize any opportunity to get ahead; they not only compete with people of their own age, but also want to vie with the masters who were once their professors and idols. The media are acclaiming them, large-scale exhibitions (for instance, Get It Louder) are showing their projects, and critics are propagating their voices. This is a place where young people burst with enthusiasm and passion. The air is full of excitement and bursting with energy.

In the course of the next ten years, design will have an enormous space for development in China. Since the new run of economic growth triggered by Deng Xiaoping’s famous inspection tour to southern China in 1992, China’s frenzied development has never stopped for a rest. After more than ten years of dramatic growth, the costs of the “development” are starting to appear: with the country’s blind pursuit of GDP growth, 70% of the rivers in China are polluted, one third of the land is affected by acid rain, and sixteen of the twenty most polluted cities in the world are in China; With the excessive exploitation of rural ressources resulting from the over-development of land, the disparity between urban and rural regions is becoming more and more serious, and social contradictions more and more intense, etc. With the pressures of environmental pollution and social conflicts, China is required to adjust its industrial structure, reduce energy-consuming and high-polluting industries, such as power, metallurgy and chemical engineering, and to control exploitative businesses that make extortionate profits, such as real estate, by working at developing “smokeless” industries, such as culture, entertainment, media, and information technology. The low-end manufacturing industry that used to rely on cheap labor is also required to evolve into a creative industry. The fact that these measures were already put into Hu Jintao’s report to the Seventeenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China and become an official discourse opens a political door for the explosion of Chinese design.

In the era of post-Olympic Games, the saturation of and the control of the real estate market will make more architects turn to the design of public buildings. A great number of museums and cultural infrastructures will become the territory for them to perform their talents, while the young talents who have been trained for years in graphic design, fashion design, industrial design, and new media design will start to take part in the molding of Chinese people’s life patterns and life styles in the new era. These young people, who used to revel in Nike’s American-style sports fashions, or were totally bewildered by the shortage marketing strategy of iPhone, or were the victims of European luxury brands, such as Prada, will now have to reflect on this question: being Chinese, what kind of creativity can you contribute to the world? They will start to study their own growing experience, the cultural nutrients in their own blood, as well as the Western knowledge and skills they have acquired. They will need to reorganize and invent a new type of Chinese-style modernity in the laboratory of their brains. I believe that this impulse to innovate and this awakening of national consciousness do not result from the political bewilderment of a party, but are a kind of self-awareness coming from the innermost heart.

Over the past few years, a new group of young designers, who are consciously looking for their own language and style, have emerged in big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Among them include Guang Yu, Liu Zhizhi, Xiaomage and Chengzi in the field of graphic design, Ma Ke, Wang Yiyang and Zhang Da in fashion design. In spite of their permanent presence in the whirlpool of international trends, they are constantly trying to create in an independent manner; however, such designers with a more mature personal style are still a minority among the new generation. After all, China has not really ended up with the economic model of rapid production and fortune-accumulation through low-cost imitation, and the so-called “knowledge economy” is still in the early stages. Even a young architect who has attained success like Ma Yansong is also criticized for imitation (his heteromorphic style and curved surfaces are criticized for having imitated Zaha Hadid.)

This is the best of times, but also the worst of times. If designers cannot resist the seduction of seeking quick success and instant profits, if they don’t have a more solid strength of originality, design in China will have no successors in ten years. Just like the concern that Hadid revealed in an interview: “China at the moment is attracting attention, the young generation has many opportunities, and there are also many talented people. However, I am afraid that they may ultimately give up their own language.”

Beijing, January 21, 2008