Life and art

Clockwise from above left: Liliane Fawcett is the owner of gallery Themes & Variations and an observer of contemporary Chinese design. King Chair, Apple, China ceramic sculpture and Harmony-Light Chair on show at her gallery. Photos Provided to China Daily

Inspired by a visit to Beijing's 798 Art District, a London gallery owner is taking contemporary Chinese design, stimulated by the country's rapid changEs, to a European audience

Liliane Fawcett says her gallery Themes & Variations has never attracted as much media coverage as in the past month, when it hosted its first exhibition of Chinese contemporary design.

"We've never had this amount of press for any other exhibition, so maybe there is great interest for Chinese design in Europe. Most of the visitors coming to our gallery did not know what to expect of Chinese design, but were amazed by the standard of work."

Fawcett, 55, a French countess, set up Themes & Variations in London in 1984, selling post-war and contemporary design.

Over the years it has promoted work from up-and-coming designers such as the British-Tunisian Tom Dixon and the Israeli Ron Arad, as well as decorative arts and furniture from the 1960s and 1970s.

The 55 items that make up the Chinese Design Today exhibition are the work of 16 artists from Beijing, Shanghai and Jingdezhen, a city in Jiangxi province famous for its porcelain.

Fawcett says one popular medium used by the artists is furniture, which holds true for both older and younger generations of Chinese designers.

An example is the King Chairs by Shao Fan of Beijing, born in 1964. With two versions, in black and red, they are antique Ming Dynasty style chairs made from wood with caned seats, divided by a central lacquer linear chair.

The starkly different materials so coherently combined create a subtle reminder of China's rapid transformation in recent decades.

Similar to Shao's chairs are the Harmony-Light Chairs by Xiao Tianyu, a younger-generation designer born in 1987. With straight-edged elm wood casually built into big cotton seat covers, the design embodies contrasts.

One aspect of this contrast is the upright feeling of the elm with the relaxed mood of the cotton. The second is a contrast between the craftsmanship of the elm, which could take a single worker several weeks to make, and the more commonly mass-produced cotton.

Fawcett says the theme of tradition versus modernity is popular with Chinese designers because China is a society in transition.

"The designers are trying to keep a grasp of the past but also reach towards the future. China has a long history, so designers can't look towards the future without looking at the past."

Also representative of this theme are ceramic sculptures made by Li Lihong, a professor of Chinese porcelain at Fudan University in Shanghai.

His Apple, China features a golden apple with a bite similar to the icon of the American electronics brand Apple. The bite is filled with blue floral porcelain, as a comment on China's consumerism.

Another theme Fawcett observes is up-cycling, the re-use of old material for new purposes. One example is Gu Yeli's antique Chinese wooden benches dressed by colorful pompoms.

Gu collected broken or abandoned chairs and benches dumped in Shanghai's maze of alleys, and reworked these commonplace items into striking and distinctive furniture.

Up-cycling is also a theme in the hand-stitched wallflowers created by Yang Fan, which are large rectangular cloths hung on a wall, with scrap cloth and pompoms stitched into arrangements of flowers and smiley faces.

On a visit to southern China's clothes-manufacturing factories, Yang was shocked to see thousands of pieces of cloth discarded. She methodically collected what she could and stitched the cast-offs into brightly colored panels.

Fawcett says it is easy to imagine why up-cycling is an attractive theme for Gu and Yang. "When you have a society coming out of not so strong an economic background and emerging into a strong economic power, people still have the idea in their mind that nothing should be wasted," she says.

"There is a joy to be reusing something that could be reused, and see the object turn into something fresh, something which is not seen anywhere else before."

Yet a third theme Fawcett notices is modernity, led by the double-skinned stainless steel panels Zhang Zhoujie makes from parametric design - a digital scripting method that creates designs using computer models.

But Zhang also cites another guide in his work - the Taoism concept of wu wei, which means uncontrived action or natural non-intervention. Hence his work is true to the materials he uses, devoid of embellishment or disguise.

Born in 1985, Zhang grew up in rural China, and studied both in Beijing and later at Central Saint Martin's, a globally renowned art school in London.

Befitting his background, his work blends traditional Chinese art perspectives with Western design methodology.

"Zhang's work is futuristic. It's not influenced by Chinese history very much, but at the same time it's not like anything already in European markets," Fawcett says.

Works in the exhibition are for sale, most priced between 9,000 pounds ($14,500, 11,000 euros) and 80,000 pounds. Fawcett says a significant number of items have already sold and she expects 70 percent to sell by the end of the one-month event.

Some of the buyers are professional collectors, while others are consumers wanting to buy unique furniture to decorate their homes. The unsold items will stay in her gallery and Fawcett says she will continue to buy works from the artists.

The inspiration for the show was a trip Fawcett made to Beijing two years ago. Upon visiting the 798 Art District, she was surprised to find a range of innovative items that altered her perception of Chinese design.

A stylish gathering place in Beijing, 798 Art District is an old factory turned into a conglomerate of studios, trendy cafes and exhibition halls. It sells contemporary design items including mugs, notebooks, cloth dolls, hand-ripped art pieces, calendars, jewelry, T-shirts, and even postcards with the 798 district logo.

"I think China's fine art market experienced an explosion in the past decades, and consequently Chinese design was left to the side, but it is now emerging," Fawcett says.

With a view to unveiling Chinese design to a Western audience, Fawcett went with a consultant to Beijing, Shanghai and Jingdezhen to select pieces for her exhibition.

"We went from one designer to another designer. We eliminated firstly all the designs similar to a European style, and then it was just a matter of following our taste."

Fawcett has not been the only one attracted by China. In November, the well-known British curator Janice Blackburn organized a week-long exhibition of Chinese design students' work at Sotheby's in London.

Titled Unfolding Landscapes, the exhibition featured furniture, ceramics, jewelry, fashion and photography produced by about 20 graduates from the School of Design of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

"I think Chinese products have a reputation for just being cheap copies, but there is actually a huge amount of creativity in China which people don't really know. This is just a graduate show, so people see it as emerging," Blackburn says.

In September, London's boutique furniture store Squint hosted a month-long exhibition of 20 sculpture pieces of the Chinese contemporary art brand X+Q.

The colorful and quirky sculptures of angles, rabbits and Chinese people were made by the contemporary sculptors Qu Guangci and his wife Xiang Jing, who founded X+Q.

Qu says X+Q has already opened four shops in China since its launch in 2010. "Despite our brand's fast growth in China, I think it is important for our brand to break into the international market," he says.

All these exhibitions suggest a new trend of Chinese design emerging onto the international scene. Fawcett says that the key for Chinese design to succeed in European markets is to ensure consistent quality.

"Now that Chinese design is growing fast overseas, it's important that designers remain focused to produce works of good quality," she says.

"The other key is to have discipline for both the artists and the galleries to create small editions and unique pieces so what customers buy can be differentiated. For example, if a piece claims to be an edition of eight, it must not be an edition of 80."

cecily.liu@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 01/18/2013 page28)