As young designers, Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent dueled in a 1954 contest that helped put both on the fashion map. This year, the competition has been resurrected, and the finalists reflect the emergence of a new source of fashion talent: China.

Two Chinese designers, Qiu Hao and Shao Jia, are among 10 finalists who will today unveil runway collections in a bid for the Woolmark award, which provides more than $150,000 for the winner’s label.

Having buoyed the luxury-goods industry’s growth for years, China is becoming an incubator of design talent, from young Europeans seeking jobs in the country’s massive textile industry to a rising generation of homegrown Chinese designers.

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Post tags: design, fashion
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This evening, rush hour commuters on Xicui Road in the western part of Beijing will be treated to the sight of a 20,000 square foot LED screen displaying videos that are twelve stories high. It will be the official debut of the Greenpix Zero Energy Media wall, a building-sized video installation powered entirely by solar energy. Designed by the architect Simone Giostra — who has worked on projects with Richard Meier and Steven Holl — the building features a glass wall clad in a photovoltaic laminate that soaks up the sun’s rays during the day and uses that energy to project low-resolution LED videos at night.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, design
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Say the words “new Chinese architecture” and what springs to mind? Ambitious skyscrapers, soaring apartment blocks, Olympian designs in central Beijing by celebrated international architects, and the unbridled kitsch of suburban estates like Thames Town, a bizarre mock-English development near Shanghai.

But even while great – and likable – tracts of old Chinese cities continue to come tumbling down in the names of change and modernisation, the country’s up-and-coming practices are developing intelligent new forms of specifically Chinese design, even if they do draw from the west from time to time. Whatever other glamorous projects these talented young architects are beginning to scoop up, it is mostly housing for ordinary people that concerns them – that, and a desire to change the direction of Chinese architectural development, all too often a soulless juggernaut ripping the hearts from old towns and cities.

The article also includes an audio slideshow.

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Post tags: architecture, design, hutongs, Olympics construction
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Ms. Lam, a daughter of the late Lim Por-yen, a Hong Kong tycoon, has been a pioneer in the Chinese art world. With the 1993 opening of the first Contrasts, in Hong Kong, she began promoting Chinese contemporary art long before it enjoyed even a hint of its current worldwide popularity, or fetching the jaw-dropping prices it now does. (On Oct. 12, Sotheby’s sold Yue Minjun’s “Execution” for $5.9 million, a record price for Chinese contemporary art at auction; six weeks later, the record was superceded by a Christie’s sale of a set of 14 gunpowder-on-paper drawings by Cia Guo-Qiang for $9.5 million.)

She is also proving to be a major force in the emerging market for Chinese contemporary design. In September, she launched the Design Consulate, a branch of Contrasts in Shanghai, which shows work by designers who share her keen interest in cultural cross-fertilization. The gallery’s current exhibition, “The Essence of Chinese Sensibility,” includes work by XYZ, a group of four young Chinese designers that Ms. Lam said she had bullied into the profession, and by Shao Fan, a sculptor and painter whose “deconstructed” chairs merge elements of traditional Ming-style furniture with contemporary materials and styles.

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Read the rest of A Shanghai Auntie Mame – Christopher Mason (64 words)

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Post tags: contemporary art, design, galleries, Pearl Lam
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China is not content to serve as factory to the globe. Call it economic foresight, or cultural pride, but despite the stratospheric growth of its economy–10.7% last year–China knows that cheap labor alone can’t sustain the boom. While a flurry of activity (and, yes, a government five-year plan) has stressed scientific and technological innovation, look a little closer and you’ll see that creativity in art and industry–in design, fashion, media, and the like–is fast becoming a driving national mission.

Look past the behemoth Three Gorges Dam, past a highway system that will be larger than America’s by 2020, and China is building a creative infrastructure, too, at breakneck speed. [Full text]

- See also a slideshow that accompanies the article.

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Post tags: contemporary art, design, innovation
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Pearl Lam knows what we think about when we think about Chinese design: “Fakes. All those counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags. The miles of Prada and Christian Dior. Or Ming chairs, reproduced over and over. It’s very depressing. But we can’t move into the 21st century unless we confront that.”

To say that Lam, who owns the Contrasts Gallery, with outposts or staff in Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou, Hong Kong and London, has herself moved past cheap imitation into the current century is an understatement: it would be more accurate to say that she has charged headlong into her own vision of the future. Bankrolling a group of emerging Chinese artists, commissioning pieces from international figures like Andr√©e Putman and Andr√© Dubreuil, and mounting traveling exhibitions, Lam has made Contrasts not merely Asia’s leading showcase for avant-garde objects, but also the place where China’s nascent design industry is actually being born.

© Michael Zhao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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From Business Week:

When global audiences tune in to watch the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the world’s fastest and strongest athletes won’t be alone in striving for superlative achievements — a new generation of innovative architecture is rising in China. Fueled by a surging economy (the latest Chinese census, released on Dec. 20, says the country’s GDP is $1.93 trillion, or 16.8% higher than previously measured), China will soon be home to the world’s largest airport, the world’s first fully sustainable city, and the world’s highest outdoor observation deck, to name just a few of its innovative architectural feats.

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There’s a lot of that going on in China these days. As Chinese companies seek to build global brands and foreigners aim to boost sales in the mainland, they’re transforming the country’s design business. Chinese manufacturers realize they need better products if they want to break out of China and beef up their margins on sales abroad. And foreign companies such as Sony are starting to see that as Chinese consumers get more discriminating, they’re no longer content with the tired, designed-somewhere-else models that many overseas-based marketers once sold in China.

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Post tags: consumerism, design, technology innovation
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