“Long-term vision is seeing the art in the future.”
Scenes from a Chinese Design Exchange Trip
by Paulette Hurdlik

Scene Two
Chinese Design Education

The great leap forward from Red Guard to Avant-Garde continues. Chinese design schools house impressive creativity within their rapidly-expanding walls.

Like everything else in China, design education is exploding. The U.S. will graduate 40,000 designers this year. China will graduate 1,000,000. Enrollment has risen so quickly that teachers are in short supply.

Here are some examples of student work, and students, from Beijing. Much of the art we saw contained some element of social commentary.

The installation below draws attention to the utter devastation of historic China in the name of progress. The divinity figures, weighing a ton each, will be destroyed in 20 days. Here you see #9, with 8 down and 77 to go. Pieces of the destroyed figures are in the foreground.

86 Divinity Figures by Zhan Wang

Graffiti says (in English!) “Money, more more... Forget Art. Sell your ass.”

Read Scene Three