For Chinese Design Students, an Olympian Task

BEIJING — No pandas, no kung fu, and no Great Wall. No paper cutting. And please, no dragons. Amid the symbolic fanfare of Beijing’s Olympics, visitors to the games this month have been hard-pressed to spot many of China’s most recognizable symbols.But according to the man who helped advise Beijing on its image for the games, Xiao Yong, the icons’ conspicuous absence is by design.“Many of the elements that people understand and know, we wouldn’t dare to use them anymore,” Mr. Xiao, a professor at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, said.Unlike the official effort to ensure that dissidents, pollution, and traffic are mostly out of sight during the Olympics, the decision to keep some of the most familiar symbols of China — at least to Western eyes — away from the games was not simply a matter of saving face. It was an issue of creating a powerful symbolism that could communicate with foreign and domestic audiences alike.The people tasked with such a duty were not, however, from a glossy design firm. They were Mr. Xiao’s students.While the task of shaping a new Beijing — from its billion-dollar sporting venues to its press operations — was handled by a partly foreign army of professionals, the graphic design of the city’s Olympics fell to what might be called a class project.For four years, a rotating team of some 50 undergraduate and graduate students at CAFA toiled over a spectrum of designs, from bunting to uniforms to stamps to the pictograms and medals.“It’s an Olympic first,” an adviser to the International Olympic Committee, Brad Copeland, said of the university arrangement. Having guided six games hosts through the political and artistic minefield of their Olympic images, and aware of the bureaucracy and stakes in China, Mr. Copeland had doubts about Beijing’s radical tack. “I was skeptical because it was definitely outside the box,” he said. “But CAFA is one of the most impressive design schools I’ve ever been in.”In a country where the words for graphic design — pingmian shiji — didn’t arrive until the 1980s, the task of creating a memorable design on par with the Mexico City ’64 or Tokyo ’68 Olympics, for example, seemed, well, Olympian.“This is something that has made me sleepless, made me really lose a lot of weight and gain a lot of weight,” the dean of the design school and the games’ main design adviser, Wang Min, said. He launched the student project in 2004, partly as a training program. “This is the largest design project in the world.”With every Olympics comes a flotilla of imagery meant to evoke the spirit and culture of the host country, with varying degrees of success. Some designs, such as Otl Aicher’s crisp, clean athletic pictograms for 1968’s Munich Games, ingrain themselves into both Olympic memory and the collections of souvenir traders. Others have as much authenticity and panache as a doped athlete. (Remember Izzy, the mascot of the Atlanta Games? Exactly.)But as with so much else in Beijing these days, the challenge and the stakes of creating compelling Olympic design was higher than ever before. Amid an ongoing debate over how China can best present its cultural legacy to a world it barely knows, designers must also please a 1 billion-strong domestic audience that is searching for clues to China’s past and future, too.“We see our designs as kind of a door into Chinese culture,” Mr. Xiao said. “I have traveled in over 50 countries, and I do believe there is little understanding of China today.” China is “also not aware of what’s happening in the world,” he added. “And I’m sure there are many more rich cultural elements and traditions in China that we need to discover by ourselves, too.”“We have to have some different perspectives on our own culture,” Mr. Xiao said. “Some ancient cultures belong to us, and not every country can really claim that. But we don’t want to create a situation where we need to force visitors to understand.”Designers began by studying the look of previous games, locating important themes such as individuality and totality. Previous Olympics often offer templates for future ones, and in Montreal in 1976, organizers simply reused the designs of the Munich Games, four years prior. For China, these older Olympics could offer only a general background. “Other Olympics have nothing to do with us,” Mr. Xiao said. “The result is that I had to forget all of them. We had to create something new.”The designers opted to excavate more authentic bits of Chinese culture. For the medals, for instance, Mr. Xiao and his team abandoned the decorative elements that are a traditional part of the Chinese aesthetic. “Modesty is also part of Chinese philosophy and culture,” Mr. Xiao, who led a team of 11 students to work on medal designs, said. Their design bested 289 other proposals from 19 countries.Though dozens of proposals envisioned a highly ornate medal featuring traditional elements of Chinese culture, medal winners in Beijing are now wearing a sleek, subdued emblem defined by a ring of smooth jade, with white jade for the gold medal, to dark green for bronze.The attached ribbon features the Beijing Games’ ubiquitous “lucky clouds” pattern in variations of a pigment dubbed “Chinese red,” a color that derives from a strict set of rules drawn up by the CAFA team. Though it may be ominous in the West, red is the most common color of the 2008 Olympics, signifying good luck, palace walls, and the country itself.But the designers’ most impressive work may be the pictograms, the stick-figure logos used to identify each Olympic event. Like the main Beijing Olympics logo, which was fashioned by an independent designer, the pictograms use as inspiration the jiaguwen — primitive Chinese characters that were written on bones during the Shang dynasty 3,000 years ago — as well as the structure of the ancient Chinese seal. By incorporating fine lines, rounded, flowing shapes, and a black-and-white contrast, the tight, simple symbols are a successful balance of modern and traditional Chinese imagery.“This is our chance to show the new look of our homeland to the world,” a CAFA graduate who spent two years working on the games’ core graphics — elements such as emblems, slogans, and color patterns — Xin Jing, said.Though the job may be high-profile, it is not high-salaried. Designers such as Ms. Xin can only expect to earn an average of $300 a month at their first job out of college, and, at the design center, they earn only a paltry allowance. But they are motivated by another force. “To a certain extent, the greatest pressure comes from our own sense of responsibility,” Ms. Xin said.They are also motivated by significant pressure from above. Each design has yielded an intensive back-and-forth process of critique, often from officials who are guided less by an appreciation for design than by personal whimsy and politics.“As we design, we are trying to keep our original ideas,” a CAFA professor who oversaw in the early ’90s the first McDonald’s advertising campaign in China, Hang Hai, said. Asked how this bureaucratic process had affected the designs, he paused before tiptoeing through a response: “There have been a lot of arguments. It’s very important that we fight for what we want.”That bureaucratic struggle over creative work is particular to the Olympics, but it is also be a sign of things to come. In recent years, the central government has emphasized the so-called creative industries, including visual art and graphic design, as future cornerstones of an economy built on innovation and middle-class consumption.“There’s a shift happening now from the factory-driven model to the creative, innovating one,” a researcher who consults the government on its creative-industries development, Shaun Chang, said. “The government is creating a more relaxed environment to allow investment into this area. But it’s been difficult for the government to understand what creativity actually is.”The development of the market economy has proved a devil’s bargain for design: More goods to be advertised and designed helps support the estimated half-million designers working in places such as Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai. But it has also meant the growth of fly-by-night design schools that churn out graduates with subpar educations.To Wang Min, poor, copy-paste design education will only keep China in the cultural and economic dark ages. But even he cannot resist the creeping influence of the market or the pressures of politics. CAFA is now working on transport design with a major car company and is helping to draft the government’s first national-design policy.Mr. Xiao said that the homegrown Olympics project has a greater legacy than even the Summer Games: helping to dissolve China’s deep-seated creative insecurities. “China is known for ‘Made in China’ or even fake ‘Made in China,’ and as designers we are very ashamed of that,” he said. “We cannot change the whole world, but we can change that.”

For Chinese Design Students, an Olympian Task

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