We are officially back! It’s been refreshing to take a step back from the blog, to reassess priorities, and to take a look at what’s happening in the field of design in China and its neighbouring geographies with more of a critical eye: I’m happy to be back and to continue offering news and updates, hopefully for a while to come. And what better way to start than with news from the now-opened Design Society in Shekou, Shenzhen - specifically, the museum’s latest venture, an exhibition called “Craft: The Reset”.
Opening early next month, and taking place until March 2019, this exhibition showcases the work of more than 50 designers and studios, including PINWU, ffixxed, Shao Fan, Benwu Studio, Sally Lin and Zhang Junjie, to investigate “the widening possibilities of crafts as an equally important creative impulse for China’s future innovation”. Of the exhibition, Director of Design Society Ole Bouman states:
“It’s a new narrative, coming from the most pioneering minds in society and the design field. It’s a narrative not as a regression, falling back into the trap of nostalgia, but as a future oriented design, based [on] new ways of living, on new business models, new application of digital technologies and, yes, a new cultural sensitivity of the need to save the planet and cultivate vibrant communities to ensure its future stewardship. That’s why we call this exhibition Craft: the Reset, to showcase how craft is being re-energised by attracting the strongest talents for its act of rebirthing.”
Further details about the exhibition can be found on the Design Society website.
The first of a series of talks today to spark, disturb and re-engage, beginning with a 9am panel between Ole Bouman, Wang Shu, Francine Houben and Rahul Mehrotra. Mehrotra's statements on calibrating between local-global binaries and considering nuances of pluralism to overcome the (Western) obsession with models of consistency will linger on. (Venice Architecture Biennale, 2012)
An oportunity to turn back to where architecture starts
For architects, Bouman suggests, "the crisis" is simply "too valuable an opportunity to let slip by, a chance to turn back to where architecture starts, in the creative spatial organization of life—not in style choices or concept analyses, but in the identification of new spatial constellations; not in the spatial allocation and accommodation of a given program, but in helping to create a spatial organization for multiple programs; not in making things in space, but in organizing processes in time; in short, not in the object, but in the performance."
(photo by Rietveld Landscape) The Venice Biennale is still open for a month or so. One of the most interesting urban displays might be found in the Dutch pavilion. The exhibition, Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas, looks into the potential of unused government buildings. The pavilion itself has been vacant for 39 years. I like the quote from Ole Bouman, the director of NAI (Netherlands Architecture Institute), concerning the exhibition: "We show that the design capacity is not confined to new buildings, but can also be found in reuse. We want to see that theme put higher on the international agenda." The project is executed by a NAI and Rietveld Landscape.
