Professor Min Wang/China
Design Director, Beijing 2008 Olympic Games
Branding a country, showcasing its people, history and contemporary landscape within the context of the world’s most anticipated sporting event could only be described as an Olympian task.
In the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games all eyes are focused on Beijing, and the visual identities devised and designed by Professor Min Wang, and his team.
The Dean of the School of Design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), China’s oldest and most prestigious fine art institute, Professor Min resolved to involve his student body and faculty in some early conceptual work. Since the School’s foundation in 1918, CAFA alumni have imparted significant influence on the artistic landscape of the country. Tertiary level involvement was thus a vital part of the design game plan.
To this end, in 2004 CAFA established the Art Research Centre for the Olympic Games, with programs directed at the Games’ considerations. Student and faculty members’ work was utilised throughout the process to enhance a sense of inclusiveness in the design strategy.
This sporting chance serves to validate the growth trajectory of design education in China from a mere ten tertiary level design programs thirty years ago, to well over one thousand today. Professionally, close to half a million designers are employed throughout the country as local industry takes to local design innovation with alacrity.
Much has changed since Professor Min attended Art College in China in 1978 with just 14 fellow students enrolled in the design faculty.
An Ivy League graduate of Yale University’s School of Art, Professor Min Wang is a globally successful designer who never rests on his laurels.
His design pedigree blends academic excellence with an international CV that includes an eight-year tenure as Design Manager and Senior Art Director at Adobe Systems and Design Director at Square Two Design’s Beijing office.
A creator of typefaces and distinguished graphic identities, his work has been showcased internationally most notably at the Biennale of Graphic Design in Brno and the Type Director’s Club Exhibition in New York. He has been a visiting fellow at two German arts schools and was appointed Honorary Professor by Shanghai University’s Fine Art College. In 2007, he was elected Vice President of the International Council of Graphic Design Associations.
But in 2003, after 20 years abroad, Professor Min returned home to China to tackle his most challenging design proposition to date as Design Director for the Beijing Olympic Games Committee.
The design agenda proved a mammoth, multidisciplinary undertaking involving hundreds of stakeholders representing a diversity of interests from all around the world.
The Games, he says have afforded the country’s design sector a unique platform to present their work on an unprecedented global scale and an opportunity “to re-brand China.”
The ‘One World, One Dream’ identity can be seen throughout China. It is designed, says the Professor, to combine the old and new, the historic past and the modern vision to represent: “a nation with a long history and a people who want to be part of the international family, with energy, passion and spirit. Not just for the Games, but as a part of the contemporary international community.”
Thus the design solution mirrors the epitome of the Olympic ethos in positioning diverse cultures, iconography, disposition, the Olympic visual symbolism and the Chinese host nation’s spirit and values without assimilation.
Ahead of the 2008 Games, Design Victoria spoke with the Professor on his visit to Melbourne to address the AGIdeas Business ‘Advantage’ Breakfast about the evolving culture of local design, a vital segment of China’s growing creative industries and his own Olympian effort in training the next generation of contenders.
DV: What a tremendous design challenge to be tasked effectively with branding a nation, as well as the Olympic Games. How were you selected initially?
MW: My involvement with the Olympic has quite a long history. In the beginning of 2001, I was in San Francisco, operating my studio. The Olympic Bid Committee was preparing for the IOC presentation and meeting to make the host city decision for 2008. They had been working with a local ad agency and studio in Beijing who had been trying to come up with a design solution. The Committee was not entirely happy with the results. They came to San Francisco asking me to formulate a proposal for the presentation design, which I did. My design was chosen and then they asked me to go to Beijing to direct the production of the presentations. So, I spent time in Beijing, worked as the Designer and Art Director for the presentations for February 2001, and then, for the IOC meeting in Moscow in July 13th. During the bid time I promised the Beijing Bid Committee people that if Beijing was successful in the bid that I would return to China.
After 20 years away from China, I wanted to return, and to be a part of the big change that happening in China, and of course to work on the Olympic project. In 2003, CAFA, invited me to be the Dean of the School of Design. I took the position, went to Beijing and at the same time, the Olympic Committee wanted me to involve the design of the 2008 Olympic Games. I already had the position at the School, so I told the Committee that I would take up the offer but I also wanted to organise the students and faculty members to work on the Olympic project.
But every project we were involved in was a competition. So, we were not given the projects automatically: we had to compete with ad agencies, design studios and other schools. But we were lucky; we won most of the projects.
DV: So, it was a homecoming for you both professionally and personally.
MW: Oh, yes, very much. I grew up and was educated in China but after many years in the West; in Europe and in America, I began to watch closely how China was being developed and changing. It was incredible to me. Especially being outside of China, it was something I felt that I had to be a part of. During the [AGIdeas] presentation, I spoke about the changes in design education, but the whole society has been changed, the whole country has been transformed into a totally new country, to my eye.
To a Westerner, if you compare China to Australia, America, Europe, it is still a developing country; in many ways, it is still far behind. But if, you place it in an historical context, if you ask someone like me to compare the China of today to the China I grew up in, then it’s day and night, totally new.
When I left China in 1983, I was working in one of the best art schools in the country as a college teacher. I was working full time, but making about (US) 7 dollars a month. To buy a watch back then, I would have needed to go without food, nor do anything else just to save three months salary. Even if you had the money, you couldn’t just simply buy one. You needed to wait until you could get a coupon because there was not enough supply. To buy a bicycle also cost three months of a college teacher’s salary and a coupon, which you had to work hard to try to secure too. If you were assigned a company or institution to work for, then that was for life. You had no choice. You could not change.
DV: Did you have any sense at the time that you left, that you would not return to China for two decades?
MW: No, I didn’t. I thought I would just spend a few years in Europe and then return to my college and continue to teach. But, somehow, along the way, other opportunities arose, and after 3 years in Germany, I received the invitation from Yale. And Yale’s graphic design program was one of the best in the US. I thought I really should go and take a look!
From there, I went to Adobe, which was in its infancy at that time. It was the earliest stage of desktop publishing and was really challenging how printing, publishing and design should be done. It became a publishing revolution and I thought it was marvelous to be a part of it. In 1986, the same year I went to Yale and began my involvement with Adobe design, Adobe had only 30 people [on staff]! So from one to another was tremendous opportunity and I just kept going.
Suddenly, I realised 20 years had passed; I was still in the West, in America. And in the meantime, China had changed so much. It was no longer the same country I used to know.
DV: Even though China has evolved its own design industries and creative capabilities, was it difficult to bring back with you particular Western working practices and design sensibilities that had been part of your working life for so long, to collaborate in a like-minded way?
MW: Yes and no. There are many people with many talents [in China]. We just needed to find them. The problem was the process. We just lacked a well set-up process for doing design and making design decisions and finishing the design project. The process was a little complicated. But certainly there is no lack of talent: in just my school (CAFA) alone we have a lot of talented students and faculty.
I think China is at a very interesting stage. On the one hand, it is a country in which almost everything is possible. Largely because there is no pre-existing procedure set up. With no established precedent, no history of doing it a particular way, you can do many things that are hard to do in the West. You can do things very quickly. But at the same time, there are certain things I used to do very easily, that I took for granted when I was in the US that I could never do in China, they would take far too long. Sometimes this is due to people maintaining their old habits although [the industry] is changing, becoming more efficient.
DV: Did the mechanics of the process impact on the design style that you had in mind initially for the Games? Did you find you excluded some concepts because the execution may not have concurred with the desired outcome?
MW: Yes, I think the major problem is the decision-making process. This could be seen from the outside as an overall problem in China, that the design decisions are usually made by committee and there are many layers of government officials. After a long, complex, decision-making process, requiring so many layers of approval, sometimes some interest in the design ideas, some fresh, intuitive kinds of elements, are gone. Instead, there could be something with a degree of compromise that incorporates a lot of commentary from a lot of different people.
At the end, as the designer, I may not be totally satisfied with the solution that has been finalised; it may not necessarily be the design that I was initially looking for.
DV: You then had to incorporate the protocols and input of the international bodies given that it is such a massive worldwide event. Was there a common design vision across the diversity of stakeholders?
MW: The Olympics are absolutely a special case. Firstly, there are the layers of decision-making on a national level, and then there is the international level to finalise the design.
The Pictograms, for example. Every individual symbol had to receive the individual sporting federation’s approval. The symbol for soccer for instance, had to get the approval from the international football body. Each of them came back with a special requirement and yet we had to maintain the overall design style of every one of the 35 symbols. One time, we received written commentary from a particular sporting authority and it was inches thick! We had to go through it page by page and then make a final decision on which revision we could do and which we simply could not change. Then we had to send back a rationale for each. Mostly though, we did try to amend where they required it to be done.
DV: Elements of China’s historic past are referenced in the design, including the decorative arts in for example, the medal construction – with the use of jade, the first time that a material other than metal has been employed in the modern Games. Did you focus on bringing those identifiable elements to the table in addressing both the new and old worlds in the design propositions?
MW: Every time we started a project, it was an initial part of our approach to try to incorporate something traditional, either art or Chinese values, or something unique to Chinese culture that we could bring to the design. It’s partially because this was the first time that the Olympic Games were to occur in China and we wanted to leave a legacy, we wanted to give the Games some Chinese flavour.
It was a very natural choice for us but it was hard to do because the Olympic Games after all, are an international event, it is a celebration, people getting together to celebrate the Olympic spirit, the humanity… there’s many international Olympic ideals and values that should be reflected in the design. And then many things we needed to make understandable to an international audience. We could not be too traditionally Chinese, it has to be contemporary, it has to be modern. That’s why we wanted the final design to reflect that.
DV: Design is often faced with that problem especially when it is called on to rebrand a business in which the history needs to be preserved but the brand modernised. You discussed ‘branding China as part of the world community’ within the context of the Olympics. How does design visualise cultural memory, modernity and global inclusion?
MW: With business sometimes, you can take the risk; you can make a bold move.
A company can move away from its history and start something new. A brand new approach. But for the Olympic Games in China, we all wanted to represent a Chinese appearance in some way in the design.
So the approach we have is totally different to the 2012 London Games, for example. Their approach for the emblem and the image reflects the ‘no- nationalism’ approach that I believe was one of the requirements for the design. Nothing nostalgic. They wanted their design to be very modern, contemporary and meet the expectations of a young generation’s eye and spirit. The resulting tanagram is the young people’s visual language. I think it is a very powerful image. In four years time again, it will be the younger generation competing in the Games.
DV: CAFA has a strong fine arts tradition but the design faculty was not as structured in terms of educational systems perhaps reflecting the industry lack in the local marketplace. As the Dean now, can you identify a point when design education was considered more vocationally, as something to aspire to?
MW: Design as an industry, as a modern profession is quite new in China. Only after the reform in 1978 did it emerge. So, in the past, our school was, as most fine art schools in China traditionally were, focused on fine art – painting, sculpture, Chinese artforms - print-making… but in the last ten years, almost all of our school has a heavy emphasis on design. Society needs a lot of designers.
A lot of candidates apply to our school mostly because they want to get into the design disciplines. The numbers are quite stunning. In 2007, the number of High School applicants from one province - Shan Dong - wanting to enter art school was 170,000 – in that one province alone. Now at CAFA, we take in 1 student from 58 applicants so it’s a very hard proposition.
Those who apply for CAFA, are already thinking they are the best in the country otherwise they would not apply. The application process is extremely complicated. They have to apply, be able to afford it, and there are only seven cities in which we offer testing facilities so they need to travel to one of them, register and then take the 3 days exam of drawing, colour, and composition, and then again for 4D composition. There are so many tests they have to undergo. And on top of this, they have to take national exams for literature, English, maths… it’s very difficult. So unless they already have the confidence in their abilities, they won’t apply for CAFA, they may instead apply for a local college in design or fine art.
DV: The vast market affect, economic power and global might of China is much talked about. But what is the challenge now for design in China in terms of growing national business interests and establishing interaction with local enterprise?
MW: Because of the lack of designers in China and the slowness of local business development in the early stages after the reform [there was a design industry void]. In the 1970s and early 80s there were no design businesses in the sense that manufacturers centred in China were for many years, only producing goods for Western brands. They didn’t need their own designs, nor to come up with their own brands. But after 30 years, the manufacturing capacity in China and the level of manufacture has changed quite a good deal. And then the size of the companies in China who manufacture has grown and they’ve become more skilful. Now, they want to have their own brands, to produce their own goods, evolve a new design. So, it is something that has been happening in the past few years.
A lot of companies realising they need their own design has produced quite an urgent demand for designers. So there is need from both sides. At the same time, the garment trade is starting to promote creative industry and growing the design industry [by extension]. At [design colleges] we are working with industry and with the garment sector in trying to educate industry in how to work with designers, how to buy design and how to make design decisions. At CAFA we worked with the garment industry and drafted a national design policy – it’s not yet implemented but it’s there to try to stimulate the design industry; secondly, to protect it and to foster the industry and make it a valuable part of the economy.
DV: Lastly, Professor, as a designer on a world stage, what does design mean for you?
MW: Being a designer is probably one of the best professions in the world because you are always involved in something new, something you haven’t learned or been involved in before. So it is a constant, lifelong learning process.
Related Links
Beijing Olympic Games — en.beijing2008.cn
Central Academy of Fine Arts — www.cafa.edu.cn
More
Min Wang provided his view on 'Why Design?'. Click here to read his response.
Click here to read Design Victoria's review of Min Wang's presentation at the AGIdeas Advantage Business Breakfast 2008.
Lani Steinberg for Design Victoria
6 August 2008