Milan's Furniture Fair Is More Than 50 Years Old. What Role Does "China" Actually Play There?

"If China wants to understand design better, it needs to learn to live less aggressively."

"Milan is boring most of the time," says Eve Pasquet, laughing. She is in her early forties.

It is 2 p.m. on April 14, the third day of the 55th Milan Design Week. Eve is the press officer for Alamak, an exhibition on Asian design at the Milan Triennale. The Triennale, back after a 20-year gap, is one of Design Week's main venues outside the fairground. Sitting in a bright café, hungry, she keeps trying to flag down a waiter run off his feet by the crowd, and eyes with envy the visitors out in the garden with their children and dogs.

"Design Week is really the best time in Milan," Eve says. I had just finished interviewing Alamak's curators and designers, and ran into Eve at the café by chance. I teased her: "Doesn't Milan also have Fashion Week?" Eve shook her head, in earnest: "Fashion Week is set up for a small circle. Apart from a lot of black sedans with tinted windows, there's nothing to see."

Design Week is meant to be a design feast for all of Milan, and for the nearly 300,000 visitors who come from more than 160 countries. Almost all of it is open to the public.

The Salone Internazionale del Mobile — the Milan international furniture fair, "Salone" for short — began in 1961, and showed the world, at just the right moment, Italy's postwar economic takeoff. In 1972 New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) mounted an exhibition about it, calling Italy's furniture industry a model of commercial power and cultural energy perfectly fused.

More than half a century later, the design masters who started out in Milan are too many to count — the Memphis Group's first appearance in Milan in 1981 (pictured below) was itself a landmark in design history. Hoping for that kind of success, countless young people with a passion for design come to Milan as if on a pilgrimage, to soak up ideas.

People have gradually taken to using the name Milan Design Week for everything that has grown up around the furniture fair — an ever-larger crowd of exhibitions.

At Fiera Milano, the roughly 350,000-square-meter main fairground in the Rho district to the northwest, the stars are still the countless furniture brands and the endless stream of furniture-trade visitors. But for that one week, Milan also fills up with events, exhibitions, cocktail parties, talks and product launches in every corner of the city. Some are there only to be linked to Salone somehow: brands and companies of every sort would happily occupy the whole city to squeeze out as much press coverage as they can, whether or not their products have anything to do with furniture. Others are independent or academic discussions and roundtables, or experiments in art and design in all kinds of spaces around town, and they keep Design Week alive outside the fairground.

If this is your first Milan Design Week, finding the places you most want to see, fast, is close to impossible.

These "off-site events" are so rich that for many Design Week regulars the furniture fair itself is no longer the point. Theo Theodorou, who put Alamak together, and the curator Tim Power are both insiders who haven't missed a Milan Design Week since the 1970s — and neither plans to visit the fair's main pavilion this year. "Everything in the city is more interesting," Theo says.

Some people think Milan is overrated. The British critic Alice Rawsthorn asked in 2015: "Isn't it odd that a furniture fair has extended such deep influence over the whole of design culture, not just its own field?"

That set off a run of arguments about Milan Design Week. Many rushed to defend the city; others, like the Dutch designer Hella Jongerius and the theorist Louise Schouwenberg, used the moment to publish a manifesto attacking design's never-ending chase after the new: "We advocate an idealistic design agenda and condemn the compulsion to innovate for innovation's sake." Today's design world, they argue, turns out far too much meaningless, bad design, and with it far too much pointless shopping — and designers are responsible for that.

The installation the two of them brought to Milan this year also tries to peel design's surface away.

The criticism has carried into this year, with some new notes. Marcus Fairs, editor-in-chief of Dezeen, wrote a few days ago: "This year Milan isn't a furniture fair; it has become something more interesting."

He means COS, Nike, Audi — "non-furniture" heavyweights that have all thrown themselves into Milan and spent heavily on their displays. Last year Alice accused the "superficial" commercial activity at Milan Design Week of deepening the public's prejudice against design. Marcus's answer this year is that the big brands come to Milan "to learn, to experiment, to take risks and to have a conversation," which makes their presence there "a good thing."

Even so, Milan Design Week is still the date every designer in the world marks in red on the calendar. The narrow streets downtown stay jammed all week, and hotel prices shoot up to absurd levels.

Any successful event stirs up some argument and criticism; that is ordinary enough. Especially since the designers and critics arguing about design culture and depth all know one another — they are, in fact, Milan Design Week's core "human resources." By what looks like a chaotic method, they keep Milan Design Week running organically.

Next to them, "China" in Milan is a newcomer, plain and simple.

At home you will certainly read that some Chinese brand or other has "made its debut" or "made its voice heard" in Milan. But if you have any contact with the furniture trade, you will more often hear about Milan Design Week turning Chinese brands down — mostly because of a history of copying. Once a background check turns up copying, the organizers reject the application. To this day no Chinese furniture brand has ever appeared in the fair's main halls.

And most of the Chinese exhibitions that do turn up somewhere in the city tend to stand for a certain kind of "Chinese-style" design. Furniture displays built on auspicious clouds, coiled dragons and other heavily "ethnic" motifs struggle to cross the cultural gap and rarely produce any real exchange. Work like that is cut off not only from Milan's design context but from contemporary Chinese culture as well.

There are bright spots, though. In 2016 the young designer Zhou Chenchen made it into SaloneSatellite, the international furniture fair's showcase for designers under 35, and won its "Special Mention" award; several other young Chinese designers and design schools showed there too. The pioneering designer Li Naihan, whose work carries a critical edge, was the only Chinese designer in Alamak, the Asia-focused exhibition. Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, from Shanghai, worked with several brands in Milan and launched a string of new products. The M+ museum in Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District ran a roundtable on copying. JD.com started a Design+ project that put Chinese and Italian designers on show in Milan together... From product design, art design and concept design to critical argument, the "China" people see in Milan is slowly moving out of its old stereotype.

But the pace is still slow. Federico Palazzari, who owns the high-end lighting design company Nemo Lighting and lived in mainland China and Hong Kong for more than a decade, puts it this way: "Milan will probably see Chinese design soon enough. I can see plenty of Chinese designers working in Europe and the US, breathing the air here — but I haven't yet been lucky enough to meet a good Chinese designer."

Milan does expect something from Chinese design, especially now that China has shown such capital muscle. Rossana Hu, co-founder of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, has come to Milan Design Week every year for the past seven or eight years, at first for the architecture practice and later more and more to show Neri&Hu's own furniture. She says: "I think Milan does have expectations of Chinese design, because Chinese design has a lot of room to improve — because nobody here has seen the good stuff yet. But sooner or later it will come."

As with many of China's creative industries — contemporary art, independent film, fashion design and the rest — Milan Design Week is also one of the roundabout routes Chinese designers hope will pay off at home. Neri&Hu, widely watched and much awarded, has more or less followed that route. "Going out and then coming back is not the wrong direction," Rossana Hu says. "A lot of designers at home are only recognized at home after they've done projects abroad."

But for Chai Xiaodong, who is from Hangzhou and has just turned 30, spending real money to put his work in some corner of Milan Design Week is about a chance to get his design ideas across. He brought his own furniture brand, Grado, to Milan in 2014 and again in 2015. "The first year we showed the work," he says, "people who came to look thought the design quality was pretty good, and asked whether the designer was European or Japanese. When I said I was Chinese, the reaction was always: how could this be a Chinese designer?" So the second year he put up a sign: "A brand from China."

"I like Milan, because I can show my ideas here, and that gives me a lot of encouragement. In China there is often no point saying any of this, because the whole market is copying and nobody cares what you put on show. The market hasn't been educated yet; people can't tell whether a design is a copy or an original," Chai Xiaodong says.

Japan may still hold a place at Milan Design Week, but "China," and even "Asia" more broadly, has no clear shape yet inside Milan's traditional view of design. Using Singapore's entry to the Milan Triennale, Tim Power gathered 12 Asian designers under the Alamak exhibition to explain what "Asian design, Asian manufacturing" means. "Europeans have a standing prejudice that Asia is good at manufacturing, not design," he says.

That may well be true for now, but both Tim and Chai Xiaodong think Asia's manufacturing capacity is an advantage local designers can put to good use. "Compared with the few factories left in Europe, Chinese designers have more resources," Chai Xiaodong says. His own designs start from what a factory can actually produce.

Look one layer deeper, though, and Chai Xiaodong's method means that anything Chinese factories cannot produce is hard to design in China at all. Zhou Chenchen, who won his award in Milan this year, has opened an office in Italy and built channels to high-end manufacturers there, because many of his designs cannot be made in Chinese factories. And Chinese designers, as a force, are not yet strong enough to pull the whole manufacturing industry into an upgrade.

Zhou Chenchen says there is a reason he won. The Salone Internazionale del Mobile will hold its first overseas edition in China from November 19 to 21, 2016 — Italy badly wants the Chinese furniture market open. That the Chinese market is huge seems to need no proof; whether Chinese consumers' appetite for originality and design has "met the bar" is argued over endlessly. Most people prefer to find the silver lining in how alert young people in big cities are to news from abroad, and how eager they are to make things.

Which makes it telling that Federico — the lighting-company owner moving between product launches and rooms full of guests — said this to QDaily on a Milan street corner under a purple sunset, cocktail in hand: "[Design] is a very slow business, like farming: you plant the seed, you water it, it takes a long time. If China wants to understand design better, it needs to learn to live less aggressively."

"We do have some clients from China with sophisticated taste. But that alone isn't enough to build a whole cultural context; that takes a very long time. Maybe my son's son will see it."

Image credits: Dezeen, on-site photography, inexhibit