Year After Year, Is Beijing Design Week Really About Promoting Design?

Developing in every direction at once may mean being mediocre in every direction at once — or something worse than mediocre.

Link up with the 13th Five-Year Plan. Solve the city's hard problems. Revive Beijing's inner city. Renovate the hutongs. Upgrade small and mid-sized low-energy cultural industries. Focus on creative design for the Winter Olympics. Foreground Chinese cultural elements. Drive manufacturing transformation. Boost consumption. Market culture-and-museum products. Bring in Italian home-furnishing manufacturers. Make household products smart. Stress technology ethics. Strengthen cooperation across districts. Promote tourism in Chengde.

When that pile of tasks landed on the desk of Wang Yudong, executive deputy director of the Beijing International Design Week organizing committee office, Beijing Design Week turned into something strange.

And those were only the parts Wang chose to stress. The event may well be more complicated than any design week anywhere in the world.

The government always wants to run everything. The plan for next year's Design Week has to be finished by the end of this one, and this year's theme, "Design '2020,'" is pegged to the run of the 13th Five-Year Plan. The tangle of agendas exists to support moving the capital's non-core functions out of the city and to prepare for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

"This isn't just a goal for the organizing committee — it includes everyone taking part in Design Week. Together, through this year's event, we're setting a goal for the next five years," Wang Yudong told QDaily.

From September 23 to October 7, 500 "projects," organized under the banners of Design in Beijing, Design for Beijing and Design by Beijing, appeared in every imaginable form on the streets and inside buildings.

To serve the goal of boosting consumption, this year's Beijing International Design Week partnered for the first time with Beijing's "Cultural Consumption Season for the Public," and for the first time "allowed commercial projects in," letting products be sold at Design Week events.

If all of that leaves you dizzy, it only proves how complicated Beijing International Design Week is.

Geographically it covers nearly the whole of Beijing, with satellite venues in Tianjin, Hebei and elsewhere. Its programming splits into exhibitions, markets, design forums, academic conferences, lectures, trade fairs and award competitions. Creative design — the thing other cities' design weeks, Milan's among them, treat as the main event — is mixed in somewhere among all these other goals.

So what is this thing called Design Week actually for?

I was confused before the tour even began. The Beijing Design Tour map on the official website was crammed with red pins, packed so tightly that taking in the whole event looked impossible.

In the end I gave up on most of the program and picked the "Design Tour," the part closest to ordinary visitors every year, and spent the most time in the Dashilar community, the hottest spot each year. Beijing Fang plus the hutong district: together, the whole Dashilar design community covers nearly every major goal the organizers have to hit — urban planning, renovation of old courtyard houses, revival of traditional culture, technological innovation, exhibitions and sales of everyday consumer goods, and creative design of every kind. Each year this area is taken for granted as the liveliest, most inventive district of Beijing International Design Week.

Who Is Deciding the Future of Baita Temple?

The "Baita Temple Regeneration Project" was launched back at the 2015 Beijing International Design Week. What it wants to do is renovate the area around Baita Temple, the White Pagoda Temple.

"Right now everyone's talking about moving the capital's functions out — the Beijing municipal government has moved to Tongzhou, and some cultural industries, including film and TV production and post-production, which used to be based in the inner city, are all moving out. So what fills the space inside the city? That's become a fairly important question," Wang Yudong said. Against that backdrop, the Baita Temple project consists mainly of concept designs for renovating the old city — though how much visitors take away from it is another matter.

This year a project called "World Academy" was installed in the Gongmenkou vegetable market. Most of the exhibits were laid out the way the vegetables used to be, piece by piece on the stalls down both sides of the market. Some booths were strung with flickering purple and blue neon tubes, and one small stand sold merchandise tied to this year's Baita Temple programming.

The exhibits were all over the map. A phone booth designed by students from the Central Academy of Fine Arts was dressed up as a bee; the caption said it was a renovation of an old phone booth. A wooden installation called "Folding Hutong" took its cue from the mazha, the small folding stools of Beijing's hutongs, and its parts fold more or less freely. A travel bag by the designer Casper Notenboom held a great many things, and a life preserver sat next to it — though the curator offered no explanation of what the life preserver was for.

Some spots showed design work by CAFA students; across from them sat research on urban renewal from various schools. Some of it was packed together entirely in English, dense enough to strain the eyes. A middle-aged man glanced at one English caption, looked at the foreigner standing beside him, then turned to his companion: "All this is for foreigners to look at."

On the other side of the exhibition area was a small hall tucked out of sight, with no signs pointing the way. This little courtyard held several entries from an international call for proposals to renovate Baita Temple's courtyard houses. The text and renderings for each project were printed edge to edge on display boards that hung down from the ceiling in long strips. Perhaps because there had been so little time to prepare, several booths still stood empty, their white tabletops already labeled "Do Not Touch."

Everyone who lives nearby knows the Gongmenkou vegetable market has sat abandoned for two years; the exhibition took two days to install. For Design Week the market's storefront was hung with several huge, brightly colored banners. Almost every resident who walked past stopped at the entrance and peered in, but only a few hesitated, pulled back the cloth curtain and stepped inside.

Quanyechang: Who Gets to Show Off Traditional Culture?

The Quanyechang exhibition area covered everything from reusing waste materials and cutting-edge technology to displaying and reinventing traditional culture.

The home-goods brand Bentu Design showed its "Brick-Made" and "Pipe-Made" furniture series, built from construction waste. The design studio DB Workshop moved part of its own studio on site to demonstrate 3D printing. The entire fourth floor was given over to an exhibition called "Century of Treasures, Soul of Beijing Porcelain." The remaining booths all fell under the theme "New Chinese Trend," which meant new readings of traditional Chinese culture.

Working from the same theme, exhibitors understood it very differently.

The silver jewelry brand Quan'ai Craftsman is built around hands-on silverwork. Its booth was a miniature version of its shop, with metalworking machines and finished pieces on display. Visitors who wanted to make their own silver jewelry on site paid a fee of 299 to 799 yuan.

Zhao Chen, a staff member there, told me: "The curator, Ms. Duan Yanling, is friends with our brand's founder. When they were planning the 'New Chinese Trend' theme, they thought of us, because we've given traditional culture a new interpretation and passed it on in a new way."

Li Design Studio was invited to do something new with Tongrentang, the centuries-old pharmacy. So it opened an "Impossible Pharmacy." The walls were papered with modern ailments — "Thirsting for Likes," "Gear-First Syndrome," "Acute Inspirational-Quote Poisoning." Chinese herbs with amusing names — jixingzi, "impatience seed," and yizhiren, "wit-sharpening kernel," among them — were borrowed and rewritten as prescriptions for curing these modern complaints.

"Our whole exhibition on the second floor explores ways of working with time-honored brands. What exactly we do isn't fixed — some of it is about promoting the old brand, with the focus on the brand itself," they said.

What the studio's seven members want to do, in their own words, is "not aimed at commercial profit" but rather "to discover problems in society." "We can creatively find a different angle from which to argue for certain ideas — that's what sets us apart from other designers and studios. So we don't do packaging, or make things that can be sold straight off the shelf. Our focus is on thinking through problems and solving them."

Next to the other booths, which earnestly set out physical objects — Chinese-style clothing, furniture, dyed fabric, paper — theirs really was the odd one out.

But in the eyes of many visitors, the booths at Quanyechang were not only for looking at.

In front of Bentu Design's "Dung-Made" series, an old man with a long white beard lingered a long while. He was taken with this furniture made from yak dung off the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and phosphate ore from the Kunlun Mountains, reaching out to touch a bowl, picking it up to study it, and asking Zhou Zheng, the director in charge of Beijing operations, "This bowl is nice — how much does it go for?"

Quite a few exhibitors had also set out QR codes for their Weidian mobile shops and Taobao stores. Plenty of visitors, after a loop through the hall, pulled out their phones and scanned them. There was no selling on site, but these booths, half display and half shop, seemed to answer Wang Yudong's goal of "boosting consumption" rather better.

Yangmeizhu Xiejie: Design Hotspot, or Tourist Attraction?

September 27 was the first day this year's Dashilar design community opened to the public. Besides Quanyechang and the W2 pavilion at Beijing Fang, which I had seen the night before, the day's itinerary took in the Dashilar hutong district around Yangmeizhu Xiejie and the newly opened W1, W7, E1 and E2 pavilions at Beijing Fang.

Yangmeizhu Xiejie is one of Design Week's older exhibition zones. Unlike the Baita Temple district I had walked the day before, it is tidier: the ground is laid with neat tiles, and morning glories and other plants decorate the storefronts along the street, breaking up the gloom of a dark-toned hutong district.

Perhaps because Design Week events have been held here since 2011, the area no longer seems to need banners strung along both sides of the street, the way Baita Temple does, to remind people the event exists. Exhibitors just stick a Design Week sign on the door, and visitors with a map can find the booths scattered through the courtyards.

Because it was the first day, and a weekday with few visitors, many halls were still being set up, and some had simply locked their doors.

The halls that were open — perhaps to echo the hutong renovation going on all around them — mostly took up urban planning and the renewal of the old city.

"Every year the organizing committee receives many project proposals, and matches them to different districts," Wang Yudong said. Each district also has some freedom to put forward projects of its own, though the organizing committee still has to sign off.

"Hearing Dashilar," by Chen Guanyun, a young woman from Taiwan, uses sound research to ask how Dashilar's old-city renovation might build a better soundscape. Her space is under ten square meters, with headphones hanging on all three walls so visitors can listen to different sounds. But she said it had been put together in a hurry, some of the equipment was not fully ready, and some of what visitors saw that day had only been finished the night before. The organizers seemed unbothered: "A volunteer came by yesterday, saw we hadn't set anything up, and left without saying much."

The graduation show of the newest class from CAFA's architecture department filled a roomy display area. All ten works by the ten graduates dealt with renovating old temple spaces in Dashilar.

Plenty of other halls were talking about traditional culture: reworking metal movable-type printing, inviting a Dutch artist to make Jingdezhen porcelain, making jewelry with the liaoqi glassware craft, opening workshops with traditional artisans.

The people moving through the hutongs were mostly young people and foreigners, which made a tour group of elderly residents organized by the local neighborhood committee stand out.

Many of these old men and women were neighborhood committee members themselves, dressed in bright red coats, going lane by lane behind their volunteer guides. Three photographers and videographers came along, shooting the whole way. One volunteer explained the theme of each hall to the seniors; two others carried pen and paper and, after every stop, asked what they had made of it and wrote the answers down.

The seniors kept up a lively conversation as they went. They liked to study the buildings the exhibits were in: "This used to be a kitchen, didn't it? Look, that wall's in bad shape." Or they would pass through a hall and crane their necks at the private house next door: "Isn't this so-and-so's place?"

They stayed a while in a hall called "Open Source Hutong." Told that the iPad on the wall was livestreaming, and that everything happening in the room could be seen by viewers anywhere in the world, the old people got quite excited, waving and saying hello to the audience through the little screen.

Not every local was so cheerful. An old man who lives on Yangmeizhu Xiejie saw me consulting my map and came over to talk: "Tell me, what is this Design Week designing, exactly?" Before I could answer he answered himself, waving his hand as he spoke: "You can't get it back! The old things — none of it can be gotten back!"

A little group of rickshaw pullers I met afterward seemed put out by visitors pulling out phones to photograph them; one of them muttered, "Photos, photos, everything has to be photographed..."

Because of property rights, the hutong district could not be fenced off into a single area for a concentrated display. But this year's projects were fairly consistent in style, so walking the whole route with a clear sense of direction was not hard.

Beijing Fang: A Small-Goods Market?

Beijing Fang is a new display area, and the Dashilar community put real effort into it. Unlike the free-range hutong district, its halls are gathered into a few adjoining buildings, and uniformed volunteers are everywhere.

The chance of getting lost is small. The chance of getting lost among the halls' different themes is large.

Starting from Quanyechang in the middle, the E1 pavilion on the right held a "Cross-Strait Heirloom Jewelry Design Exhibition," laid out more like a museum or the jewelry counter on the ground floor of a mall. This was also the first time Design Week has shown jewelry design; Wang Yudong said it was "because this year jewelry was formally included in Beijing's cultural and creative industries for the first time."

Right next door, the E2 pavilion fit clothing, furniture, jewelry and tea-set booths onto a single floor, none of them large. Just inside the door were 3D-printed pieces designed by CAFA architects, silver objects under glass domes, each with a price tag beside it. Next to them, clothing from CAFA's makers hung in neat rows on racks; in photographs it might give you the familiar feeling of walking through a mall.

By Wang Yudong's account, these exhibits belong to the "franchise section" — "commercial products" — that Design Week let in for the first time this year. "The country is under a lot of pressure right now to revive brick-and-mortar retail and boost consumption. Even a city like Beijing feels a lot of that pressure. So this year we allowed commercial projects in; as long as the quality holds up, we let them in," he said.

To the left of Quanyechang, the W1 pavilion showed the "Guanting Public Art Town Project," about infrastructure to support the 2022 Winter Olympics. The W2 pavilion, which I had seen the night before, was themed on urban planning and VR.

The strangest mix was at W7, a little farther off. Its single-floor hall had only five booths, and each one talked about something entirely different. Banana Fish Books was showing independently published books, Uncover was showing streetwear, poOtsh had brought out oddly shaped throw pillows, Chuiyan Mobile Canteen was selling food, and TangRoulou, run by two French designers, was showing children's Tang-style clothing.

Edward Hogikyan, director of New York's design week, once defined a design week as something that exists to "sort out problems": "New York Design Week doesn't produce design itself — it exports design as a brand. We provide a platform that helps connect designers and audiences who are choosing each other; you could say this platform is their 'umbrella.'" The point of holding a design week, he believes, is "teaching people how design changes life."

In theory a design week really should play several roles: showing the leading edge of design thinking, teaching the public about design, and — more important — getting more designers seen and paired with the right partners. Very little of the pile of problems on Director Wang's desk has anything to do with those three things. Under the government's planning, design has become a key to be tried in every lock in sight.

No lock will open for it.

Cover image: china-sd