After reading the article about ‘Designer Nostalgia in Honk Kong’, I decided to research the cited designs of Shanghai Tang and Alan Chan. Shanghai Tang’s specialism in design is brand paper design (Fig.1) which is a combination of modern vivid colour and detailed calendar poster designs originating in the 1920s to 1930s. In effect, I feel there is an influence from communist proletariat design via the design’s bold, sans serif typography, an aesthetic that is manifest through the depiction of luminous buildings that seems to be from the British colonial period. This has had a good response in terms of fashion items that merges Maoist-era Chinese visual culture into modern China dress design. The commercial fusion of commercial tastes and communism iconography might have a relationship with the economic situation in Hong Kong and wider China today, a design allegory to the high periods and glorious pasts of Shanghai and Hong Kong (Fig. 2).
Fig.1
Fig.2
To move to Alan Chan, his designs more directly articulate a sense of vintage style – whereas he rearranges old commercial design through a use of sepia colour (Fig. 3). His style does not only evokes a sense of nostalgia through design but also conveys an aesthetic updating through its contemporariness. In other words, he uses the traditional elements like brush writing or old modes used to create logos that both reflect an Asian modernity and an authenticity to explore those aspects in the present (Fig. 4).
Fig.3
Fig.4
I assume the need for nostalgic design here is to ‘regain a lost era’ and to celebrate the aesthetic values and dictates of the past. That might be different from the past itself, but people pursue something that does not exist in our perceived present. I think this aesthetic pursuit is the same as future orientation in the meaning of ‘not now, not here’. I guess people can claim to have a fantasy or dream that might be a motivation for consumer activity more than it means a genuine concern for heritage in that ‘far from here’ design ethos.
I personally believe that to know the cultural history of popular retro design is invaluable because it deepens how such material is branded via its ‘commodification of the past for the present to project.’ (Higson 2003: 12) Although I am not from China and I do not have a personal connection to the High Period of Maoism in China or the British colonial period in Hong Kong, I do possess a genuine interest in this epoch and that might come from my personal experience having travelled and consumed many Sinophone cultural products (i.e., films, art exhibitions, design books and typographical histories). Thus, through the regional influence of wider China on Japan, I have gained especially through television and film in the 1980s and 1990s what Huppatz calls a “nostalgia fever” (Huppatz, 2009), and what Breathnach and Dermody argue that “Designers themselves are not exempt from such a generational attachment.” (2013) In this instance, my scholarly and personal affinity for retro designs.
Bibliography:
Breathnach, T., and Dermody, B. (2013) ‘The Appeal of the Past: Retro Type and Typography’. InPrint. [Online] Vol. 2, Iss. 1, Article 4. Available from: https://arrow.dit.ie/inp/vol2/iss1/4
Higson, A. (2003) English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huppatz, D. (2009) ‘Designer Nostalgia in Hong Kong’. Design Issues. [Online] Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 14-28. Available from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20627803?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents