London,

Chinese art of deception

Ben Lewis, Evening Standard 18.03.08

A Week of violent repression and human rights abuses in Tibet did not prevent me - I am ashamed to say - from fantasy-shopping at the first show of Chinese design at the V&A.

I fixated, for example, on the Nike Year of the Dog Air Force I trainers (2004), which combine a white swoosh with red stitching, turquoise laces, fake-dog-skin around the ankle and orange oriental-patterned fabric around the toe. I was rather taken with the bar stools of the TMSK Restaurant in Shanghai (2001) - their support formed by the glowing pink ellipse of an elongated Chinese lantern, while the seat is three concentric red-lacquered wooden pilules. I had to wrench myself away from the vitrine with four neat shelves of plastic panda mascots - every one different, yet all a cute fusion of wild animal and alien, with one memorably encrusted with diamante.

They seemed to say more about contemporary China than a thousand of the expensive and fashionable paintings for which millions are now paid at auctions.

There were other moments when I could see the bizarre future of the human race stretching far in front of me: I coveted the model of "Guangming Smart City", a town built out of broad surburban towers, composed of layers of vertically stacked homes, communal recreation areas and hydroponic organic farms.

Nevertheless, events in Lhasa in which perhaps 100 Tibetan protesters were killed by Chinese militia, underline the complete lack of political and social context in this exhibition, which is an uncritical panegyric to the Great March of Chinese capitalism.

One enters this show full of curiosity. There's the Communist back story: imagine a culture where 20 years ago there were no designers, where fashion and lifestyle magazines didn't exist, where the words "beauty" and "fashion" were never mentioned. There is the economic big picture: China is the world's factory, the world's biggest manufacturer of electronics, toys and clothes. What kind of new design culture, one wonders, is emerging in the new economic zones where one shipping container of goods is leaving the ports every second?

There is the artistic dimension: Chinese contemporary art has been big news for two years, but the story of Chinese contemporary design has not yet been told. There are the two news stories: first, China is hosting the Olympics this year and some of the world's greatest architects have been employed to create the infrastructure. Then we hear reports of the closure of websites, the arrest of pro-democracy campaigners as well as of dispossessed peasants. Surely there is a design dimension to this repression?

If you read the exhibition labels carefully, you will find the odd fascinating story of the dark side. There is a striking but, to Western eyes, harmless set of posters about communication, which feature a variety of rocks with different postage stamps on them. One learns that the one with the Taiwanese stamp was banned by the authorities. In the fashion section, a dummy is dressed in a thick, grimy brown cape. This is the work of Ma Ke, who has established a successful prêt-à-porter label, but she hand-made this strange garment from fabric that she collected from the roadside in Zhuhai City.

Of course, one can't expect a design show to concentrate on social issues but the V&A's show itself is not only apolitical, it is arid. The exhibition catalogue has the sense of abundance and density this topic needs but the vitrines and displays are under-stocked and the walls painted a chilly blue, as if the polite curators felt a need to tone down the exuberance, avarice and libido of this enormous, frenetic, emerging capitalist state.

The small Perspex display case dedicated to mobile phones is typical: it holds only four and they look disappointingly similar to the ones we use over here. Equally unsatisfying are the cool architectural models and computergenerated aerial film of Beijing.

I wanted to know what it was like to walk down a real street, not see this cleaned-up virtual reality. Where were the urban furniture, the crowded bazaars, the supermarket shelves, the red-light districts? Where were the videos of fashion shows to accompany the showroom dummies dressed in couture? I wanted real people to show me their homes and the design objects they lived with. Excuse me for using a trendy word, but this kind of exhibitions need to be much more of an immersive experience.

Even safely on design territory there was an omnipresent timidity. The curators make little attempt to define the emerging aesthetic of Chinese design - although it is detectable in the exhibition. Chinese elements surface in extremely elegant graphic design. In one poster, a leg in a black trouser is intertwined snake-like with another leg decorated with Chinese florally patterned cloth - a neat symbol of modernisation. Literary magazines, meanwhile, use striking monochromatic designs based on Chinese letters. Another purely Chinese quality is the evocation in haute couture ballgowns of the imperial golden age of 1930s Shanghai.

But although nationalism plays a fundamental part in Chinese identity, it doesn't manifest itself in the same way as it does in Europe. Chinese design does not exclude foreign influences; instead it swallows them up, emptying them of their history, reducing them to a flavour - do you want your home to be American ranch-style or British Edwardian? They create a new hierarchy by turning our cities into their suburbs - they are building residential quarters in Beijing that mimic Amsterdam or London, the latter given the Ballard-like anodyne name of "Thamestown".

These developments, which fuse the theme park with suburban living, indicate the fundamental distinguishing quality of Chinese design - our design world is based on function, theirs on fantasy. And that fantasy is almost tautological: their design evokes a sci-fi world that predicts their imminent economic and technological ascendency. Even foreign architects who work there seem to bow to this aesthetic. Only that could explain the number of construction projects, larger and more futuristic than anything in the West - above all, the twisted, mirrored gravity-defying TV headquarters of Rem Koolhaas and the steel lattice of Herzog and De Meuron's Olympic stadium, which look like Star Wars models.

Somewhere between the resistance in Tibet and the global credit crunch, this may turn out to be just a vast fiction, the cover of a sci-fi novel by Asimov.

• China Design Now is at the V&A (020 7942 2000) until 13 July. Open daily, 10am-5.45pm, Friday until 10pm. Admission £8, concessions available. www.vam.ac.uk.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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