The Beginning of “Contemporaneity” and the End of “Arts and Crafts”

Chinese contemporary design refers to Chinese design since the reform and opening-up in 1978. As a concept of time here, the connotation and essence of “contemporaneity” invariably overlap with modern design. The reason to emphasize its time orientation is because of the emergence of a “new” structure in Chinese society and the resulting change of idea, culture, and knowledge structure. Generally speaking, we are used to dividing phenomena by time. Just like 1840 is a watershed of China’s modern history, it is also reasonable to mark the beginning of China’s contemporary design with the formation of a “new society” structure after the discussion of “practice as the only standard for testing truth” in 1978. But I prefer to judge it by specific events, because it is more significant in terms of symbolism than time division. For example, we can say that China’s modern history began from 1840, or the Opium War. Likewise, the starting event of Chinese contemporary design, I think, is the “Capital International Airport mural movement” in 1979. As we all know, the decade from the late 1970s to the late 1980s was another important development period in modern China. In this period, there was no power alternation like in the past dynasties, the Communist Party of China still continued its leadership since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and the basic political discourse still continued its tradition from Mao’s era, but the national ideology had clearly broken away from the past and completely changed its connotation, which promoted the country to make corresponding changes in its organizational form of politics, economy, society, culture, etc. In other words, though a socialist country, China began to fall into a new pattern in 1978, facing the world and resetting the goal of its social development under Deng Xiaoping’s call for reform and opening-up and reiteration of “realizing the four modernizations.” This was a preparatory stage for officially stepping into the international capital market in the future. Given such a historical background, and with the influx of various ideas from the Western world, a great change has also gradually taken place in design, an important part related to Chinese people’s daily life.