Beijing material culture and graphics

In the afternoon sometimes if there is no wind blowing from the north or from off of the ocean, a hazy smog settles in on Beijing. Many locals wear cloth fashioned face masks. More so than Godzilla era japanese nurse masks, they resemble older generation American style cloth diapers: ribbed white main surface areas with whatever floral or patterned trim they can come up with.

The BNU campus is gearing up for finals. Tom and I attended a physics class today with an evironmental science student I met named Li Wei. Before class, many students were asleep at their desks and Li Wei explained that they were taking advantage of any time they could find for sleep. Finals seem much more intense here at BNU than they are at UD. Another difference from UD: even the physics and math students here dress tastefully. I still do not really like Chinese men's clothes though. They seem to be interpreting American culture through nippon and euro lenses. The result feels like they missed the point as the styles' aesthetics create seeming contradictions within themselves. I think perhaps its because the original functionality of the clothing designs have been so far distorted in translation twice removed that they become convoluted and ridiculous. However their effort to be fashionable is very noticable around campus and around the city.

The Beijing state construction company is also very noticable throughout the city. They paint their graphic logo on the fences around their numerous construction projects and they have their name and logo on a major commercial tower in the business area of the city. At first glance, their symbol is an ominous soviet style simple geometric pattern designed to impress and intimidate. However after a week of seing it on a daily basis, I realized that the negative space was in fact a shadowed representation of an American style tower being raised from a square urban field. I feel that this graphic is a wonderful microcosm of the state of China in 2007. It is a soviet style graphic plastered all over the city in Orwellian fashion denoting the incredibly numerous construction projects of a nation undergoing a complete metamorphasis. However the graphic itself is in a highly postmodern contemporary style of idea and the subject matter is a representation of an American debtor's tower; Ginsberg's Moloch.



Tom and I found another wonderful piece of contemporary Chinese material culture yesterday. We found our first skateboard shop in Beijing. On the bottom of the rack of imported American decks was a bright red deck. It had Chinese characters denoting in a completely serious and direct fashion the company name. It featured a graphic of a socialist style propaganda statue wearing a mao suit and a mao hat holding a skateboard and says in small English letters below it: 'the people's skateboards'. It is a powerful capitalist mockery of Chinese socialist culture fastened to a skateboard: The bastard child of high capital middle class idle sporting and the urban desert-jungle combination of the concrete and automobile age.


-winkler