The Next Cultural Revolution

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Eddie Yip | entrepreneur The founder of adFunture, an edgy vinyl toy line, Eddie Yip is also a partner in Da>Space, a Shanghai gallery that showcases China’s emerging street culture.

Lin Jing | furniture and ceramics maker Lin Jing’s live-work loft in Beijing’s 798 gallery district contains everything from curvaceous wooden stools to porcelain flashlight/lamps that would make Claes Oldenburg proud. (She’s draped over her aluminum “Long Island” chaise.) Lin, 33, studied art in Beijing and Belgium, and her organically shaped teapots have won coveted shelf space at 10 Corso Como, the Milanese fashion emporium.

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"I like to get my creativity from real life," Li says, sipping a coffee at a trendy bar overlooking Beijing's Houhai Lake. "Most of my ads are localized, about experiences the Chinese can relate to, while maybe borrowing some Western ideas," he continues. Li started off with a bang when, at just 25, he directed a television commercial for UNICEF, which won China's first-ever Gold award at advertising's career-making One Show in New York. "It was an extraordinary ad that I remember well," One Club president Kevin Swanepoel recalls six years later. "As good as any I've seen." Apparently, Sony agrees; it just hired Li to help produce some new ads for the domestic markets in China, Japan, and Korea.

In other words, as China's influence expands, and its young creatives refine their export-grade material, the notion of Chineseness is expanding along with it. After all, you wouldn't think of MAD's Toronto towers as being typically Chinese. But "there's a reason we hid the buildings' structure," explains firm partner Qun Dang, referring to their torqued, sinuous exteriors. "China didn't have an industrial revolution like in the West, so the structure isn't the main concern. Instead, it's about the beauty of the natural form, a more eastern philosophical or Chinese way of thinking." In light of the current infatuation with expressive architectural gestures--think Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid--it's tempting to argue that the world is catching up with China.

Not that China doesn't have some work to do. Overall, its education system still does little to inspire. And then there's the weight of government censorship (a heavily redacted Internet, for example), red tape, and all that nagging piracy--though Beijing is working on a national design policy that promises, officially at least, to better protect intellectual property rights while promoting new education initiatives. What's more, while the country has spectacularly leapfrogged into contemporaneity, the flip side, many Chinese will tell you, is that there's not much of a pop- or sub-culture foundation to build on.

Even here, however, the vacuum is filling fast. "Street culture is becoming the biggest influence in China," says a hip and prolific Shanghai designer who goes by the name Ji Ji. His branding and identity clients already include Nike, L'Oréal, and Shu Uemura, but the 35-year-old also has five stores: four for Shirt Flag, his T-shirt line known for ironic takes on Mao-era graphics, and one for Under Oath, a more architectural and conceptual fashion collection. "Right now, we're following the Western world, but we don't want to copy," he says. "I think we'll have our own street culture soon."

Or consider Da>Space. A year-old gallery and store in a former factory building in Shanghai, it has hosted everything from a life-size, apocalyptic take on an army tank to an extravaganza, called "I, China," that got more than 80 emerging artists and designers to personalize aspeciallycommissionedtoyfigure. Da>Space is entirely self-funded--no corporate sponsors allowed--which makes it an anomaly in this cash-hungry milieu. Sponsors tend to want to take over, explains Lin LinMai,oneofDa>Space's four 35-and-under partners, and while her design firm, Jellymon/JMGS, has counted Nike and ad giant Wieden+Kennedy as clients, she and her cohorts want to "go more slowly here," she says. "It takes time to develop a subculture before it gets latched onto the mainstream."

That's it: time. China just needs time. Yet in a country where everything is happening at warp speed, where neighborhoods and even skylines are transformed overnight, waiting around isn't an option. And so, from the grassroots to the very top, young Chinese are ramping up. Just think of Jennifer Wen Ma, as she spends her days and nights contemplating how to project an ascendant China at the Olympics next year. "It's a heavy burden--not only to show the world a new side of China, but the Chinese people are expecting a lot too," she says. "Everyone, it seems, is ready for a renaissance of creativity." They won't have long to wait.

Aric Chen is a contributing editor for I.D., Surface, and Interior Design magazines and regularly writes for The New York Times, Art + Auction, and other publications.

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