The 2018 London Design Biennale, opened its doors on 4 September at Somerset House in London; therein 40 exhibitions from 40 countries, cities and territories highlight how design influences our emotions.
China’s entry has won accolades for the emotional part it has played in the everyday lives of Chinese people.
The exhibition called “The Memory Project of Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge”, focuses on the nation’s memory of the bridge and what it symbolises for the Chinese people.
The bridge is set to reopen soon after 2-plus years of renovation, celebrating its 50th anniversary.
Exhibit curator professor Lu Andong, from Nanjing University’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, told China Daily, “It is without [a] doubt the most important monument of 1960s and 1970s China. And without doubt a national symbol of the Chinese pathway to modernisation”.
With the theme of “Emotional States”, the expo has been designed to provoke a broad interpretation across design disciplines, with immersive and engaging installations that interrogate how design affects every aspect of people’s lives, and how it influences our very being, emotions and experiences.
Together, the participants’ responses to the theme will present an exciting laboratory of ideas that will investigate the important relationship between design, strong emotional responses and real social needs. Sustainability, migration and conflict, civic responsibility, pollution, water, social equality, and innovative solutions for issues in 21st-century life are just some of the big issues of our time being explored.
The Nanjing exhibition includes sounds that were piped into trains that crossed the bridge and are played through period radio sets. It explores how the bridge became a national symbol of technological achievement, its image disseminated through mass media, such as propaganda posters and low-cost photography, notes the Biennale website.
“Because this bridge was politically very important, it started to invade into everyday life, and to establish a very intimate relationship with everyone”, Lu was quoted as saying for Dezeen.
The Nanjing entry was awarded Honorable Mention for excellence in conception and delivery.
“Christopher Turner, artistic director of the London Design Biennale and one of the judges for its 2018 medals said the exhibit is “a great example of how history can inform and educate the present”, and that the jury was impressed with ‘the high, scholarly standard’ of the Nanjing entry”, reported the Daily Mail.
