Nostalgia Negotiated: Revisiting What is Lost in Contemporary China Through Design

Cultural specificity is essential to an ethnic group and potentially the nation it belongs to. As a civilization with thousands of years’ history, China is home to an enormous network of diverse, rich culture. Contemporary Chinese society over time, has never been stable, it has frequently been influenced by different sociopolitical and historical aspects in the global culture. China’s tangible or intangible cultural heritage, as a result, is gradually fading away (“Top10: Fading Away”, 2011). Today much of it is being replaced by products of globalization. My research, focusing on the significance of traditional culture of China and the local culture of the Sichuan region, is rooted in an argument put forward by Hall (1996) and referenced in Chiang’s 2010 paper. It states that historical factors such as political movements or economic force heavily impact identity formation, and that people’s identity enables and effects the position they take when they speak (Chiang, 2010, p.39). Drawing on these assertions, my thesis starts from my Chinese and Chinese diaspora identities, and discusses traditional Chinese and Sichuanese cultural heritage in the flow of modernization. Concerned with national and regional identities, my work evolves out of observations of the mundane. The way in which Western perspectives and acts of Modernization have affected, misinterpreted, and changed aspects about the lifestyle of Chinese people since the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is ever present. Part of this work also relates to the Chinese diaspora in North America, a group I geographically belong to. A series of design projects serve as a means to reflect on locality and place, identity, globalization and modernization. Through design acts that preserve, modify, and replace these concerns, I demonstrate means of using visual communication design to reconsider the fading traditional culture in contemporary China, and reflect on the modernization of China.