Summer 2009
Scrapbook from China
In March, Robert Linsky and I went to China with fourteen MassArt [Massachusetts College of Art and Design] undergraduates. We travelled to Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Beijing, where we met with many designers, including Henry Steiner, Kan Tai-keung, Wang Xu and Xiao Yong. We also visited four art schools: Tsinghua, GAFA, CAFA and HK Polytech.
CAFA’s Professor Amy Gendler and I developed a three-day workshop project for our combined group: the MassArt visitors, eleven Chinese design students and three European students studying with Amy in her Spring semester, whom we divided into five mixed groups. We gave them a design brief to investigate the 798 art complex in Beijing.
Each group made six sequential digital ‘pages’ about their shared experience, and the 30 resulting pages have been combined into a digital document by one of my interactive students. The MassArt students also created visual journals and essays that reflected their intercultural experience.
Top: MassArt students in China. Photograph by Elizabeth Resnick.
First published in Eye no. 72 vol. 18 2009
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.
