Styling the Superpower
Once dismissed as unsophisticated, the Middle Kingdom is now a growing source of business for Hong Kong designers--and they want even more
By Liam Fitzpatrick/Hong Kong

Spring 2005 Style & Design
THE BIGGEST BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY in Alan Chan's life took him completely by surprise. For years, the Hong Kong designer scathingly dismissed the mainland-Chinese market as a nonstarter—a place where boorish industrialists in cheap suits defaulted on fees and stole original work. A fastidious, fashionable man with a neat goatee and an exquisitely appointed office, Chan could no more contemplate working in Hong Kong's smogbound hinterland than he could imagine using a gauche typeface or clashing color palette. But two commissions made him change his mind. The first was an elegant shopping and dining complex in Shanghai called Three on the Bund (it includes an Evian day spa designed by Chan, as well as a Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurant). The second was a nationwide rebranding project for Coca-Cola. In both cases, Chan found himself not among barbarians but in the company of aggressive, risk-taking executives who put their staid Hong Kong counterparts to shame. "This was shocking for me," he says, "to get the creative freedom there that we couldn't get here. So suddenly I started focusing on China, traveling there once a month. Then it became twice a month, then three times." And now? "Now more than half our business comes from mainland China, and that's happened in less than two years."

Chan is by no means the only Hong Kong designer looking upon the mainland Chinese market as a banquet to savor after years of local famine. You can barely move through the business-class lounges of Hong Kong International Airport without running into members of the city's design establishment as they brush up on their digital presentations and phrases in Mandarin while waiting for the morning shuttle to Wuhan or Nanjing. "Half my business is from the mainland, a quarter from Hong Kong and a quarter from elsewhere," says Gary Chang, an award-winning interior designer and architect, perhaps best known for the ultramodern Suitcase House he designed at the Commune by the Great Wall, a collection of designer villas in the shadow of China's most famous monument. Says Kan Tai-keung, whose company, Kan & Lau, has done branding for several Chinese companies: "We have increased our billings from China every year since 1997." Kevin Yeung, chairman of the Hong Kong Fashion Designers Association, says, "There is a huge market in China for us. China needs designers."

The reasons are simple. The world's next superpower must add value to its exports if it is to develop its standing in international markets, and good design is a crucial way of doing that. At the same time, China's domestic market is surging in sophistication: the burgeoning urban middle class is no longer satisfied with substandard goods or last year's models and expresses increasingly international aspirations. As style mediators between China and the global community, Hong Kong designers are uniquely placed to help in both areas. Granted, for most of its ephemeral history, Hong Kong has had no design language of its own. In the 19th century, its manufacturers simply aped the style of the neighboring Pearl River Delta—those willowy patterns and motifs familiar to aficionados of Chinese brush painting and ceramics. During Hong Kong's 20th century industrial boom—the era of plastic flowers, cheap transistor radios and flimsy toys—products were fashioned according to the dictates of Western importers. Not until the century's close did something like an indigenous style vernacular emerge. And when it did, it blended both Chinese tradition and modernist éclat in a new and successful form. Just think of the Day-Glo Mao jackets of Shanghai Tang (which, despite its name, is a Hong Kong, not Shanghai, company) or the cinematic mood- scapes of Wong Kar-wai.

For mainland clients, the appeal of Hong Kong design is not so much the Chinese qualities at its core as the internationalism in which it is cloaked, making it at once deeply familiar and enticingly foreign. Knowing this, Hong Kong designers play up their differences with China. "The advantage of keeping my headquarters in Hong Kong is that I am treated as an international designer," says Barry Ho, chairman of the Hong Kong Interior Design Association and head of his own practice. "We are middlemen," sums up Patrick Hui, a product designer who has consulted for multinationals wanting to sell to China, such as General Electric, as well as for Chinese firms intent on exporting to the West. "But I include us in the category of foreign designers because we have some elements from the West. It's a role Hong Kong has traditionally fulfilled."

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