Modern Asian Design 9781474296786, 9781474296779, 9781474296854, 9781474296847

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Modern Asian Design

Cultural Histories of Design Series editors: Grace Lees-Maffei of the University of Hertfordshire, UK and Kjetil Fallan of the University of Oslo, Norway The Cultural Histories of Design series presents rigorous and original research on the role and significance of design in society and culture, past and present. From a vantage point in the heart of the humanities, the series explores design as the most significant manifestation of modern and contemporary culture. Forthcoming titles Modern Asian Design by D. J. Huppatz of Swinburne University, Australia Norman Bel Geddes by Nicolas P. Maffei of Norwich University of the Arts, UK Soviet Critical Design by Tom Cubbin of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden Open Plan by Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler of Purdue University, USA

Modern Asian Design D.J. Huppatz

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © D. J. Huppatz, 2018 D. J. Huppatz has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

HB: 978-1-4742-9678-6 PB: 978-1-4742-9677-9 ePDF: 978-1-4742-9684-7 ePub: 978-1-4742-9686-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Huppatz, D. J., author. Title: Modern Asian design / by D.J. Huppatz. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018. | Series: Cultural histories of design | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2017043789 | ISBN 9781474296786 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Design–Social aspects–Asia. | Asia–Civilization. Classification: LCC NK1472 .H87 2018 | DDC 745.095–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043789 Series: Cultural Histories of Design Series editors: Grace Lees-Maffei and Kjetil Fallan Cover design by Louise Dugdale Cover image: Japan: Reijin music magazine (1930)/Pictures from History/Bridgeman Images Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Trademark Acknowledgments

viii x xi

Introduction

1



Asia in an expanded design history Paths to Asian modernity

4

1

Foundations, 1700–1850

13



Part I: China from China Part II: Textiles from India Part III: Modernization, globalization and design

13

6

21 28

Section I Paths to Modernity, 1850s–1930s

33

2

Elite Paths

35



Part I: Meiji Japan—Designing a modern state Part II: Siam and civilization Part III: Modernizing everyday life in Taishō Japan

35

3

Colonial Paths

57



Part I: Designing the British Raj Part II: Designing an Asian empire

57

45 52

71

vi Contents

4

Professional Paths

81



Part I: East meets west Part II: Shanghai modernists Part III: West meets east

81

5

Consumer Paths

101



Part I: The herald of civilization Part II: New patent medicines Part III: The department store

101

88 94

107 115

Section II Asian Modernity, 1940s–2000s

125

6

Postcolonial Design and the State

127



Part I: Chandigarh Part II: Designing the People’s Republic of China Part III: Singapore—Designing a postcolonial society

127

7

Design and Development

149



Part I: From domestic appliances to digital lifestyles Part II: Design for development

149

8

The Design Professional

171



Part I: Kenji Ekuan Part II: Minnette De Silva Part III: Kan Tai-Keung

171

9

Globalization and Consuming Asian Design

191



Part I: Rebranding banks in Hong Kong Part II: Asian lifestyle brands

191

134 141

161

177 182

201

Contents vii

Conclusion

209



210

Design history and modern Asian design

Notes Index

213 251

List of Illustrations

Figures I.1 Borobudur Temple, Java, Indonesia.

3

1.1 Porcelain Ewer, Ming dynasty, Jingdezhen, China, 1550–75, for export to India or the Middle East.

16

1.2 Willow pattern plate, blue and white porcelain produced by Doulton, Stoke-on-Trent, nineteenth century.

20

1.3 A seventeenth-century Mughal cotton textile painted with a floral pattern.

25

2.1 Rokumeikan Hall, designed by Josiah Conder, 1883.

43

2.2 Interior of the Chakri Throne Hall.

46

3.1 Mayo College, designed by Major C. Mant, Ajmer, Rajasthan, completed 1885.

62

3.2 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London: Central Avenue of the Indian Section, 1886.

66

3.3 Governor-General’s Office, Taipei, completed 1919, initial design by Uheiji Nagano.

73

3.4 Japan-British Exhibition in London, entrance to an Ainu village, 1910.

76

4.1 Frank Lloyd Wright, Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, designed c. 1913–20, opened 1922.

96

5.1 Advertisement for Singer Sewing Machines. National costume series features China, 1899.

103

5.2 Street tailors working at their Singer Sewing Machines, India, 1929.

104

5.3 Aw Boon Haw and some of the Tiger range of products.

113

5.4 Wing on Department Store, Shanghai.

122

List of illustrations ix

6.1 Laborers breaking rocks for concrete with residential apartments in the background, Chandigarh, 1958.

132

6.2 Employees of the Government Printing House, Beijing, pack copies of Mao’s Little Red Book, 1971.

140

6.3 Singapore HDB flats.

146

7.1 Konosuke Matsushita, founder of the Matsushita Electronics Corporation (later Panasonic), with products manufactured by the corporation.

153

8.1 Bank of China Hong Kong, logo designed by Kan Tai-Keung, 1981.

184

9.1 The Bank of China and Hongkong Bank.

198

9.2 MUJI Shanghai Huaihai 755 store, 2016.

203

Plates 1 The Tokyo Terminus of the new Tokyo-Yokohama Railway, 1872. 2 Chakri Maha Prasat, Grand Palace, Bangkok, 1876–82. 3 Cultural Revolution poster, “Greet the 1970s with the new victories of revolution and production,” 1970. 4 Zhiying Studio, Calendar Poster, Great Eastern Dispensary, Shanghai, 1930s. 5 Hisui Sugiura, poster for Mitsukoshi Department Store: The Renewal of the Western Building of the Main Store and Completion of the Shinjuku Branch, 1925. 6 Kikkoman soy sauce bottle, designed by Kenji Ekuan in 1960. 7 Kan Tai-Keung, poster: Exhibition of 13 Famous Hong Kong Artists, Nagoya, 1989. 8 Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Headquarters, Hong Kong.

Acknowledgments

Many people, books, and conferences have contributed to my thinking through this project, but I would like to single out a few particularly influential individuals and events. These are: John Clark’s seminar on Japanese modernism and his 1991 conference “Modernism and Postmodernism in Asian Art” at the Australian National University for first opening my eyes; Gloria Davies for mentoring me through my thesis on Hong Kong design in the mid-1990s; Katarina Posch and Frima Fox Hofrichter for the opportunity to first try these ideas out at Pratt Institute in 2005–8; and Siobhan for our many Asian adventures together. I would also like to thank Grace Lees-Maffei and Kjetil Fallan for their thoughtful comments on early drafts of this book, as well as their ongoing support and friendship. And, finally, thanks to Rebecca Barden (who first proposed this book) and Claire Constable at Bloomsbury for their patience and professionalism. This book is dedicated to Katarina Posch, an inspirational scholar of Japanese design history and friend. *** A section of Chapter 9 was published in the article “Globalising Corporate Identity in Hong Kong: Redesigning Two Banks,” Journal of Design History, 18:4, 2005, pp. 357–369. Thanks to Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce part of this article.

Trademark Acknowledgments Bank of China Limited registered in England Number 6193060. Registered Office: 1 Lothbury, London EC2R 7DB. Company registration number: 6193060. VAT number: GB 243 3157.

HSBC HSBC is owned by HSBC Holdings plc. HSBC Holdings plc is a public limited company registered in England and Wales under Company Register Number 617987 and with its registered office at 8, Canada Square, London, England E14 5HQ. VAT number: GB 365684514.

Kikkoman Kikkoman Trading Europe GmbH. Registered office: Unit 17, 7 Premier Park Road, Park Royal, London, NW10 7NZ. Registered in England and Wales No. FC021411. VAT number: 681632624.

Introduction

In the twenty-first century, Asian design is characterized by innovation and continuity. Consumers around the world have embraced products designed and manufactured in Asia by corporations such as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, Canon, Toshiba, Acer, and Hisense. But Asian design’s recent prominence is the result of a long process: a global exchange of ideas, materials, and people. Modern Asian Design maps this process from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is an introduction to modern Asian design’s historical development and its contemporary manifestations in the first decades of the so-called Asian Century. In the 1990s, the popular media term “Asian Century” encapsulated a projection that the region’s growing economic, political, and military power would “overtake” the United States and Europe in the twenty-first century. While this scenario may or may not eventuate, Asia’s “rise,” or more correctly, Asia’s “return” to the center of global affairs, certainly occurred as predicted. Japan’s status as a leading global power was already assured by the 1990s but over the next two decades, the staggering economic growth of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China, and India confirmed the idea of a region on the rise. By 2010, Asia had become central to both the production and consumption of manufactured goods.1 Despite this, the English-speaking world knows little about Asia’s long engagement as both producers and consumers of modern design. The region’s reputation remains as a place of tradition rather than innovation, or as the world’s “factory” that manufactures products designed elsewhere. Apple, for example, emblazoned their iconic iPods, iPhones, and iPads with “designed in California,” yet outsourced their production to Chinese factories. But at the same time, products “designed in Asia” have achieved global prominence. Japanese corporations such as Toyota and Sony, for example, have maintained a reputation for design innovation for decades, and, more recently, Korean corporations

2

Modern Asian Design

such as Samsung, LG, and Kia, and Chinese corporations such as Lenovo and Huawei, have established global recognition and large export markets. For an English-speaking reader, few resources provide a context in which to understand this recent rise of Asian design. With the exception of Japan, Asian nations have not appeared as central to modern design’s development, and, if they appear at all, it is as societies without notable designers or designed objects. To fill this gap, Modern Asian Design provides readers with a theoretical framework and a new approach to understanding modern design’s development in Asia. Rather than a singular Asian design history, it comprises a series of histories that identify and illuminate essential themes. Despite its use in this book’s title, “Asia” is a potentially problematic term. Geographically, Asia extends east from Europe to the Pacific Ocean, but its precise boundaries are fuzzy. Conceptually, “Asia” developed as an idea in European minds (and later in Asian minds).2 In this sense, “Asian” referred to implicit cultural sensibilities or characteristics that opposed European or “Western” ones. This is overly simplistic. Asia is comprised of diverse people, cultures, languages, and religions, tenuously linked by geographical proximity. Recent experiences within the European Union in trying to maintain collective economic, political, cultural, and other shared values have exposed the fragility of a singular Europe. A singular vision of Asia is no less fragile.3 Defining a shared design culture—a uniquely “Asian design”—is not the intention of this book. Instead, Asia serves as useful shorthand for a vast collection of people, objects, and ideas significantly underrepresented in design history. Rather than providing a comprehensive chronology of famous designers or iconic objects, Modern Asian Design presents a new historical model. Although the book’s overall structure is chronological and its case studies geographically focused, each section emphasizes global connections—both within Asia and between Asia, Europe, and the United States. However, Asian modernism is also specific. The shared experience of European colonialism, uneven modernization, and similar paths to nationhood connect many contemporary Asian countries and their design cultures. The title—Modern Asian Design—is intentionally provocative. It implies that there was, and continues to be, an Asian modernity with its own characteristics and history, a modernity independent of Europe. However, given the constant interaction, adaption, and adoption of ideas, materials, and people between Europe, Asia, and the United States in the modern era, relatively independent is more correct. The title contains two other important implications. First, Modern Asian Design suggests the possibility of other regional modernities—modern Latin American design or modern African design, for example. Second, it

Introduction 3

relativizes modern design: European design is no longer the founding or originary paradigm but one among many.4 And, as the following chapters illustrate, this book is not only a history of modern Asian design but also an alternative history of modern European and American design. Although inspired by recent scholarship in design history and Asian studies, there is also a personal dimension to Modern Asian Design. In 1997, on the island of Java, Indonesia, my journey into Asian design began with a moment of “enlightenment” while climbing Borobudur. Built in the ninth century, Borobudur is a Buddhist “temple-mountain,” over 100 meters square at the base and rising to 35 meters. Its stepped stone terraces are covered in intricate carved reliefs and bell-shaped stupas containing life-sized statues of the Buddha (Figure I.1). There I was, having recently finished a four-year degree specializing in art history and cultural studies at one of Australia’s most prestigious universities, standing on one of the most spectacular ancient monuments in the world. At university, I had learned a great deal about European culture—from Lascaux to the Eiffel Tower—but I had never heard of Borobudur. This ignorance drove my subsequent research on Asian design.5 As I later discovered, Borobudur is a revealing case study that illuminates a central insight of this book. Its ancient creators derived the temple-mountain’s design from an Indian Buddhist tradition but also drew upon Hindu monuments,

Figure I.1  Borobudur Temple, Java, Indonesia. Photograph credit: author.

4

Modern Asian Design

while local stone carvers drew upon Javanese models for the reliefs. A hybrid design, Borobudur was at once a local product of the Javanese Sailendra Dynasty, yet also a product of a larger cultural and spiritual sphere extending from India to the Indonesian archipelago. Falling into disuse with the rise of Islam in Java, the temple-mountain was “discovered” and restored by Dutch archeologists in the nineteenth century, adding a colonial layer to its history. During the 1950s, Indonesia’s first prime minister, Sukarno, promoted Borobudur as an important heritage site, adding a national layer, while further restoration and tourist interest resulted in a UNESCO World Heritage Site listing in 1992, adding a global layer. Beyond my initial “enlightenment,” researching Borobudur’s hybrid design and multilayered “life” served as further inspiration for contemplating Asian design.

Asia in an expanded design history This overview of modern Asian design is part of an ongoing project among design historians to expand and globalize the discipline.6 In doing this, Modern Asian Design incorporates a range of new approaches. As design historians moved from an art historical canon of styles, designers, and significant objects to greater consideration of design’s production, consumption, and mediation, a number of challenges arose.7 Perhaps the most difficult is devising new models for constructing this ever-expanding field of inquiry. This is a challenge taken up in Modern Asian Design. A significant hurdle in conceptualizing new models is design history’s preoccupation with a particular canon of designers and iconic objects.8 Design historians’ fixation on European modernist designers, objects, and theories is founded on an unstated idea that the vanguard of design naturally follows Western industrialization and socio-economic development. Narratives of modern design—typically following Nikolaus Pevsner’s initial blueprint in Pioneers of the Modern Movement—are based on a “diffusionist model” whereby modernism begins in Western Europe and diffuses outward to the rest of the world.9 However, in the past decade, design historians have suggested alternatives.10 Anna Calvera, for example, presented two possible models for globalizing design history. The first, she argues, comprises a common, large narrative of the World History of Design, open-minded enough to be shared by different regions or nations. It permits a research approach that works from the general to the particular. The second research direction aims at finding points and aspects to be compared between different local, or rather national, identities notable for their differences. This approach

Introduction 5

works from the particular to the general and, through sharing particularities, it should introduce new interpretative models (might we also call these larger narratives?) that are adapted to local realities.11

Recent surveys such as Victor Margolin’s two-volume World History of Design and Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber’s History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400–2000, adopted the first, “common, large narrative” model.12 Despite their comprehensive geographical coverage, neither adequately dealt with the global dimensions of design production and consumption. In this first model, there is little emphasis on the exchange of ideas, objects, and people between regions, countries, or cities. Calvera’s second approach, a comparative model of moving “from the particular to the general,” was an initial starting point for this book. Rather than envisage modern design’s development as a one-way flow from the Europe to Asia, Modern Asian Design presents an alternative model. The case studies that follow comprise an assemblage of regional and local adoptions and adaptations of modern ideas, technologies, techniques, and designed objects. The short case studies of Global Design History also followed a comparative approach by juxtaposing accounts of objects, people, and ideas in different contexts, and were an inspiration for this book.13 In addition to the comparative model, a “transnational” model, proposed by Yuko Kikuchi and Yunah Lee, suggests another promising new direction for design history.14 Recent scholarship on globalization and material culture has provided resources and methods for consideration by design historians. Given the broad geographical scope covered in this book, a combined regional and transnational approach seemed appropriate. For other parts of the globe, a regional grouping has been successful—Scandinavian design, for example, is a commonly used framework.15 However, because of the larger geographical scope of this study, a global dimension is also necessary. Recent progress by various scholars in compiling Asian design histories has also been crucial in creating a foundation for this overview. But significant gaps remain. There are numerous English-language publications on Japanese design, for example, but design historical resources for the rest of Asia are scattered and uneven.16 Language barriers are an immediate issue. Editors of the recent Journal of Design History series on East Asian Design Histories, Yuko Kikuchi, Yunah Lee, and Wendy Wong noted “the lack of resources and the actual objects themselves” as significant obstacles in developing design histories in East Asia (and this applies to Asia in general).17 They also highlighted the problem of simply adopting a theoretical model from European design

6

Modern Asian Design

history and filling it with Asian content. In proposing a new model, Modern Asian Design offers a potential solution to this problem. Beyond design history, other disciplines have provided both source material and methodological inspiration for this book. Over the past three decades, scholars have initiated several significant shifts in research related to material objects. First was anthropology’s “material turn” from the 1980s onward. Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of the “social life” of things, Igor Kopytoff’s “cultural biography of things,” and Daniel Miller’s studies of “material culture,” in particular, proposed new ways of analyzing people’s relationship to objects.18 Historians also took up this material challenge and research through objects—“material culture studies”—is now an interdisciplinary field in its own right.19 Historians with a particular interest in Asia such as Craig Clunas, Timothy Brook, and Susan B. Hanley responded to this shift with influential analyses of premodern Chinese and Japanese material cultures.20 Material objects and their design also feature as a significant focus in “actornetwork-theory” (ANT) in which sociologists and philosophers analyze the coupling of social and material relations.21 Here, scholars consider objects not in terms of their value but in terms of how they actively affect human life and social relations. Such analysis of people’s interaction with objects is beginning to have a significant effect on design history. Design historian Kjetil Fallan, for example, argued for “a greater emphasis on the relational and reciprocal dynamics of idea and object, mind and matter, ideology and practice in historical studies of design.”22 The design of everyday objects thus shapes human behavior. Finally, from the 1990s, the “global turn” across various research disciplines has affected our understanding of designed objects. In history, for example, scholars of the “early modern” period have analyzed the trajectories of everyday objects through trade and colonial networks. In adopting a global approach, they have created new ways of understanding how designed objects are circulated, mediated, and change meaning across various contexts.23 The three approaches briefly sketched here—material culture studies, ANT, and globalization studies— have all affected this study of Asian design.

Paths to Asian modernity Modern Asian Design comprises two sections that survey roughly eighty-year periods. Each period corresponds to a significant phase in the development of Asian design. Surveying the period from the 1850s to the 1930s, Section 1 maps four paths along which modern design cultures emerged, mediated by political and social elites, colonial elites, professional designers, and consumers. A series

Introduction 7

of case studies of specific objects, places, or people serve to illustrate what I have termed these “paths to modernity.” Surveying the period from the 1940s to the present, Section 2 maps various modern design cultures via a parallel structure. For the post-war era, we consider Asia’s newly independent political and social elites, international institutions, professional designers, and consumers. The differences in terminology reflect the different historical conditions of each period. Comprising four interacting “paths,” this model is a means of mapping modern Asian design in its historical context. Essentially, the first and second paths illustrate the top-down transfer of modernity by politically powerful people and institutions, while the third and fourth paths illustrate a bottom-up transfer by design professionals and consumers. However, these paths are not exclusive, as will become clear with the various interactions between them over the following chapters. In mapping the development of modern Asian design in this way, we can better understand the interactions between the production, consumption, and mediation of modern manufactured objects, systems, and spaces.

Foundations In Asia, as elsewhere, modern design is characterized by its continuities with the past as well as its ruptures. The long history of global interaction and exchange of new materials, techniques, people, and objects is central to the rise of modernity. In order to illustrate these complex processes, Chapter 1 focuses on two “early modern” designed products: Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles. The early modern period (c. 1400–c. 1800) was prior to the spread of technologies and systems such as steam power, telegraphic communications, and mechanized printing. The relatively equal exchange between Asians and Europeans during this period profoundly shifted with later European empire-building. By first examining “early modern Asian design,” we can better understand the impact of later mechanization, modern processes, systems, and ideas. Reconsidering porcelain and textiles as mass-produced, designed objects rather than as traditional “craft” or valuable antiques is the first challenge. Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles, while not manufactured by machines, displayed several attributes associated with modern design. Rather than unchanging and “traditional,” both were subject to innovation in methods of mass production, materials, and aesthetics. Designers of both adapted their products to appeal to foreign consumers and changes in taste. Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles were global products, used by people across Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Finally, Chapter 1 concludes with the transfer of design knowledge from Asia to Europe and its consequences in both regions.

8

Modern Asian Design

Section I: Paths to modernity, 1850s–1930s From the mid-nineteenth century, cultures across Asia underwent a process of modernization. New technologies, materials, techniques, and lifestyles profoundly affected producers and consumers of everyday objects. Section I, “Paths to Modernity,” maps how this process occurred from the 1850s to the 1930s across various Asian contexts. The four paths, corresponding to Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5, constitute the means by which modernization affected Asian design cultures at various scales and speeds. The first, “Elite Paths,” describes changes “from above” as political and social elites initiated modernization programs. The second, “Colonial Paths,” describes an alternative top-down process characterized by selective, colonial modernization. The third, “Professional Paths,” describes how individuals and institutions adopted new practices in response to modernization. The fourth, “Consumer Paths,” describes how Asian consumers adopted and adapted modern products, infrastructure, and systems to suit their own needs. Divided into three parts, Chapter 2 analyzes two different Elite Paths: Japan and Siam (Thailand). In the Meiji Period (1868–1912), the Japanese government’s rapid adoption of new transport and communication systems such as railways and the telegraph, as well as public architecture and exhibitions, created the infrastructure for modern Japan. In contrast, Siam’s path to modernity was less comprehensive. From the 1870s, King Chulalongkorn’s adoption of European material culture and architecture illustrates the Siamese elite’s effort to integrate the new and foreign. Ultimately, Siam’s integration of modern infrastructure was far less comprehensive than Japan’s. The chapter’s final section returns to the Japanese elite’s ongoing reform program through examining “lifestyle improvement” associations and exhibitions in the 1920s and 1930s. Colonialism was integral to the transfer of modernity in Asia. Chapter 3, “Colonial Paths,” examines case studies of how modern design operated within British and Japanese imperialism. In both, new systems such as railways and telegraphs, new architecture, and urban design were both colonial and modern. The first part analyzes the integration of modern infrastructure, systems, and technologies into British colonial India in the late nineteenth century. The second part considers how Japanese imperialism constituted an alternative path to modernity for its near neighbors Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria. Importantly, the colonial experience profoundly influenced design cultures not only in the colonies but also in the imperial centers. Modern design, as popularly understood in Britain, constituted one half of an unstated colonial binary comprising

Introduction 9

mass-manufactured British products on one side and traditional craft products on the other. The professional designer also played a significant role in mediating modernity in Asia. Chapter 4, “Professional Paths,” analyzes the development of modern design professions and institutions through case studies from Japan and China. In Meiji Japan, professional architects and designers began to use modern materials, techniques, and styles, adapted to local conditions. In Shanghai, the advent of graphic design as a profession in the 1920s and 1930s occurred within quite different conditions of commercial practice. And the final part of this chapter considers professional exchanges between European, American, and Japanese designers, from Christopher Dresser’s visit as a foreign expert in 1876 to Frank Lloyd Wright’s ongoing relationship with Japan. Like the Elite Path, the Professional Path describes an active process of modernization (rather than one imposed by colonial powers) but on a much smaller scale. Imported products shape everyday lives and experiences, sometimes in unexpected ways. Too much design historical research has focused on European- and American-designed objects exported to the colonies or peripheries, reducing design’s complexity to a one-way transfer that privileges Western innovation over local adaptation. However, a new system of modern advertising, branding, and marketing, adapted to local contexts, accompanied foreign products and ideas. With these issues in mind, Chapter 5, “Consumer Paths,” analyzes the Singer sewing machine, patent medicines, and department stores as modern phenomena adopted and adapted by Asian entrepreneurs and consumers.

Section II: Asian modernity, 1940s–2000s After the Second World War, conditions in Asia changed dramatically, as did the relationships between Asia, Europe, and the United States. Decolonization reconfigured global trade and patterns of exchange. New technologies and increasing household consumption reshaped everyday life. For Asian design, these changes created profound ruptures yet also presented unique opportunities. The paths described above for the period from the 1850s to the 1930s are also applicable to the post-war era but require some alterations. As in Section I, the first two chapters of Section II correspond to top-down modernization processes initiated by new national leaders, institutions, and corporations. The final two chapters analyze the role of professional designers and consumers in the post-war era.

10

Modern Asian Design

With the retreat of colonial powers from Asia after the war, postcolonial governments sought new paths to modernity. Chapter 6, “Postcolonial Design and the State,” analyzes modern design’s role in nation-building in three contrasting cases. The first, Le Corbusier’s design of the Indian city of Chandigarh in the 1950s, documents the successes and failures of a particularly influential modernist project. The second, the visual propaganda of Maoist China in the 1960s, documents the communist state’s use of visual imagery through mass-produced books and posters. The third, Singapore’s rapid modernization through architecture and urban design in the 1960s and 1970s, analyzes how the modern state used design to shape behavior and mold a particular lifestyle. Post-war changes in technology and a new wave of globalization changed conceptions of what role design might play in Asian socio-economic growth. Chapter 7, “Design and Development,” maps two alternate paths forged in Asian nations from the 1950s to the 1980s. In the first, Japanese designers led the region in developing sophisticated domestic appliances, electronic devices, and automobiles. In the second, Indian designers initiated an alternative model for design in developing countries. In India, designers questioned the uncritical importation of foreign ideas of development, industrialization, and technology, forging a renewed interest in design as a social service. From the 1950s, design was established as a legitimate profession in many Asian nations. Chapter 8, “The Design Professional,” comprises three case studies of influential designers who worked within different contexts. The first, Japanese designer Kenji Ekuan, played a significant role in defining Japanese industrial design, blending high-tech materials and processes with Buddhist philosophy. In her architectural practice during the same time period, Sri Lankan Minnette De Silva consciously blended local materials and ideas with modern processes and technologies. Finally, Hong Kong graphic designer Kan Tai-Keung’s engagement with traditional visual culture in the 1970s and 1980s created a distinctive aesthetic that has proved influential in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. More recently, the rise of Asian brands reflects an ongoing dilemma of globalization—how to mediate between universal and local cultures. Chapter 9, “Globalization and Consuming Asian Design,” analyzes this issue first through analysis of the rebranding programs of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and the Bank of China during the 1980s and 1990s. The second part documents the rise of Asian lifestyle brands, particularly MUJI’s rise as a global phenomenon in the early twenty-first century. In these more recent case studies, the continuities and differences of contemporary Asian design to historically earlier models of production and consumption become clear.

Introduction 11

Finally, the conclusion reflects on Modern Asian Design as a potential model for future design histories. Rather than a linear progression from Europe to Asia, design history is better characterized by global interactions, adoption, and adaptation. As an ongoing condition, globalization implies shared values and principles—although for designers, the questions of which values and principles and how universal they are—remain crucial contemporary questions. In Asia, as elsewhere, modernity is best understood as an ambiguous, uneven, and incomplete project.

Chapter 1 Foundations, 1700–1850

Between 1700 and 1850, goods traded within Asia and from Asia to the rest of the world were mostly “raw” commodities. Spices, grains, tea, and precious metals required minimal human intervention. But two widely traded goods—Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles—were exemplary Asian “designed” products. Unlike spices or silver, porcelain and textiles were subject to innovation in manufacture, appearance, and use. As well as being useful, a Chinese porcelain cup or an Indian cotton dress acquired abstract meanings as expressions of status, social cohesion, or identity. By situating porcelain and textiles within a local context of specialized design activity and a global context of circulating commodities, we can appreciate them as instances of “early modern” Asian design.

Part I: China from China In 1698, French Jesuit priest François Xavier d’Entrecolles arrived in Canton to begin his missionary work. Before long, his superiors in France sent D’Entrecolles to Jingdezhen in China’s Jiangxi province to engage what would be termed today “industrial espionage.”1 That is, he was given the task of discovering the secret of how to produce porcelain. Drawing upon personal observation, local converts, and Chinese written sources, D’Entrecolles’ 1712 and 1722 letters to his superiors in France were the earliest detailed sources of information for Europeans about Jingdezhen’s porcelain production. But, despite D’Entrecolles’ efforts, French potters could not replicate the Chinese product. Chinese porcelain was renowned for its brilliant surface, strength, durability, and superior thermal qualities. Fired at an extremely high temperature, its raw materials—porcelain stone and kaolin (china clay)—were abundant around Jingdezhen. The technology and knowledge required to produce porcelain was accumulated over a thousand years through experimentation with clays, kilns, and glazes. Certainly by the Eastern Han Dynasty (206 BC to AD 220),

14

Modern Asian Design

Chinese potters had perfected the technique. Driven by Imperial commissions, Jingdezhen developed as a center of porcelain innovation through continual improvements in kiln construction and firing techniques, as well as experiments with different materials, forms, and decorations. Jingdezhen’s famous “blueand-white” porcelain, comprising a translucent white body covered with cobalt blue underglaze decorations, was widely considered as technically unsurpassed. Although it was not the only porcelain center in China, Jingdezhen housed the official Imperial kilns as well as numerous private kilns. In 1712, D’Entrecolles estimated Jingdezhen’s population at 100,000, and described an industrial city bustling with activity, “up to three rows of boats, one behind the other” lining the river port waiting to load finished porcelain or unload timber for the kilns. The spectacle was clearly impressive: The whirling flames and smoke that rise in different places make the approach to Jingdezhen remarkable for its extent, depth and shape. During a night entrance, one thinks that the whole city is on fire, or that it is one large furnace with many vent holes. Perhaps these encircling mountains form a proper situation for the production of porcelain.2

Jingdezhen was not only a concentrated production center but also part of a larger transport and marketing network, “a place of convergence of the interests and experience of manufacturers, consumers and administrators from within the realm, as well as merchants and representatives of consumers from the wider world.”3 Carefully packaged in Jingdezhen, porcelain was transported via barge and boat along rivers and canals north to Beijing and Nanjing or south to Canton (Guangzhou) for export abroad.4 Large Imperial commissions, particularly during the Ming Dynasty (1368– 1644), meant that mass production and standardization had evolved as necessities. By 1700, porcelain production was so specialized that twenty people worked on a single piece before it was fired the first time; then an additional seventy worked at polishing, decorating, and glazing it.5 In the Tao Shuo (a “description of Chinese pottery and porcelain”) published in 1774, the Chinese official Chu Yen documented this specialized process: The different kinds of round ware painted in blue are each numbered by the hundred and thousand. If the painted decoration upon every piece is not exactly alike, the set will be irregular and spotted. For this reason the men who sketch the outlines learn sketching, but not painting; those who paint study only painting, not sketching; by this means their hands acquire skill in their own particular branch of work, and their minds are not distracted.6

Foundations, 1700–1850 15

From the manual labor of kneading clay and kiln loading to more specialized skills such as mold making and painting, repetition and standardization characterized porcelain production in Jingdezhen. Standardization was not unique to the Chinese porcelain industry. For centuries, in various industries including bronze production, architecture, printing, and painting, “the Chinese devised production systems to assemble objects from standardized parts.”7 In contrast to pre-industrial European pottery production, based in a workshop presided over by a master craftsman, Chinese porcelain production operated more like a modern industrial factory. Assembling objects from standardized parts and repetition were its fundamental production principles.8 To achieve this, Jingdezhen’s large workforce was structured around a division of labor whereby each worker developed a specialized skill and adhered to daily output requirements. Such an industry also required a high level of organization. By 1700, Jingdezhen porcelain production was similar to later industrial factory production in other ways. It had achieved technical progress, for example, expanded its markets both at home and abroad, and utilized a large, hired workforce. Although private kilns existed, the porcelain industry “was basically one of small producers controlled by merchant capital,”9 and these were often required to fulfill large Imperial commissions. Guilds, organized by kinship relationships, regulated the labor market and profits went to merchants or to officials as tributes. Despite its factory-like processes, the Jingdezhen porcelain industry lacked the economic means for accumulation and creating large surpluses.10 Ultimately, the city’s viability depended on Imperial patronage. Although not quite a modern industrial center, Jingdezhen was not a typically conservative craft center either. Historian Robert Finlay argues that “[v]irtuosity and flexibility were as essential for the prosperity of the porcelain city as standardization and mass production.”11 Particularly from the Ming Dynasty onward, Chinese potters adopted forms and decorative motifs from various sources to appeal to different markets. Designing products for both the Chinese emperor’s court and for distant cultures of which they knew very little, Jingdezhen’s potters needed to be innovative and responsive to changing tastes. By the time of D’Entrecolles’ letter, Jingdezhen kilns produced luxurious Imperial commissions, foreign commissions from Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, and everyday objects for the local market.

Designing Chinese porcelain As well as its technical quality, the aesthetic diversity of Jingdezhen porcelain was unsurpassed. From simple bowls to elaborate sculptural figurines, porcelain was created in not only the famous “blue and white” but in various monochrome

16

Modern Asian Design

and polychrome schemes too. In 1815, Chinese scholar Lan Pu described the variety and changes in design: “Foreign vessels are specially manufactured for export and sold by merchants in Canton. Foreign devils fill up their markets with them. Their shapes are very odd and every year different designs are wanted.”12 For foreigners from Isfahan to Amsterdam, Jingdezhen potters created unusual forms and decorative motifs. They designed large serving platters and ewers for Islamic consumers in India and the Middle East (Figure 1.1), based on metal

Figure 1.1  Porcelain Ewer, Ming dynasty, Jingdezhen, China, 1550–75, for export to India or the Middle East. Getty Images/Heritage Images/Editorial #: 464495417/Collection: Hulton Archive.

Foundations, 1700–1850 17

ewers, for example, or beer mugs and flat-edged plates for Europeans. None of these products were used in China at that time. It is almost impossible to attribute the design of a particular porcelain object to a single individual. However, we do know of various individuals—the emperor, local officials, merchants, and foreign agents—who commissioned specific forms or decorative motifs and a little about how they went about it. Under Emperor Yongzheng (1723–36), for example, “Designs drawn on paper stipulating shapes, glazes, and ornaments were transmitted by the [Imperial Household] Department to Jingdezhen for manufacture.”13 Wooden or wax models or, occasionally, original classical wares from the Imperial collection accompanied such drawings. But it seems that even designing porcelain for the Emperor was not considered specialized enough to constitute a separate “profession.”14 Foreign orders were filled via intermediary merchants or agents who provided sketches, engravings, sample wares, or wooden models.15 Designs included Christian iconography, popular prints, and coats of arms. The best-documented examples are by artists who created designs for the biggest porcelain exporter in the early eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde OostIndische Compagnie, or VOC). In the 1730s, for example, the VOC commissioned painter Cornelis Pronk to produce colored drawings and models for porcelain, ironically in an “Oriental” style. Pronk’s drawings were sent from Amsterdam to Canton, then on to Jingdezhen where they were used to manufacture dinner services, tea services, vases, and chimney-piece sets. Later, the VOC employed a specialist designer in Canton, Willem Tros, who resided there designing and ordering porcelain for nine years.16

Consuming porcelain For over two centuries, foreign kings, queens, sultans, and emperors coveted and collected Chinese porcelain. Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, for example, sultans of the Ottoman Empire amassed over 10,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. The Mughal Emperors, who ruled India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were also avid collectors, and Spain’s Philip II, whose maritime empire encircled the globe at the end of the sixteenth century, had Europe’s biggest porcelain collection. In Europe, the close association of China with fine ceramics was such that that “blue and white” tea sets, dinner services and vases were known collectively as “china” (regardless of their origin). Indeed, Jingdezhen “blue and white” was so well known by 1700 that historian Craig Clunas described it in retrospect as the first “global ‘brand.’”17

18

Modern Asian Design

Most eighteenth-century Chinese porcelain on display in museums today is of the finest quality, designed for the Chinese emperor’s court, as gifts to foreign rulers or as luxurious commodities. The voluminous scholarship devoted to these valuable pieces makes it difficult to appreciate the ordinariness of so much porcelain.18 Shipwreck sources are particularly useful for illustrating this. A Chinese junk discovered off the coast of southern Vietnam in 1998, for example, provides a glimpse into “everyday” porcelain mass produced for export. Most likely en route to Batavia, the junk sank sometime between 1725 and 1735 with almost 130,000 pieces of porcelain. Although most of this cargo was likely destined for Amsterdam, some objects, such as kendis (communal drinking vessels) and ewers, were clearly intended for Islamic consumers in Southeast Asia or the Middle East. The cargo of another wreck, the Geldermalsen, which sank en route from Canton to Amsterdam in 1752, was the subject of an extremely detailed analysis.19 Among the 150,000 pieces of porcelain recovered, the designs are limited in terms of form—19,535 coffee cups and saucers, for example, and 63,623 teacups and saucers. The standardized system of decoration comprised “a limited repertoire of distinct motifs—such as peonies, pavilions, fishing boats, or rows of flying birds.”20 The interchangeable motifs embody values of the Chinese literati—bamboo and rock for steadfastness, the simple life of fishermen, peonies for prosperity, for example—although such iconography was presumably not widely understood by foreign consumers.21 Certainly the volume of these cargoes confirm that Chinese porcelain was no longer just available to just the European aristocracy. And the volume was increasing. According to Finlay, “From the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, the VOC imported about 43 million pieces of porcelain, while the English, French, Swedish, and Danish East India Companies shipped at least 30 million.”22 By the time of D’Entrecolles’ letters, Chinese porcelain was no longer an aristocratic collectable, but a functional (if luxurious) commodity available to the increasingly wealthy European middle class. By the early eighteenth century, European critics noted the spread of la maladie de porcelain, Porzellankrankheit, or the “porcelain disease” among the middle classes. Increasing porcelain imports from China was becoming an issue of national economic importance, and another reason why rulers such as Augustus of Saxony and France’s Louis XIV doggedly pursued the secrets of its production.23 In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, Chinese porcelain’s popularity reflected changing culinary and etiquette habits. New drinks such as tea, coffee, and chocolate and a fashion for individualized (rather than communal) dining created a demand for new tableware.24 For hot drinks, for example, imported porcelain

Foundations, 1700–1850 19

cups and pots (with their superior thermal qualities) replaced pewter tankards and earthenware mugs. Beyond its utilitarian function, porcelain was also part of a European imaginary, connecting a new drink, tea, with a teacup made in China. The brilliant white surface painted with exotic blue peonies or dragons “created its own world of ideas.”25 In such “imagined spaces,” a middle-class European consumer might encounter “China” via images on Jingdezhen porcelain. Its reputation as an aristocratic luxury also meant that porcelain became an item of display within the middle-class European home. The cult of “chinoiserie,” at its height during the eighteenth century, resulted in a rage for all things Oriental, even products designed in Europe in imitation of a real or imagined China (or a generalized exotic “Orient”).26 The European imitation of Chinese forms and decorative motifs occurred across the decorative arts—from wallpaper designs, tapestries, silverware, and furniture to Chinese pagoda-style garden pavilions. Like porcelain, in Europe, China was exotic.

Imitation and influence For centuries, Chinese porcelain had a significant impact on many ceramic traditions and its forms and decoration were widely imitated. Dutch potters produced tin-glazed earthenware known as Delftware, for example, while Ottoman and Safavid potters produced their own imitations of “blue-and-white.” However, both producers and consumers of these imitations did not generally understand the Chinese visual language and symbols they imitated. This resulted in some odd cross-cultural designs. The “Willow Pattern,” for example, a popular British design, comprised pseudo-Chinese motifs including a pagoda, bridge, fishing boat, and birds. Transfer printed in Staffordshire from the 1790s, manufacturers such as Wedgwood made “willow pattern” imitation Chinese porcelain throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Figure 1.2).27 For European manufacturers, Chinese porcelain represented a technological challenge. Using alternative materials, Europeans could produce passable imitations, but they could not reproduce “true porcelain.” The problem was “one of fundamentally scientific character”—in eighteenth-century terms, a problem for alchemists.28 At the same time as D’Entrecolles was in Jingdezhen collecting information, alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger was working on the problem on behalf of his patron, renowned porcelain collector Augustus of Saxony. In 1708, Böttger worked out the formula and the Royal Saxon Porcelain Manufactory at Meissen opened two years later. Although Augustus tried to keep it secret, other royal factories such as Sèvres in France soon began manufacturing “true” porcelain. Over thirty such factories were established in the first half of the

20

Modern Asian Design

Figure 1.2 Willow pattern plate, blue and white porcelain produced by Doulton, Stoke-onTrent, nineteenth century. Getty Images/Credit: Science & Society Picture Library/Editorial #: 90779280/Collection: SSPL.

eighteenth century, but European production was limited by access to kaolin and by royal patrons who sought to control supply, conditions, and competition. This delayed the impact on Jingdezhen’s export trade until the nineteenth century. In East Asia, knowledge of porcelain production spread much earlier. Korea’s Choson court, for example, produced its own version of “blue and white” in the seventeenth century.29 In 1592, Korean potters kidnapped by Japanese invaders introduced porcelain production to Japan. In addition to supplying the local market, Japanese producers in Arita exported their own version of “blue and white” from the 1620s, including specific pieces for the Dutch market. In one particular example, Japanese potters used a Cornelis Pronk design circulating in China. This Japanese imitation of a Chinese product based on a Dutch drawing (which was initially based on a Chinese theme) illustrates the imitation, exchange, and cultural synthesis of early modern design.

The decline of Jingdezhen Accounts of China by European missionaries and travelers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries generally highlighted Chinese cultural superiority.30 The highly refined, carefully designed everyday objects such as porcelain were

Foundations, 1700–1850 21

objects of envy. On the Chinese side, there was little doubt on this point—China was literally Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom—and it needed nothing from foreigners. The emperors considered foreign trade as a tool of diplomacy rather than an engine of national economic growth. Even in the early Qing, it existed “to extend benefits to men from afar and nourish barbarians of the four corners.”31 Regulations placed on trade during the early eighteenth century culminated in a 1759 edict restricting foreign trade to a single port, Canton (Guangzhou).32 For the emperors, designing porcelain for export to foreign lands was never considered an important activity. By the early nineteenth century, China’s porcelain trade to Europe was declining for a number of reasons. First, Europeans could now make Jingdezhen-quality porcelain in Europe, without transportation costs and risks.33 Second, consumer tastes had shifted from Oriental exoticism to a Classical revival. Third, English ceramics producers, particularly Wedgwood, devised new formulas, such as his famous creamware (made of white-firing clay and flint, rather than kaolin) and utilized new technologies such as steam engines and new techniques such as transfer printing. Mass-produced tableware was cheaper and easier to manufacture. Meanwhile, late Qing China was in political and economic turmoil. Increased pressure from European powers for trade concessions resulted in the First Opium War with Britain (1839–42) and internal power struggles destabilized the kingdom. During the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), fighting destroyed most of Jingdezhen’s kilns. Once rebuilt, Jingdezhen continued to produce porcelain for the Chinese market but was never again the export center it had once been. Remarkably, foreign ceramics and new mechanized processes had little effect on Jingdezhen’s porcelain production.34 Once renowned for innovation and technical superiority, by the nineteenth century, China’s porcelain industry was no longer a global leader.

Part II: Textiles from India If Chinese porcelain was the most important “designed” product in pre-industrial East Asia, textiles were the South Asian equivalent. Up until the nineteenth century, Indian cloth, particularly painted and printed cotton, was unsurpassed in quality, large-scale production, and price. As in the Chinese porcelain industry, the Indian ability to design textiles for different export markets and adapt to changes in taste was crucial to its success. India’s advantages in textile design included highly specialized skills and knowledge in spinning, weaving, dyeing, and printing, as well as access to unique dyes. Like Chinese porcelain, consumers used Indian textiles in various ways—as luxurious fashion in Europe

22

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or as currency in West Africa, for example, as well as for everyday clothing and home furnishing. As Chinese trade dominated the South China Sea in the early modern period, Indian trade dominated the Indian Ocean.35 India’s biggest export was textiles, especially coarse cottons, but also luxurious printed and painted cottons, muslins, and silks. Over centuries, the major textile centers—Gujarat, Bengal, and along the Coromandel Coast—developed sophisticated processes and systems to enable mass production for export. Before the arrival of European ships in the sixteenth century, Indian, Arab, and Persian merchants sailed east to Malacca, where they traded textiles for spices or Chinese silk and porcelain, or west to Aden and Jeddah, where they traded textiles for the African or Mediterranean markets. However, the entry of the English East India Company (established 1600) and the Dutch East India Company, or VOC (established 1602), into the Indian Ocean trade had profound effects on the Indian textile industry. The English and Dutch companies began to exclude or regulate their competition, and the volume of trade between India and Europe grew exponentially. The VOC established “factories” in Gujarat and on the Coromandel Coast specifically to source Indian textiles. In Southeast Asia, Indian textiles were the medium of exchange for spices. By the mid-eighteenth century, the VOC “warehouses in Batavia (now Jakarta) stocked between 500,000 and 1,000,000 items of cloth, the vast majority of which was of Indian origin.”36 This intra-Asian textile trade became as important as trade with Europe and new markets such as the Americas.37 Indian textiles were integrated into an increasingly complex and global circulation of commodities. For Southeast Asians and Europeans alike, the appeal of Indian printed cotton textiles was multifaceted. Cotton was light, easy to wash, and comfortable to wear. The patterns were bright, colorfast, and visually distinctive. For seventeenthcentury Britons who wore wool and linen, for example, imported Indian cotton textiles brought about a revolution in fashion and furnishing. Indeed, the variety of vivid colors, exotic patterns, and lighter fabrics produced in India changed consumer taste in many cultures. Globally, by the late eighteenth century, “South Asia accounted for approximately a quarter of the world’s textile output and almost certainly a larger percentage of the world’s seaborne trade in textile.” India, argue historians Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, “clothed the world.”38

Designing Indian textiles As with Chinese porcelain, Indian textile production was extremely specialized. Creating a finished piece of cloth might involve up to twenty different stages, from

Foundations, 1700–1850 23

preparing, spinning, and weaving the raw cotton to dyeing, painting, printing, or embroidering decorative patterns. From gold-embroidered royal robes to plain woven, coarse cotton for slave garments, the range was incredibly varied. Indian dyes, particularly indigo for blues and the chay plant or madder plant for reds, produced intense colors. A vast repertoire of fixing techniques meant that India led the world in dyeing technology. This specialized knowledge about spinning, weaving, dyeing, painting, and printing was passed down orally from generation to generation of artisan families. Identifying an individual designer of a single piece of Indian fabric is impossible. Over centuries, various regions developed specializations in particular types of fabric, designs, or techniques. The mordant or resist-dyeing technique, typical on the Coromandel Coast, provides a brief insight into the design and production process. Raw cotton was first spun and woven into plain cloth in one of the specialist weaving villages in the hinterland. This involved the use of simple machines such as the charka, or spinning wheel, and wooden weaving looms.39 After bleaching and preparation, artisans from another village would draw or stencil a pattern with charcoal onto the cloth, and the outline was then painted with mordant (a fixative agent that helps dyes adhere to the fibers) using a kalam, or bamboo pen. Specialist dyers then immersed the painted cloth in a dye vat, producing colorfast outlines. They repeated this process up to a dozen times before the cloth was rinsed and polished to a shiny surface.40 Finally, the finished cloth was graded, marketed, and traded. Although various artisans produced a single piece of cloth, merchants and agents also contributed to its design. East India Company merchants, for example, commissioned cloth of particular quality, dimensions, colors, patterns, and decorative motifs. As early as 1662, English East India Company agents supplied Indian producers with printed images and detailed instructions on colors, patterns, and quality. An early account by French East India Company agent Georges Roques, written in Ahmedabad in 1678, described the commissioning and woodblock printing process. After selecting cloths, Roques writes, You ask the painter for a selection of prints from his blocks, on paper, for they have these and have used them for a long time past. If one pleases you, mark it and write the number of courges [a standard comprising 20 pieces of cloth] that he should make from this design. If he has none which suit you, lend him some of your own, on condition that he does not use them except upon your cloths.41

Roques advised future agents to supervise each production stage carefully to ensure quality. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Dutch and English

24

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East India Companies, the biggest traders in textiles, increased their control over these design and production processes.42 Decorating coarse cloth was a highly specialized aspect of production. Some Gujarati textile designers, for example, specialized in repetitive, geometric, and floral motifs for Muslim consumers, while others designed figurative decorations for Southeast Asian consumers. The European East India Companies quickly learned the importance of cultural, regional, and religious differences. The design of textiles involved more than simply drawing geometric patterns for Middle Eastern consumers and elephant patterns for Indonesians. Decorative patterns also needed to fit specific dimensions for use as sarongs, sashes, or for ceremonial cloth (Figure 1.3).

Consuming Indian textiles As with Chinese porcelain, Indian textiles performed different functions in different cultures. Although cotton-growing regions such as Java, Thailand, and Cambodia had their own textile traditions, the elite of these cultures coveted quality Indian textiles. Indian designers, for example, developed patterns specifically for the Thai royal family. In Malay and Indonesian cultures, sumptuary laws prohibited certain types of dress and fabric, and traditionally, only the nobility wore imported Indian cottons. But the volume of Indian cotton cloth exported to Southeast Asia (1.7 million pieces per year in the early seventeenth century) suggests it was not only a luxury product for elite clothing.43 Beyond clothing, Indian cloth was “a crucial part of the status game of most Southeast Asian societies,” and used in weddings, births, funerals, and gift exchanges.44 In West Africa, Indian textiles had not only “use value” but also “served a critical and wide-spread function as currency in a largely non-monetized world.”45 Jambusar, in Gujarat, produced the majority of African-bound textiles. Regional differences in West African cultures could be subtle, meaning merchants needed to keep up with local differences and changes in taste and communicate this back to Indian designers. In Africa, Indian textiles were used in initiation ceremonies, as gifts to and from rulers, and as payment for troops or debts. As in Southeast Asia, imported textiles functioned as currency and a means of storing wealth. In Europe, colorful and shiny Indian cotton textiles, known as “chintz” were used as wall hangings, bed curtains, quilts, upholstery, and women’s dresses. The exotic Indian designs contributed to the Oriental taste of the eighteenth century (noted above with Chinese porcelain). In fact, Indian textiles were so popular

Foundations, 1700–1850 25

Figure 1.3 A seventeenth-century Mughal cotton textile painted with a floral pattern. Getty Images/Stringer/Editorial #: 109394197/Collection: Hulton Archive.

in Europe that various European governments issued legislation specifically to block imports. In response to protests by local weavers, for example, the English parliament tried to ban the importation of Indian cotton and silk fabrics in 1700. In similar responses, France, Spain, and Prussia also implemented import bans on Indian cotton fabrics in the early eighteenth century, although for the most part, trading companies found ways to circumvent these bans.46

26

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Imitation and influence Although Indian artisans were renowned for their ability to replicate decorative motifs commissioned by agents, they also worked within a traditional visual language. Some of this language was transferred to other cultures. The “paisley” pattern is perhaps the most well-known example. Originally of Persian origin, Indian textile designers used the stylized floral teardrop motif and it proved popular in Europe. In the seventeenth century, French textile producers copied the pattern. In Britain, popular cashmere shawls imported by the East India Company featured the motif. In the early nineteenth century, weavers in the Scottish town of Paisley imitated these shawls and their exotic patterns, and it was soon printed onto textiles. This European imitation and adaptation parallels what happened with porcelain. Such cross-cultural exchange between designers, agents, and foreign consumers resulted in hybrid designs, neither Indian nor European. Historian John Guy argues: The legacy of the Indian textile trade to the development of an international language of design was long-lasting and profound. It was perpetuated in new forms of hybridity that evolved through the dynamics of design exchange and the interpretation (and misinterpretation) of external ideas and imagery, and it was propelled by the forces of commerce.47

Outside India, designers tried to replicate or adapt Indian designs. In Safavid Iran and Ottoman Turkey, for example, manufacturers imitated Indian cotton textiles in both technique and decoration (and, when exported to Europe, buyers mistakenly thought these copies were Indian). Egyptian and Malay producers integrated Indian patterns and decorative motifs their designs. In Indonesia, batik designers most probably adopted both their techniques and decorative repertoire from Indian sources.

The decline of the Indian textile industry As with the Chinese porcelain industry, India’s textile industry moved from dominance to decline. India’s “de-industrialization” story has traditionally been portrayed as the flip side of the Industrial Revolution: the steam-powered cotton mills of England gradually overtook India’s export markets and then flooded the Indian domestic market with cheap cotton fabrics. However, English technological innovations in cotton manufacturing were only a part of the story. Internal pressures and British colonialism were other important factors in India’s “de-industrialization.”

Foundations, 1700–1850 27

Within India, the dissolution of the Mughal Empire and a period of severe droughts between 1760 and 1810 both affected cotton production and the textile industry. At the same time, the British East India Company (EIC), which began as one among several trading bodies competing for the India Trade, became a significant military force. A series of military campaigns into the interior, particularly from the 1750s, extended the Company’s power. By 1850, the EIC had eliminated local independent kingdoms to become the dominant military, political, and economic power in South Asia. Meanwhile, English attempts to imitate Indian textiles led to a series of technological innovations. In the 1760s and 1770s, a series of newly invented spinning and weaving machines meant raw cotton from India or the American colonies could be manufactured into finished cloth in Lancashire. Historian John Styles describes Richard Arkwright’s water frame, for example, as “the textile equivalent of the European discovery of the secret of porcelain” in that it finally enabled local production of a luxurious Asian import.48 Beyond spinning and weaving innovations, English entrepreneurs used engraved copper plates for printing on textiles from the 1750s, and later, roller presses allowed for even faster printing. Finally, the integration of steam power into British textile mills from the 1790s created faster production processes and cheaper cotton products.49 From roughly 1790 to 1820, the expanding British textile industry took over markets formerly served by Indian textiles. This was by no means a smooth process. Initially, some British textiles failed to sell in Southeast Asia, for example, due to either unsuitable decoration or dimensions, leading to English merchants sending agents to Java to source suitable designs.50 Then, from 1810 to 1860, India lost even their domestic textile market as the British cemented their power in India. The impact of colonial policy, productivity increases, lower costs, and a transport revolution meant Britain began to export textiles to India.51 By the 1830s, British textiles dominated global markets. Although there are arguments about its exact timing and effects, there is consensus among historians on the Indian textile industry’s decline. From the 1760s, due to EIC power in Bengal and in the South, Indian producers were forced to lower prices. In the early decades of the 1800s, the number of skilled Indian artisans out of work rose significantly.52 Although the colony continued producing textiles for the very luxurious and the poorer ends of the market, by the mid-nineteenth century, India’s once thriving export industry was finished. Not surprisingly, cotton became a potent anti-colonial symbol in India. The Swadeshi (of own country) Movement in the early twentieth century, for example, promoted locally made clothing. In the 1920s, Mahatma Gandhi

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argued “the foundation of India’s freedom will have been laid only when the import of Lancashire cloth has stopped.”53 This is a story we will take up again in Chapter 3.

Part III: Modernization, globalization and design By 1850, Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles were no longer leading global products. European mass-manufactured products dominated global markets. Historians and economists still ponder why Europe, particularly Britain, and not Asia “took off” in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Most historians agree that Asia’s relative prosperity from 1500 to 1750 was followed by a period of relative decline. Kenneth Pomeranz, for example, argues “core regions in China and Japan circa 1750 seem to resemble the most advanced parts of western Europe, combining sophisticated agriculture, commerce, and nonmechanized industry in similar, arguably even more fully realized, ways.”54 Yet this relative equality between Asia and Europe changed markedly over the next century. Historians refer to this change in which Europe’s economic productivity and living standards rose while Asia’s declined as “the Great Divergence.”55 World manufacturing figures (Table 1.1) highlight the dramatic decline of Indian and Chinese manufacturing from their heights in the mid-eighteenth century.56 In 1750, China and India produced over 57 percent of global manufactures, declining to only 28 percent in just over a century. This decline continued in the second half of the nineteenth century. These general figures align with the particular cases of Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles. The design industries that had grown around these (and many other) manufactured products in Asia declined even further over the course of the nineteenth century. In contrast, Table 1.1  Relative Distribution of World Manufacturing Output, 1750–1900 (% shares of total) India

China

United Kingdom

Europe (including UK)

1750

24.5

32.8

 1.9

23.2

1800

19.7

33.3

 4.3

28.1

1830

17.6

29.8

 9.5

39.5

1860

 8.6

19.7

19.9

63.4

1880

 2.8

12.5

22.9

79.1

1900

 1.7

 6.2

18.5

89.0

Foundations, 1700–1850 29

British manufacturing increased from less than 2 percent of global output in 1750 to almost 20 percent in 1860—an impressive increase, particularly given the relative populations of Britain, India, and China. The reason for Europe’s, particularly Britain’s, spectacular industrial rise is still the subject of heated debate. Historians have proposed European technological development, capitalism, property rights, government policy, or Enlightenment thinking as possible reasons.57 More recently, some have questioned the idea that specifically European ideas, technologies, or conditions were responsible for the Great Divergence. The British industrial revolution, Pomeranz argues, was less a “miracle” and more a convergence of forces including labor-saving technology (particularly in cotton textiles), coal as a new energy source, American slavery, colonial plunder, and access to new colonial markets. For historian Prasannan Parthasarathi, pressure from the trade imbalance between Europe and Asia (specifically silver flowing to China and India in exchange for goods such as textiles and porcelain) was the most important factor driving European industrial innovation.58 In short, European industrialization was driven by global as much as by local conditions.

Reimagining Asia Importantly, the Great Divergence was not only an economic phenomenon. By the mid-nineteenth century, the early modern period of exchange among equals was over. The supremacy of industrialized Europe formed an important building block in modern European thinking. In European minds, “Asia” solidified as a figurative opposite to “Europe.” Stagnant and traditional Asian cultures served as counterpoints to dynamic, modern European ones. For intellectuals as diverse as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, Asia became shorthand for backwardness.59 Such thinking also underpinned European colonialism. While some Europeans saw their mission as modernizing the world, others sought to exploit colonized peoples and their lands. As we will explore further in Chapter 3, European colonialism profoundly altered Asian design cultures. Recently, scholars have argued that European industrialization was, at least partially, dependent on Asian knowledge, skills, and technology. Imitation, product substitution, and adaptation of Asian manufactures by Europeans characterized a lot of early modern exchanges between Europe and Asia. Historian Maxine Berg argues, “European manufacturers and inventors throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century tested their patents, projects, and products against

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the great achievements of translucent Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles in madder red and indigo dyes, in glorious prints, or in the textures of the finest muslins.”60 Desirable products such as Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles helped fuel European innovation. During this period of exchange, Europeans also learned the varying tastes of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea markets. Conversely, Asians learned more about European, American, and African tastes. This was an exchange of technological, scientific, cultural, and commercial knowledge. Importantly, Asian knowledge of these designed products—textiles and porcelain—was not codified in writing, and this made exact replication difficult. By gathering “useful knowledge” about Indian dyeing and printing processes and Chinese porcelain production, Riello argues that the period from 1600 to 1800 represented a long European “apprenticeship.” This period of knowledge transfer was not only one in which technical knowledge was communicated, but also one of networks of exchange and an understanding of regional markets and tastes.61 The codification of Asian manufactures—as we saw above in the letters of D’Entrecolles and Rocques—was part of a wider European process of knowledge gathering in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This new mode of thinking in terms of abstract principles, systematic explanations, and precisely measured and documented processes later became associated with the scientific method. For the design of products, “codification” was important “because it facilitated both the repetition of the process and also its subsequent verification.”62 In contrast to this modern European approach, Indian and Chinese manufacturers founded their design processes on tacit knowledge and continual experimentation. Hereditary knowledge of dye-fixing or kaolin mixing techniques were eventually superseded by modern chemistry. Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles also played a key role in fueling seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European consumerism. Not only these, but a range of imported Asian and Middle Eastern commodities had a significant impact on patterns of European consumption.63 Porcelain and textiles as much as Japanese lacquer furniture or Turkish rugs were portable goods that circulated globally and served as communication between cultures. Europeans adopted and adapted Asian design objects and decorative patterns, redefining them in the process. This complex global picture of exchange between cultures continues into the nineteenth century but with quite different characteristics. By the mid-nineteenth century, Europe and the United States were increasingly associated with the modern and Asia with the traditional.

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Given this background, how can we define modern design in Asia? In the chapters that follow, I am defining modern design in a broad sense. That is, modern design includes not only the production of mass-manufactured products but also new infrastructure, new buildings, and new visual languages associated with mass printing technologies. To restrict our understanding of modern design simply to objects and people associated with the Modern Movement in Europe—centered on the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, and De Stijl, or nineteenth-century foundations in the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, or British Design Reform—ultimately limits us to a European definition of design.64 Design modernism—a term used in art history and museum collections—fails to address fundamental questions about design’s role in modern life. This is why the chapters that follow focus on how designers envisage a new culture and how design operates within processes of modernization. The other significant issue made clear by the cases of Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles is that, by the mid-nineteenth century, design was already operating within a global context. As we saw above, the global circulation of goods, ideas, and people was already in place in the early modern period. The major changes, particularly in the later nineteenth century, are in the acceleration and intensity of circulation and their changing trajectories. For designers, this means the global sourcing of materials, the global circulation of objects, increased access to new ideas, and travel opportunities. The increase in speed and intensity of flows is due to profound changes in transport and communication that emerge in the nineteenth century—steamships, railways and the telegraph, for example. Such changes create a new landscape for modern Asian design. The following chapters explore the means by which modern design and modernity emerged together in Asia. We will begin with governments, emperors, colonial governors, and institutions responsible for designing modern states. Then, on a smaller scale, we will consider new design professionals—engineers, architects, commercial artists, industrial designers—as key protagonists in modernization processes. And finally, we will consider the changing landscape of consumerism—who are the users of new mass-produced goods, where do they buy them, and what do these goods mean? By addressing these questions, with at least some partial answers, we can begin to map modern Asian design. Though brief, the studies of Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles above illustrate both the nuances of designed objects within specific contexts and the inadequacy of commonsense associations of European design with the

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“modern” and Asian design with the “traditional.” Certainly, the examples of Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles prove the existence of highly sophisticated early modern design cultures in Asia. So, how are we to trace their paths to modernity? In different Asian contexts, various agents transferred, received, and assimilated modern design. Just as many design ideas, technology, and processes flowed from Asia to Europe in the early modern period, the modern period saw this flow reversed. From emperors to consumers, designers to educational institutions, the transfer of ideas happened on varying levels. It is to these transfers that we shall now turn.

Section I Paths to Modernity, 1850s–1930s

Chapter 2 Elite Paths

Led by their respective rulers, modernization programs in nineteenth-century Japan and Siam constituted an elite or “top-down” path to modernity. From the 1868 Meiji Restoration, the Japanese government rapidly established modern systems, infrastructure, and technology. At the same time in Siam (later Thailand), King Chulalongkorn’s government instigated a similar, though less extensive, modernization program. Importantly, Asian modernization was not simply a process of imitating European and American models. In both Japan and Siam, importing foreign ideas and technologies “almost always involved a degree of selection and adaptation” to suit local industries, skills, materials, and needs.1 Modernization was initially visible in railways, telegraph systems, and new architecture. But changes in the domestic lives of everyday people was slower. While Siam’s case was limited, Japan’s modernization program in the 1920s and 1930s shifted to the reform of the home.

Part I: Meiji Japan—Designing a modern state The shogun rulers of Tokugawa Japan (1600–1867) maintained tight control over foreign trade and ideas. European sources often overstate the idea of Japan as a “closed” culture during these two and a half centuries. More correctly, the official Tokugawa policy, enacted in 1639, was a “selective opening.” Trade with China, Korea, and the Netherlands remained, but it was tightly regulated.2 Despite the prevalent idea among nineteenth-century Westerners that Japan was “backward” as well as closed, more recently, historians have argued that the living standard in Tokugawa Japan was relatively high. Although primarily an agricultural society, Japan also had significant urban populations, a flourishing internal trade network, a relatively high literacy rate, and a sophisticated consumer culture.3 In order to reduce dependence on imports, Shogunate policies actively encouraged local industries.

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However, Japan’s selective opening to the outside world would not last. Demands from Russia, Britain, the United States, and other foreign powers to “open up” increased in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1854, American Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships” finally forced the issue. Under the threat of Perry’s modern warships, the Tokugawa shoguns signed a trade treaty with the United States. Following similar displays of superior naval power, the Shogunate also signed treaties with other European nations that included not only favorable trade conditions for Europeans (no tariffs on foreign goods, for example) but extraterritorial clauses exempting foreigners from Japanese law. Japan’s relative isolation came to an abrupt end as foreigners and their strange objects, previously known only via images, suddenly appeared on the streets of Edo, Nagasaki, and Kyoto. In a climate of humiliation at the loss of national sovereignty, the Shogunate was formally deposed in 1868. The monarchy was reinstated with the rule of Mutsuhito, later known as the Meiji emperor. The new regime moved the capital from Kyoto to Edo, and renamed it Tokyo. Mutsuhito, still a teenager in 1868, had grown up learning the Confucian classics, calligraphy, Japanese literature, and history. Traditionally, elite education focused on such classical scholarship, but post-1868, his advisers encouraged him to study international law and German.4 While Mutsuhito’s father, Emperor Komei, had consistently rejected all aspects of Western civilization during his rule, Mutsuhito embraced them. The young Meiji Emperor instigated a new relationship to the outside world and the Japanese elite self-consciously sought to become “civilized.” Initially, the most visible signs of change were in fashion and etiquette. From 1870, for example, the emperor and government officers replaced their traditional silk robes with Western-style suits or military attire, at least for official occasions. Elite Japanese women traditionally shaved their eyebrows and blackened their teeth, but when the empress appeared in 1873 with natural eyebrows and white teeth, the fashion changed. The emperor, who formerly never met with foreigners or common people, hosted foreign diplomats in his palace and appeared at public events. Although radical, such changes in fashion and social relations did not constitute total “Westernization.” Retaining an indigenous “spirit” remained important. Politician Sakum Shozan’s popular phrase, tōyō dōtoku, seiyō gakugei, “Eastern spirit, Western technology,” exemplified the ideal balance. Modernizing the military was a priority, and some of the first modern structures and industries were built for military purposes. Soon the Meiji government’s military ambitions grew. Just as Western powers had established colonies, so too Japan began to acquire more territory, beginning with annexing the Ryūkyū archipelago, then the Sino-Japanese war of 1895 that resulted in Japan colonizing

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Taiwan. But the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05 was an important turning point: Japan had defeated a European power in a modern war fought with steamships, artillery, and rifles. Following this war, Japan acquired Korea as a protectorate, then as a formal colony in 1910. Beyond proving military progress, Japanese imperial policies provided further impetus for industrial mass production and had a significant impact on the modernization of Korea and Taiwan.

Designing infrastructure and systems In its first four decades, the Meiji government self-consciously redesigned Japan as a modern nation. Modernization was a response to the unequal treaties and imperial ambitions of Europeans and Americans. Establishing a modern military was the first priority, closely followed by modern infrastructure and systems. In 1869, for example, construction of the first telegraph line initiated a national communications network. The telegraph also connected Japan to Shanghai, Hong Kong, and London. A postal system, established in 1871, and a national bank in 1872, further consolidated the idea of a unified, modern nation. Following the official Meiji policy of shokusan kōgyō (promoting industry and manufacturing), small-scale factories began manufacturing glass, concrete, matches, and paper from the 1870s.5 The Meiji government’s new approach to governance was based on bunmei kaika or “civilization and enlightenment.” Visible symbols of bunmei kaika included everything from new clothing and hairstyles to steam ships and railways. But, unlike the English word “civilization,” the Japanese understanding of bunmei was specifically associated with material (rather than cultural) progress.6 Thus, bunmei was intimately linked to technological progress, particularly steampowered machines, mechanized factories, and new materials. Importantly, the official promotion of bunmei kaika redefined Japan’s moral order from one based in the Confucian, Buddhist, and Shinto traditions to one grounded in modern science and reason. In order to master new technologies, readers purchased an expanding number of Japanese publications on practical fields, and these increased exponentially in the 1870s. Although some technical knowledge was disseminated in the Tokugawa period via Chinese or Dutch translations, the new range of translated materials was extensive. Titles such as Manual for the Construction of Western Dwellings (1872), The Story of the Telegraph (1873), Textile Weaving Methods (1873), and A Summary of Western Manufacturing Methods (1873) indicate the range of this new knowledge. Translations of European drawing and drafting manuals would prove particularly useful for students of the visual arts,

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architecture, and engineering.7 In addition to publications, the Meiji government also employed yatoi, or foreign experts, to provide training and advice on technical subjects. Railways were an important visible symbol of modernization. A line between Yokohama and Tokyo, officially opened by the emperor in 1872, marked the beginning of Japan’s railway “revolution” (Plate 1). Foreign engineers (mostly British) designed and constructed the early rail lines, using imported tracks and locomotives.8 But the Meiji policy of importing technical expertise also involved replacing yatoi with Japanese as soon as possible. By 1878, only six years after Japan’s first line opened, foreign involvement in railway construction was minimal. As well as training by yatoi, the recently established Imperial College of Engineering and foreign training for Japanese engineers accelerated this process.9 While early locomotives were imported, there were subtle adaptations to Japanese conditions. Foreign visitors, for example, noted the seats in some carriages were deeper than usual to allow passengers to sit cross-legged.10 In railroad construction, the Japanese took just over a decade to replace foreign technical experts with locals, but designing and manufacturing locomotives took longer.11 In 1893, the first locomotive was manufactured in Japan under British supervision but the vast majority were still imported. However, after railway nationalization in 1906–07, the Meiji government guaranteed domestic production by first giving preference to, then ordering only, Japanese locomotives. By the end of the Meiji period, Japanese engineers designed and produced local locomotives based on the American-style manufacturing system of interchangeable parts and standard designs.12 Three new technologies in particular—railways, steamships, and the telegraph—forged modern Japan. Together, they enabled tighter central administration of a formerly fragmented realm and connected Japan to global communication and transport networks. New infrastructure and systems also helped create a new sense of national consciousness with standard Japanese as its national language.13 In 1873, when the government adopted standard 24-hour clock time, this new spatial unity was complimented by a modern notion of time. However, ordinary Japanese people contested this modernizing process in various ways. In 1873, for example, protesters destroyed over one hundred telegraph poles. Over the following decades there were instances of public opposition to everything from compulsory education to the import of foreign products.14 In remote areas particularly, reactions to new technology and infrastructure could be extreme. There were reports, for example, of peasants referring to the locomotive as a kary, or “fire dragon,” and kneeling down as it went by.15 “Top-down” Meiji modernization was not necessarily embraced by everyone.

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Education and training In order to facilitate the new knowledge and technical skills, the Meiji government established modern educational institutions. Founded in 1871, the Imperial College of Engineering, intended to educate Japan’s technical workforce, was one of the first. Led by English engineer Henry Dyer, its graduates played an important role in the development of railways, the telegraph system, manufacturing, and architecture. The College’s fine art department, staffed by three Italian artists, was originally intended to apply art principles to modern manufacturing. However, “toward the end of the 1870s, in spite of its fundamental purpose to encourage industry, the Art School moved away from design education and toward education in the fine arts.”16 Specialized modern design education did not appear until the 1880s. New words redefined Japanese categories of art and design. Art and decorative objects intended for public display were referred to as bijutsu, a translation of “beaux arts.” A new institutional framework comprising museums, galleries, art schools, art associations, and journals reframed traditional objects such as screens, scrolls, and luxurious craft objects as bijutsu. This period also coincided with the separation of craft objects from mass produced objects: “the word kōgei came to be applied to items that were produced by hand one at a time and kōgyō to those made by machine in large quantities.”17 With the subsequent development of separate fine art and technical education courses, the distinctions between fine art, craft, and industrial design became clearer. In 1887, Notomi Kaijiro established Kanazawa Kogyo Gakko, reputedly the first design school in Japan. Notomi’s school comprised a Drawing Department, an Art Crafts Department, and a Common Crafts Department and aimed to educate future industrial artists.18 Training included Japanese drawing and painting techniques, lacquer, and woodcarving. It comprised essentially a program of applied decoration. American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who visited the school in 1905, wrote: “the Director, Kuroki, was proud of the fact that the arts have never been separated from the crafts in Japan.”19 This image clearly aligned with Wright’s anti-mechanization and ideal of design as a type of fine art. But in Meiji Japan, distinctions between art, craft, and design were far from clear.

From craft to design In their relative isolation during the Tokugawa era, Japanese artisans developed a refined and resource-efficient practice. Master craftsmen constructed housing, for example, using renewable resources such as timber and bamboo, while

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everyday clothing required minimal stitching and the cloth could be reused.20 Ceramics, lacquerware, textiles, and woodblock prints in Tokugawa Japan were sophisticated in their production techniques and distinctive in their aesthetic forms. In material objects, Japanese luxury was founded on minimal, reductive beauty rather than excess and abundance.21 As we will see in later chapters, modern Japanese designers drew on these preindustrial crafts and aesthetic sensibilities in various ways. For artisans, the collapse of the Shogunate represented the collapse of their traditional market.22 But some industries, particularly the ceramics and textile industries, adapted quickly. Japanese textile producers traveled to Europe to study chemical dyeing processes and mechanization and returned with new knowledge, materials, and machines. In the ceramics industry, modernization culminated in the 1904 opening of a large ceramics plant in Nagoya modeled after a German factory, and in the following years similar plants in Kyoto, Seto, and Arita. Once distinctive, “the peculiar qualities of each district’s ceramics tended to disappear as each factory standardized its materials and methods,” and adopted Western forms.23 Although the production of other crafts such as lacquerware, metalware, and woodcarving changed little during the Meiji era, a new export orientation resulted in new forms such cigarette boxes and cuff links for foreign consumers. Japanese craft industries also established new training institutes and education models. Founded in 1895, the Arita technical college, for example, combined training with research. In addition to education, “staff installed and ran the town’s first working coal-fired kiln and experimented with new designs in porcelain ware.”24 The government-funded Tokyo Industrial Research Laboratory, established in 1900, aimed to aid craft industries adopt new materials and processes. This was not simply imitating European or American technologies, but a “translation of existing knowledge into scientific forms which allowed the world of the craft workshop and the local trade association to be linked to that of the factory and the modern research laboratory.”25 Private factories also offered training and research opportunities. The Toyoda Loom Works, for example, established by carpenter Toyoda Sakichi in 1906, continually updated and improved upon a loom design that Toyoda patented in 1916. Toyoda’s standardization and mass production of textiles were later applied to automobiles when the company was renamed Toyota. Foreign advisors played an important role in Japan’s modernization. Gottfried Wagener, a German yatoi and chemistry professor, for example, taught ceramics production and dyeing techniques at the Tokyo Shokko Gakko (Tokyo Technical School). Wagener also advised on Japanese contributions to international

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exhibitions and advised the ceramics and textile industries on imported materials and dyes. In 1876, the Meiji government invited the well-known British designer Christopher Dresser to advise on the development of local crafts and to promote trade with England. However, Dresser’s short visit arguably had a greater impact on his own practice than on Japanese design, and certainly had less impact than Wagener’s more extensive contribution over twenty-four years.26 For the Meiji government, exhibitions were another means to stimulate and promote modernization. International industrial expositions were a chance to participate and learn from other countries while domestic exhibitions documented Japanese progress. Wagener’s selection of Japanese objects for the 1873 Vienna International Exposition set the tone for Japanese contributions to international expositions in the late nineteenth century—traditional crafts, architecture, and gardens were thought most likely to appeal to Western audiences. Locally, a series of expositions began with the First National Industrial Exhibition in Tokyo in 1877, followed by 1881 and 1890 Tokyo exhibitions, 1895 in Kyoto, and 1903 in Osaka. Their structure followed European and American models in displaying objects in categories such as mining, manufacturing, fine art, and agriculture. The high visitor numbers—450,000 for the first, over one million by the third, and over four million by the fifth exhibition in 1903—attest to their popularity with the Japanese population.27 The First National Industrial Exhibition in 1877 featured Japanese imitations of European and American machines such as a sewing machine and printing press. However, Tatchi Gaun won the major prize for his garabo, an original mechanized cotton-spinning machine. Local carpenters successfully reproduced and imitated the garabo—by the late 1880s, hundreds were in use.28 Not surprisingly, early Meiji exhibitions sparked debate in Japan about a patent system. This was not only a Japanese issue with (legitimate) fear of imitation by designers and manufacturers who displayed new machines at international expositions. The first formal Japanese patent system came in with the Shohyo Jorei (Trademark Ordinance) in 1884. Although early Meiji exhibitions featured Japanese versions of European or American machines that had been “reverse engineered,” later exhibitions featured an ever-increasing number of original products. National exhibitions also tracked the declining role of the Meiji government in modernization, as more and more private companies exhibited over the period 1877 to 1903. At the Fifth National Exhibition, for example, major awards went to the Mitsubishi and Kawasaki shipyards, local locomotive designs, and electric lamps by the Tokyo Electricity Company. The twenty-five years of national exhibitions illustrate the Japanese process of adopting new technologies: from “reverse engineering” foreign machines to local design and production.

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Designing modern buildings Another highly visible aspect of Japanese modernization was the new architecture. In Tokugawa Japan, there were a variety of building types but their materials were consistent: timber, bamboo, paper, and thatch. Timber construction methods, laid down in a guidebook in 1608, required exact measurements, precision tools, skilled carpentry, and an intimate knowledge of the material. Largely executed without nails, traditional joinery encouraged an aesthetic sensibility for raw timber, irregular surfaces, and imperfections. The Shoin style of the Samurai elite and the Sukiya style (such as the famous Katsura Detached Palace) included many elements now associated with “traditional” Japanese architecture: tatami mat flooring, fusuma (sliding wooden wall panels), shoji (sliding rice paper screens), a genkan (formal entry vestibule), and a tokonoma (alcove for displaying art objects). In Meiji Japan, the new architecture not only looked and functioned very differently, but required different materials, tools, skills, and knowledge. Early Meiji examples of Western-style architecture were experimental hybrids. Constructed in 1872, The First National Bank, for example, was actually a traditional timber structure with a brick façade. Its designer, master carpenter Kisuke Shimizu, utilized foreign elements such as French windows, classical columns, and balconies as a type of ornament. For Japanese people, “Western architecture was categorically tall” and solid, so for “Japanese carpenters, the addition of a tower to a Western-style building would suffice, much in the manner of donning a Western style hat.”29 However, Shimizu’s tower also resembles the donjon of a Japanese castle.30 How to design and construct appropriate new buildings for modern institutions such as a bank remained a problem for at least a decade. New military facilities, government offices, banks, railway stations, courthouses, and schools all required a new type of design. There were no traditional precedents for such structures. Meiji government offices and schools, for example, were almost exclusively Western in design and materials. From 1874, solid brick began to replace earlier timber and stucco imitations, and foreign advisors supervised much of the design and construction. After a fire destroyed much of Tokyo’s Ginza area in 1872, it became an experiment in not only modern architecture but also in modern urban planning. Designed by Irish yatoi Thomas Waters, Ginza’s Rengagi, or “Bricktown,” comprised orderly rows of two-story brick buildings along a commercial thoroughfare lit by gas lamps.31 Ginza became synonymous with modernity in Japan. The most influential yatoi responsible for transferring new architectural knowledge and methods was English architect Josiah Conder. Trained at South Kensington Art School and with Gothic Revival architect William Burges, Conder brought the latest British architectural knowledge to Japan. He designed dozens

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of buildings in Tokyo between 1878 and his death in 1920. One of his bestknown works was the Rokumeikan, or “Deer Cry Pavilion,” completed in 1883 (Figure 2.1). A two-story brick building, the Rokumeikan was a European-style

Figure 2.1 Rokumeikan Hall, designed by Josiah Conder, 1883. Getty Images/Editorial #: 510357772.

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reception hall for Japanese officials and Western diplomats to engage in ballroom dancing, playing cards, billiards, and concerts. The Rokumeikan was an important space of mediation between the Japanese and the Western elite. As head of the “Building Engineering Department” at the Imperial College of Engineering, Conder taught European design principles to a new generation of Japanese architects. One of the first graduates, Tatsuno Kingo, traveled to England after graduation, on a trip that included training with William Burges and travel in France and Italy.32 On his return to Japan, Tatsuno became a professor at the Imperial College of Engineering and founded his own office in Tokyo. Tatsuno designed bank buildings, educational and judicial buildings, factories, and warehouses, all in an eclectic Western style. Just as the new education was transforming Japanese building practices, such structures were transforming Japan’s urban landscape.

Designing a new material culture For many Japanese people, the Meiji government’s modernization program resulted in a “double life.” Negotiating two different cultural systems meant being Western in public and Japanese in private. Some wealthy Japanese constructed Western-style homes next to their existing Japanese home or Western-style “parlors” within their existing homes. Also known as Wayo-Secchu, or hybrid style, such houses physically embodied the “double life.”33 Filled with imported furnishings and fixtures, Western-style spaces functioned as places for formal reception and diplomacy. In Meiji Japan, imported furniture and domestic objects were expensive. For the elite, they became symbols of wealth, but were simply not affordable for the majority of Japanese people. For most Japanese, foreign products assimilated into their home life were more modest, such as soap, matches, clocks, or kerosene lamps. Tokugawa Japan was a floor-sitting culture and homes were sparsely furnished. The minimal furniture typically comprised low tables or shelving, storage chests for clothes, utensils and other items, and built-in cupboards for storing bedding. Particularly in urban areas, people used storehouses to store infrequently used goods and valuables, a practice that also contributed to the minimal interiors. In contrast, nineteenth-century Western homes were radically different, both conceptually and physically. A civilized, comfortable home required chairs, sofas, tables, sideboards, beds, washstands, chests of drawers, glass windows, solid wooden doors, and dividing walls for privacy. The Japanese writer Jukichi Inoue summarized the contrasting domestic ideals in 1910:

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Our rooms look very bare to foreigners and appear to lack comfort to those who have lived in European apartments; but from the Japanese point of view, rooms furnished in the approved European style suffer from excess of furniture and partake too much of the nature of a curiosity shop or a museum.34

The traditional Japanese interior was open and flexible, and even in the most luxurious palaces, good taste was expressed in sparse decoration. The Western ideal of a home as a permanent, static series of rooms filled with solid, immovable furniture was difficult to reconcile with Japanese ideals. In Tokugawa Japan, people even conceived of their houses as “consumer durables rather than permanent assets.”35 Given the expense of furniture and imported objects and the different concepts of home, the Japanese floor-sitting culture without beds, chairs, or tall furniture remained throughout the Meiji period. We will return to changes in Japanese domestic life after considering an alternative elite path to modernity in Siam.

Part II: Siam and civilization In the year of the Horse, fourth of the decade, 1244 in the Siamese calendar, King Chulalongkorn of Siam presided over his kingdom’s centennial celebrations.36 As part of these celebrations, an exhibition showcasing Siamese products was held in the Royal Grounds adjacent to Bangkok’s Grand Palace. The king declared the first National Exhibition “a great benefit to the country and a help to the commerce of nations, that mutually interchange benefits with each other.”37 In addition to being mutually beneficial, international trade was an essential part of being modern. But in 1882, being both modern and Siamese was a difficult balancing act. These seemingly opposing forces—modernity and tradition—were dramatically materialized in another centennial project commissioned by Chulalongkorn, the Chakri Maha Prasat or Chakri Throne Hall (Plate 2). As a space for meeting foreign dignitaries and a royal residence within the Grand Palace complex, the Chakri Throne Hall was highly visible and symbolic. But symbolic of what? To foreign eyes, its design was nonsensical: a European-style neoclassical building topped with a Siamese hat. Chulalongkorn’s newly appointed royal architect, John Clunis, an English architect from Singapore, designed a classical plan for the three-story Throne Hall.38 The central audience hall, flanked by symmetrical wings containing reception halls and staterooms, recalled Singapore’s Government House. Like many European architects of the era, Clunis employed the design language of

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the Italian Renaissance—carefully proportioned structural bays with projecting cornices and architraves neatly divided the stories—the ordered, rational approach reflected European scientific methods. However, upon closer inspection, the Germanic Baroque-style grand staircase and Rococo-style interior details express a more eclectic hybrid.39 As, of course, does the roof. Clunis’ original design included a Mansard roof, but, during construction, a royal advisor cautioned the king that the new palace looked too foreign. The king halted construction and the royal master builder, Phraya Ratchasongkhram (Kon Hongsakul) was brought in to construct a more “Siamese” roof. Traditionally, an intricately carved golden roof topped by spires, or prasats, represented Mount Meru, the realm of the gods and center of the cosmos. Those constructed for the Chakri Throne Hall were maha prasat, seven-tiered spires reserved for royalty. Thus the building’s “Siamese hat” was, in fact, a “crown” designed specifically for a king whose power and authority was founded on local traditions. On its completion in 1882, the Chakri Throne Hall was the grandest palace in Southeast Asia (Figure 2.2). Contemporary newspapers reported a shipment of “richly gilded” and “magnificent furniture manufactured by Messieurs Jackson

Figure 2.2  Interior of the Chakri Throne Hall. Getty Images/Chicago History Museum/Editorial #: 150062173/Collection: Archive Photos, 1893.

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and Graham” in London, measuring 800 tons.40 A contemporary traveler described the “internal fittings” as “on a most elaborate scale, the most costly furniture having been imported from London at an expense of no less than £80,000. One of the features of the palace is a large and well-stocked library, in which the king takes great interest all the leading European and American periodicals being regularly taken in.”41 Clearly, the expensive English furniture, gilt-framed royal portraits, cosmopolitan library, and billiard tables were selfconsciously designed to replicate a European palace. However, the king’s ceremonial throne sat under a prasat-style wooden canopy, and, alongside European classical details stood singha (lion) figures and guardian figures such as the ancient king Narai and the Hindu god Garuda. For a design or architectural historian schooled in European styles and periods, the Chakri Throne Hall makes little sense. Its design, aesthetics, construction methods, and even its function do not fit neatly into a progressive narrative that proceeds from the traditional to the modern. Furthermore, the blend of European and Siamese architecture and interior decoration is also challenging, as it fits into neither Western nor Eastern models. However, rather than dismiss it as an oddity, by understanding how and why the Chakri Throne Hall was commissioned, designed, constructed, and received by its contemporary audience, we can begin to construct a new narrative.

A modern king and mediator Chulalongkorn, also known as Rama V, ruled Siam from 1868 to 1910. He inherited a shrinking kingdom from his father, Mongkuk (Rama IV). Former vassal states who once paid tribute to the Siamese kings had been annexed by (or in some cases defected to) the neighboring British colonies of Burma and Malaya. For the Siamese elite in the mid-nineteenth century, the political and economic landscape of the region was rapidly changing. Mongkuk prepared the young prince (and his eighty-one brothers and sisters) for the modern world by providing them with an education that followed both an English curriculum and a Siamese one.42 In 1871, Chulalongkorn was the first Siamese king to leave the kingdom, in this case to Singapore, Batavia, and Semarang (he would tour Europe in 1897 and 1907). The decision to tour British and Dutch colonial ports was particularly unusual. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, although familiar with them, the Siamese royalty had shown little interest in Europeans. Traditionally, India and China were the sources of cultural and symbolic capital. But times had changed. For the Siamese, the 1855 Bowring Treaty with Britain was a significant turning point, “opening” the kingdom to international trade,

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with considerable concessions to the British. Similar treaties with France, the United States, and Japan followed. The regional balance of power had clearly shifted—the European colonial landgrab in Asia had left only a few independent states, and even those were under threat. In the mid-nineteenth century, the British, already established in Burma, India, and Malaya, engaged in the Opium Wars with China and claimed Hong Kong in 1842. Meanwhile, the French took Danang and Saigon to start their conquest of what would become Indochina, the Dutch expanded from Batavia to add further territory to the Dutch East Indies, the Spanish held the Philippines, and, in 1853, Japan was forcibly “opened.” For Mongkuk and his son Chulalongkorn, actively opening Siam to international trade and offering concessions was—potentially—a peaceful means to resist colonization. However, historians have argued that the treaties, particularly the Bowring Treaty, resulted in a semicolonial situation or “crypto-colonialism”: “the condition in which the very claim of independence marks a symbolic as well as material dependence on intrusive colonial power.”43 Although not formally colonized, European economic and military pressure forced the Siamese kings to reshape Siam from a tributary kingdom to a modern nation. For historian Maurizio Peleggi, “colonialism actually engendered—rather than endangered—modern Siam as a geopolitical entity.”44 Its rulers fixed geographic boundaries within which diverse peoples and their cultures were identified as “Thai.” Chulalongkorn’s first National Exhibition displayed both the crafts of these people and the newly bounded territory’s natural products. It also created a distinction between Siamese and non-Siamese. To be Siamese was to share a common language, history, culture, religion (Buddhism), and a king. For the king, modern unification was ironically founded on appeals to tradition. And visible symbols such as the Chakri Throne Hall’s spired roof made tradition tangible. European colonialism in Southeast Asia also inaugurated an important discursive shift in which the world was divided into “civilized” and “non-civilized” cultures. This new discourse was encapsulated by the Thai word, siwilai, a transliteration of the English word “civilization.” Siwilai encompassed both everyday conduct such as adopting European fashion and etiquette, and an ideal state based on a European model.45 Western material culture, previously seen as novel or exotic, became a highly charged marker of siwilai. For the Siamese king, siwilai was physically embodied in the Chakri Throne Hall, “the site for the domestication of Western material culture.”46 Although initiated by the Siamese king and the kingdom’s elite, the interest in siwilai and farang (white-skinned foreigner) culture spread, so that “[d]uring the second half of the nineteenth century, following the example of the royal elite, the ordinary Thai also rapidly

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began to value farang material culture and commodities.”47 The latter included “everyday” imported goods sold in department stores, as well as technological systems such as the telegraph and railway. In the name of siwilai, Chulalongkorn continued the modernization program started by his father, Mongkuk. However, Chulalongkorn’s reforms went much further, and included establishing a centralized political administration, military, judicial, and educational reform, and even the modernization of Buddhism.48 In the 1880s, Chulalongkorn commissioned European-style administration buildings in the outer court of the Grand Palace including those for the Treasury and Foreign Affairs departments—appropriately modern design for their modern administrative functions. He employed Italian and German architects for his new Public Works Department, shifting from the inherited traditions and knowledge passed down familial lines of the royal master builders to professional European architects and engineers. Today, Chulalongkorn is revered for preserving Siamese independence in a colonial era, and for the successful integration of modernization and tradition (epitomized by the monarchy and Buddhism).49 Chakri Maha Prasat was an embodiment of the problem faced by the king—how to create a modern civilization equal of Britain and France yet retain a foundation of Siamese tradition. Symbolically, the European body and Siamese “head” of Chakri Maha Prasat unite the profane and the sacred, the material realm of European science and technology and the sacred realm of Buddhism and enlightenment inherited by the king. As mediator between East and West, the king adopted elements of European culture—perhaps with irony, or Koompong Noobanjong suggests, parody. For Thais, Chakri Maha Prasat was farang clothing with a Siamese crown.50

Paths to modernity: Becoming civilized The Siamese anxiety to become “civilized” was part of a general ideological shift in nineteenth-century Asia, chiefly brought about by European colonial expansion. In Siam under the reigns of Mongkuk and Chulalongkorn, siwilai was a key concept driving reform that initially meant adopting European-style institutions and technology. It paralleled Meiji Japan’s bunmei kaika, or “civilization and enlightenment.” Railways, steamships, and telegraphs were among the first modern technological systems and objects adopted by governments in both Siam and Japan.51 In a colonial world divided between “civilized” and “uncivilized” people (ranging from “barbarians” to the more primitive “savages”), demonstrating material “progress” was a visible manifestation of civilization. But what was civilization?

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In his essay “Civilization” (1836), influential English philosopher and East India Company bureaucrat John Stuart Mill defined the term as: the direct converse or contrary of rudeness or barbarism. Whatever the characteristics of what we call savage life, the contrary of these, or the qualities which society puts on as it throws off these, constitute civilization. Thus, a savage tribe consists of a handful of individuals, wandering or thinly scattered over a vast tract of country: a dense population, therefore, dwelling in fixed habitations, and largely collected together in towns and villages, we call civilized. In savage life there is no commerce, no manufactures, no agriculture, or next to none: a country rich in the fruits of agriculture, commerce and manufactures, we call civilized.52

In this framework, it is possible to understand Chulalongkorn’s National Exhibition and the Chakri Throne Hall as attempts to situate Siam on the civilized side of Mill’s division. Mill also noted that civilization was both a state and a process. To become civilized in the nineteenth century, “as much emphasis is put on social order and on ordered knowledge (later science) as on refinement of manners and behaviour.”53 Civilization became a key concept shaping international affairs in the nineteenth century. It was not simply a description but an evaluation, a comparative benchmark with Europe as the standard. In Norbert Elias’ classic study, The Civilizing Process, he writes: “By this term Western society seeks to describe what constitutes its special character and what it is proud of: the level of its technology, the nature of its manners, the development of its scientific knowledge or view of the world.”54 As a process, civilization was analogous to progress, and the “traditional” emerged as not only a contrary state to the modern, but a prior one.55 In the late nineteenth century, the Siamese and Japanese elite selfconsciously adopted the ideas of civilization, and projected an image of themselves as civilized. For the Siamese king, to project siwilai was to be part of a global, cosmopolitan elite bound together by shared tastes and cultural practices. Pelaggi writes: “By contemplating themselves in their new clothes, new domestic settings, and new urban spaces, the Siamese court ended up convincing themselves, above all, of being modern.”56 But such tangible evidence of civilization was absorbed into its new context in various ways, resulting not in an “imitation” of European design, but in hybrids such as the Chakri Throne Hall and many other ambivalent designs. Like Japan, Siam was not formally colonized. But both were subject to unequal treaties that favored imported European manufactures over local products. The

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Japanese path from “reverse engineering” and import substitution to original design and manufacture did not occur in Siam. Until the twentieth century, Siam’s exports remained raw materials—rice, teak, tin, and rubber—and its imports manufactured goods, primarily from Britain.57 As Meiji Japan’s territory expanded, Chulalongkorn’s Siam shrank. Surrounded by British and French colonies, Siam ceded Lao territories to the French and Shan territories to the British in 1893, then Malay territories to the British in 1909. Compared to Japan, Siam’s autonomy and potential for developing modern industries were severely limited. The development of modern infrastructure and systems in Siam was also more limited. Although the kingdom’s first telegraph line was constructed in 1876, it was not connected internationally until 1883, and then only as far as Saigon (and not connected to Europe until the twentieth century). The first railway line opened in 1893 between Paknam and Bangkok but the Siamese railway “revolution” was not until the 1920s and 1930s when the network expanded to encompass the whole nation. As in Japan, in Siam, foreign experts designed and constructed railways using imported construction materials and locomotives. However, unlike Japan, Siam remained dependent on foreign technology and expertise. In modernizing craft industries, Siam again differed from Japan. It was not until the first decades of the twentieth century that significant imports of heavy machinery arrived in Thailand, mostly from Britain but also from the United States, Germany, and Japan. In 1936, for example, the Thai Ministry of Defense imported German spinning and weaving machinery for Siam’s first modern textile mill.58 Other modern factories in Siam developed in the 1930s included a paper factory and brewery based on German models, and a cannery and tram factory based on Belgian models. By this time, some Japanese modern factories had been in operation for decades. A final significant difference was education. The Siamese elite, particularly those close to the monarchy, studied in Europe. Chulalongkorn’s son Vajiravudh, for example, who ruled as Rama VI from 1910 to 1925, was educated at Britain’s Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and at Oxford University. The Siamese elite completed advanced training for new professions such as engineering, law, and medicine overseas, typically returning to work in government departments. As in Japan, the Siamese government employed foreign advisors to aid in modernizing everything from the railways and irrigation systems to administrative and legal systems. However, in terms of local higher education, Thailand’s first university, Chulalongkorn University, formally opened in 1917 and included engineering but only added a specialist architecture degree in 1939. Unlike in Japan, Siam did not develop specialized design education and a design industry until after the Second World War.

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Part III: Modernizing everyday life in Taishō Japan By the time of the Meiji Emperor’s death in 1912, Japan was a relatively modern, rapidly industrializing nation. The new emperor, Yoshihito (later known as the Taishō Emperor), oversaw a second, “less state-led” wave of modernization.59 The “Greater Taishō” period (1912–1930s) was one of economic prosperity, urban growth, women entering the workforce, and the expansion of consumer culture in Japan. New media and entertainment industries, including cinema and radio, created new opportunities for designers. The rise of professional designers and consumer culture are discussed in later chapters, so this part focuses on the ongoing top-down modernization and its impact on everyday life in Japan. While Meiji modernization focused on large-scale public infrastructure and systems, the Taishō elite applied modern principles of efficiency, rationalization, and standardization to the home, and, in a limited way, to industry. Mitsubishi Electric, for example, adopted Fredrick Taylor’s scientific management ideas between 1910 and 1920, but most factories were smaller and less mechanized than their American counterparts.60 The Japanese automobile industry, though established by the 1920s, was producing far less cars than American subsidiaries operating in Japan. Although progress in industrialization continued in Japan, top-down modernization increasingly focused on everyday life. Terms like kaizen, kairyō, and kaizō (improvement, reform, and transformation) captured the new spirit. This reform coincided with the popularization of the term bunka, “culture,” in the 1920s. When applied to practices of everyday life, bunka could refer to everything from using electricity to leisure activities such as sport or art appreciation. Individuality and modern consumption practices were crucial to the new bunka lifestyle. Early promoters such as Amerikaya (American Home Shop), founded in 1909, for example, and the Association for Improved Housing, founded in 1916, aimed to encourage Japanese consumers to adopt Westernstyle living practices. Later reformers, such as the Bunka Seikatsu Kenyukai, or “Cultured Life Research Group,” founded in 1920, produced educational guides including a periodical designed to inform people how to reform their daily life. In 1920, the Ministry for Education, Science and Culture launched the Seikatsu Kaizen Undo (Lifestyle Improvement Campaign). This included the formation of the Seikatsu Kaizen Domeikai (Lifestyle Alliance Committee) comprising prominent educators and government officials, educational reform, and a magazine, Seikatsu Kaizen (Lifestyle Improvement). The rhetoric employed by these reform efforts argued for a more holistic modernization and a rejection of

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traditional practices. The lifestyle reformers urged Japanese people to simplify and rationalize their housing, clothing, diet, social rituals, and relationships. In short, the aim was to stop the “double life.” A 1924 report of the Lifestyle Alliance’s Research Committee, Jutaku kagu no kaizen (The Reform of Domestic Furniture), is a good example of the reform rhetoric: 1. Homes should incorporate chairs, rather than sitting on the floor. 2. Domestic floor plans and facilities should be based on the family, rather than around visitors, as is currently the case. 3. Domestic structural facilities should shun decoration and place weight on hygiene and the prevention of accidents. 4. Gardens should not be for mere entertainment, as is currently the case, but should place weight on having practical use in preventing accidents. 5. Furniture should be simple but strong, in keeping with the reform of the house. 6. Public housing (apartment houses) and garden city facilities should be constructed in accordance with the circumstances of the megalopolis.61

The ideal was a modern home centered on the nuclear (rather than extended) family, and on design principles such as functionality, simplicity, and efficiency. Rather than the flexible, minimal spaces of a traditional Japanese interior, the “Culture House” comprised separate rooms dedicated to a single function— kitchen, dining room, bedroom—and included chairs, tables, beds, and wooden or linoleum floors rather than tatami mats. A “Culture Village” exhibited in the 1922 Peace Exhibition in Tokyo presented the model modern lifestyle in concrete terms. Comprising a collection of “Culture Houses,” it was intended to promote the ideals of Western-style furniture, fixed walls, and glass windows instead of tatami mat and sliding screens. The Culture House became a powerful symbol of progress in the popular press. Particularly after the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake destroyed much of Tokyo, Culture House developments began to appear in the Tokyo suburbs. Based on English “Garden City” ideals, such developments included leisure facilities and convenient rail access to the city. Two-story brick constructions, Japan’s new Culture Houses were conspicuously visible from the street. This suburban ideal started to reshape Japanese cities but internally, the Culture House was also linked to changing social relations and gender roles. Women, for example, were increasingly expected to maintain control of the aesthetic aspects of domestic life.62 However, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Culture House remained an ideal. In reality, even new Culture Houses often contained Japanese-style

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tatami mat rooms within predominantly Western-style interiors, and their cost was beyond most Japanese people. Despite the efforts of reformers, the “double life” continued.

Designing a chair-sitting culture Furniture, and particularly the chair, was a notable ground of contestation in early twentieth-century Japan. In a traditionally a floor-sitting culture, reformers faced a significant problem: how could people integrate bulky Western-style chairs and sofas into an existing tatami-mat home? During the Meiji period, architects designed new Japanese schools and offices around chairs and tables, but the majority of Japanese homes had changed very little. Heavy furniture could potentially ruin the relatively fragile tatami mat flooring. But such dilemmas presented opportunities for a new generation of Japanese designers. One solution, developed by design group Keiji Kōbō (Ideal Form Atelier), featured a wooden chair with tatamizuni, or “leg guards,” that resembled skis. The tatamizuni were designed to more evenly distribute weight and allow chairs to slide along tatami mats. Formed in 1928, Kurata Chikatada’s Keiji Kōbō promoted modern living through a furniture design philosophy based on rationalization and standardization. In a 1935 manifesto, Kurata wrote: We would like to set a standard for every article of furniture in a room . . . Our aim is to simplify form, and to make an integrated and unified standard for construction materials . . . Purchasing chairs will be as easy and acceptable as buying ready-made clothes.63

Kurata was influenced by both the writings and furniture designed by European modernists such as Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, and Charlotte Perriand. Another pioneer furniture and interior designer, Moriya Nobuo, founded a similar design studio, Kinomesha, in 1927. Both studios “aimed at ordering new lifestyles through design.”64 Although neither group was ultimately successful in mass manufacturing furniture, such practices represent, according to design historian Hiroshi Kashiwagi, the moment when “modern design was first consciously created in Japan.”65 On a national level, the Ministry for Commerce and Industry founded the Design Education Research Centre (whose members included Toyoguchi Katsuhei and Kenmochi Isamu, also part of Keiji Kōbō) in 1928. In 1933, the Centre invited German architect Bruno Taut to lecture and in 1940 asked Charlotte Perriand to advise on modern design (see Chapter 4). However, with the increasingly military rhetoric of the 1930s, the projects of national modernization

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and domestic reform converged “into a rationalization campaign aimed at building and controlling the nation for the war regime.”66 With the emphasis on rationalization, standardization, and efficiency, the foundations were in place for an easy integration of every Japanese individual within the war effort. Corporate research laboratories were another crucial element in establishing a modern design culture in Japan. Historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki argues that there were “at least fifty” such research institutes “established between 1914 and 1941, including textile research laboratories,” and institutes to support industries from ceramics and brewing.67 In electrification, foreign partnerships were essential. Tokyo Electric, for example, collaborated with the American corporations General Electric and RCA for access to light bulbs and radio technology, respectively. Japan was a leader in household electrification. In 1935, 89 percent of Japanese households had access to electric lighting (as compared to 85 percent in Germany, 68 percent in the United States, and 44 percent in Britain). But electric consumer goods such as fridges and washing machines were expensive, so more modest radios and electric fans were more common among the majority of the Japanese population.68 Finally, military technology became increasingly important. Japan’s military expansion during the 1930s provided increasing business for industries and entrepreneurs. The automobile and airplane industries were considered particularly important. Government legislation such as the Automobile Manufacturing Industry Law in 1936, for example, aimed at reducing the presence of foreign manufacturers and stimulating domestic production. Particularly after the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, government intervention into various industries was significant. When the navy requested a carrier-based fighter plane capable of flying at 600 kilometers an hour, for example, Mitsubishi’s design team came up with the A6M “Zero.” Constructed from a new lightweight aluminum alloy, the Zero was light, fast, and maneuverable, making it one of the most advanced fighter planes of its time. Mitsubishi’s design team made gradual improvements in fighter plane design and construction, driven by Japan’s imperial expansion that culminated with war in China in 1937. Meanwhile, American and European leaders assumed Japanese military design, production, and technology were inferior to their own. A common American view prior to the war, for example, held that Japanese aircraft were “not up to the contemporary standards of efficiency” and most were “ominously obsolete.”69 Led by aircraft carrier-based Zeros, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 proved such views to be wildly inaccurate. Its compact, streamlined, and lightweight design made the Zero more agile in combat than Allied aircraft, and it dominated the Pacific war until the Americans developed a more powerful fighter aircraft in 1943.

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Elite paths to modernity As a top-down process, modernization in Japan and Thailand clearly differed, particularly in the relative speed with which modern industries and design cultures emerged. It is worth remembering that popular reactions against such modernization processes not only varied but sustained in various ways well into the twentieth century. Although critics noted the impact on local Japanese or Siamese traditional culture and society at the time, a longer-term impact is also worth considering. Modern industries required coal and oil, materials that were largely imported into both Japan and Thailand. Pollution and environmental degradation due to these new energy sources were part of the price paid for modernization. Ironically, as modernization progressed at home, representations of Japan and Siam in Europe and the United States emphasized their traditional culture and products. European and American designers and architects—from Aubrey Beardsley and Alphonse Mucha to Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruno Taut—were fascinated with traditional Japanese design, architecture, and aesthetics. Siamese culture, while less known in the West, was also typically represented as traditional. The Pavilion of Siam at the 1911 Turin International Exhibition, for example, was a reproduction of an ancient, golden-spired temple, designed by Italian architects. The Orientalist lens through which Westerners saw Asian design has only recently been challenged, revealing a dynamic and complex relationship between old and new that characterized the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Chapter 3 Colonial Paths

Unlike in Japan, modernization in colonial Asia was an uneven process. Colonial regimes established modern infrastructure, introduced new architecture and urbanism, and imported new technologies. Unlike in Japan and Siam, European colonial powers used modernization as a means to further their interests and delayed industrialization in their colonies. As well as analyzing the design of colonial modernity, this chapter will consider design’s role in subjugating, dominating, and controlling colonial peoples. As for “native” design cultures, the non-civilized people of the colonies and their culture were represented as traditional. However, interactions between colonizer and colonized over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries affected design in not just in the colony, but also in the “motherland.”

Part I: Designing the British Raj As we saw in Chapter 1, the British East India Company became the dominant military and economic power in India over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, the 1857–59 Indian War of Independence, Rebellion, or Mutiny (depending on which side you were on) was a crucial turning point in British–Indian relations. Indian soldiers in Uttar Pradesh rose up against British rule and the rebellion quickly spread. After suppressing the revolt, the British Crown dissolved the East India Company and took direct control of India. For the next 100 years, Indians endured a dependent relationship with Britain. For the British, selective modernization proved invaluable in unifying India’s diverse cultures, traditions, languages, and religions into a coherent British colony, known as the Raj. Although railways appeared relatively early in India, they were constructed primarily to serve British military, administrative, and economic interests. Built with British technology and expertise, the first line opened in 1853. Railway

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lines soon radiated out from Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, all centers of colonial administration. Early consultants, including engineers Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson, largely reproduced the British railway system using imported materials and locomotives.1 Until the 1920s, British engineers designed the Indian railways, and, despite attempts at developing a local locomotive industry in the late nineteenth century, British pressure from home effectively stifled Indian design and production.2 At first, the railway system served military purposes, but in the longer term, it also transported agricultural and raw materials out of the Indian interior and finished goods from Britain in. As the railways spread across India in the second half of the late nineteenth century, so too did the telegraph. Started in 1851, the telegraphic system proved an efficient means of long-distance communication across Britain’s vast colony. For military, administrative, and commercial purposes, the telegraph was crucial for maintaining colonial order, and operated strictly under government control. During the 1857 Rebellion, for example, the telegraph proved essential in coordinating troop movements. The Indian rebels clearly understood the system’s value as they repeatedly destroyed telegraph wires and stations.3 Particularly after the Rebellion’s threat to British power, modern systems such as the railways and telegraphic network served as strategic “tools” for both the creation of and control of the Raj.4 Railways, telegraph poles, canals, and iron bridges served not only military and economic ends, they also “seemed to the British to furnish irrefutable proof of their material superiority and their commitment to ‘civilizing’ and ‘improving’ India.”5 From a British perspective, colonization was bringing modernity to India, and these were visible symbols of a benevolent Empire. But Indians had little input into their design and development. From an Indian perspective, new technologies such as the “iron cow” were—at least initially—visible symbols of a foreign, oppressive regime. Despite this, many Indians assimilated modern systems and infrastructure into their lives. Although not involved in its design, the construction, maintenance, and operation of the railway system comprised colonial India’s largest modern workforce from the 1850s to 1870s.6 Railways also provided Indians with wider commercial networks, travel opportunities for pleasure or education and “carried pilgrims in their thousand to ancient shrines and melas (festivals).”7 Ironically, the modern systems and technologies established by the colonial regime in the late nineteenth century later provided essential in the creation of an independent India. That is, Indians eventually used these “tools” of empire to undermine the colonial power that designed them.8

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Colonialism also conditioned Indian industrial development. As we saw in Chapter 1, “de-industrialization” properly described the fate of India’s textile industry. By the 1850s, British textile mills and trade dominance had already cut off India’s export markets. Next, innovations in transport such as steamships, the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), and the railway system flooded India with British machine-made textiles. Many former Indian weavers, spinners, and dyers faced widespread unemployment and relied on subsistence farming. The modernization of Indian textile production—when it did occur— did so under colonial conditions. Mechanized textile production in India relied on British technology and expertise, and distribution occurred within British controlled markets.9 Colonial policy directly affected other existing Indian industries. From the 1830s, for example, imported steam-powered ships increasingly replaced local ships. As early as 1815, the British parliament introduced policy to protect British shipping interests and restrict Indian shipbuilding. It was not so much British technological superiority but colonial policy that was responsible for stifling India’s shipbuilding industry.10 Adopting new technologies, materials, or systems of production—as happened in Meiji Japan—was not an option for Indian industries. Although some local entrepreneurs established modern factories in Bombay and Calcutta, these were exceptions to the general rule. For Indians, industrialization was almost impossible under British colonialism.

Designing “Indo-Saracenic” architecture For centuries, European port settlements along the Indian coast comprised a walled fort or compound containing storehouses, barracks, and a church. Such enclosed compounds were designed not only to protect their inhabitants but also to reinforce cultural distance with spatial distance. In the nineteenth century, as port settlements became colonial cities, British designers continued to structure space symbolically as well as functionally. Colonial design assured the British of their superiority, distinguishing them from locals by means of modern buildings filled with the material objects of civilization. Colonial architecture and urban design reinforced the separation between rulers and ruled. The Indian village, in contrast, had its own social hierarchies and relationships inscribed in its spatial scheme. This related to not only social and religious divisions—such as the Hindu caste system—but also adhered to local design theories. Indian builders, craftsmen, and priests who designed buildings and planned villages in the pre-colonial era utilized a corpus of knowledge known as Vastu Vidya (also Vaastu). Developed over centuries, Vastu Vidya comprised

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a system of proportions and principles for spatial organization and architectural ornamentation, as well as rituals related to foundation laying. Although Vastu Vidya had regional variations and changed over time, its core value was its close connection between spatial and architectural design, cosmology, mythology, and ritual.11 British colonial architects ignored such methods and imposed their own design theories. After the transfer of power to the Crown, responsibility for public architecture and urban design in India changed. From the 1860s, engineers and architects who worked for the new, central Public Works Department (PWD) designed the physical infrastructure of the Raj. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the PWD designed government and military buildings, hospitals, schools, courthouses, roads, bridges, canals, and sewerage systems. In many ways, its engineers created a blueprint for modern design practice in India.12 Although largely driven by a functional, engineering ideal, PWD designers also grappled with a difficult problem: what was the appropriate architectural style for the Raj? As it played out among British architects in publications and lectures, the argument distilled into two visions of Empire: according to the first, colonial buildings should replicate the best of British architecture, typically in a Classical vein. According to the second, colonial buildings should adopt indigenous styles in order to “naturalize” British rule.13 Both sides agreed on three things: architecture’s powerful political symbolism, the effect of local climate, and the peculiarities of colonial lifestyles. With these considerations, “all agreed that successful colonial building involved the incorporation or adaptation of some elements of indigenous design.”14 On a practical level, this included concern for shade, ventilation, and privacy, but there was little consensus on the appropriate aesthetic. Early forts, compounds, and administrative buildings in India simply replicated European aesthetics. The early nineteenth-century English “battle of the styles” between Classical and Gothic revival forms, for example, was played out in colonial Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. Bombay became renowned as a “Gothic” city, exemplified by its grand railway station, the Victoria Terminus (now the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus). Designed by English architect Fredrick William Stevens and constructed between 1878 and 1888, the Victoria Terminus combined advanced structural engineering with Gothic Revival polychromatic stone and Italianate decorative styling. Although it appeared to be an imitation of London’s St. Pancras Station from the outside, the interior decorative details, completed by Bombay School of Art students and local craftsmen, included local details such as monkeys and peacocks. Perhaps fittingly for such a

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prominent colonial structure, Stevens topped the central dome with a female figure symbolizing Progress. However, particularly after the Rebellion, some British officials and architects argued that such overtly British forms symbolized a foreign invasion. In order to establish legitimacy, they argued, the Raj needed visible expressions of local traditions. British research into traditional Indian architecture was already under way. Indigo merchant James Fergusson’s systematic classification of Indian architecture, for example, begun in the 1830s, was eventually collected in the two volume History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1876). Fergusson’s text, which remained the standard reference for at least the next two decades, divided Indian architecture into Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Saracenic (a catch-all term for Islamic architecture) traditions, and attributed stylistic differences to religious differences. In the British architectural debate over the appropriate style for modern Indian architecture, the “Indo-Saracenic” ultimately won out, and design of the Mughal Empire emerged as a common point of reference.15 In practice, what the British termed the Indo-Saracenic or Hindu-Saracenic style comprised a pastiche of traditional Indian forms and decorative motifs applied to modern buildings. Metaphorically, the Indo-Saracenic mix brought a coherence to the diversity of the Raj: “not only could the distinct ‘Hindu’ and ‘Saracenic’ forms be melded, but the British, self-proclaimed masters of India’s culture, could in the process shape a harmony the Indians themselves, communally divided, could not achieve.”16 By designing modern administrative, institutional, and commercial buildings in recognizable Mughal and Rajput styles, the British sought to both unify the colony’s disparate traditions and situate themselves as their legitimate inheritors. A notable example, Mayo College in Rajasthan, designed by Major C. Mant between 1871 and 1877, underwent several iterations due to the ongoing controversy over an appropriate colonial style (Figure 3.1). Finally completed in 1885, the College was intended as an English boarding school that could educate sons of the Rajasthani royalty as English gentlemen. Although constructed using modern technology, including concrete reinforced with iron girders, the exterior façade was clad in marble and its decoration self-consciously “traditional.” By combining elements of “Hindu” and “Mohamedan” forms, Mant’s aim was aesthetic and symbolic harmony—cusped archways drawn from the Mughal tradition, octagonal (Islamic) minaret forms topped with Hindu domes, the whole ensemble encircled by broad verandas.17 Yet, despite the inclusion of traditional wood carved paneling in the interiors, the spatial plan was classical and included a lecture hall, offices, and the functional spaces of a modern

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Figure 3.1 Mayo College, designed by Major C. Mant, Ajmer, Rajasthan, completed 1885. Getty Images/Credit: Soltan Frédéric/Editorial #: 542376020/Collection: Sygma.

educational institution. Although superficially “traditional,” the prominent clock tower of this Indian “Eton” signaled the discipline and order of modern time. The first student to arrive upon the College’s opening, Maharaja Mangal Singh of Alwar, arrived at the gates on an elephant, followed by his retinue of servants.18 Architects working in the Indo-Saracenic style distilled elements from various Indian buildings, time periods, and regions, resulting in an incongruous pastiche of Indian “tradition.” Stripped from their original context, decorative details and patterns were seen as interchangeable, and could even be combined with Gothic or Classical elements. In this process of abstraction, British architects aimed to extract universal principles of design in order to express an essential “native” aesthetic. From the 1880s until the early twentieth century, many modern public buildings in India, including schools, museums, railway stations, hospitals, banks, and administrative buildings, were designed in variations on the Indo-Saracenic style. For its British designers, such architecture connected modern utility and convenience with the grandeur and beauty of the Indian past. Although it remained controversial in architectural circles, “both the apologists and the critics of the Indo-Saracenic appear to agree that it was a decidedly ‘modern’ style.”19 The Indo-Saracenic style—or at least a variation on the same theme—also flowered in Britain’s Malay colony a little later than in India. When asked to

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design new government offices in Kuala Lumpur, PWD architects A.C. Norman and R.A.J. Bidwell initially drew a classically inspired scheme. But the PWD Director, C.E. Spooner, thought an “Oriental” style would be more appropriate. Norman and Bidwell looked to Indian colonial architecture for inspiration. As a predominantly Muslim culture, they surmised, a “Saracen” style might also be appropriate for the Malay colonies. Built between 1893 and 1896, Norman and Bidwell’s Federal Secretariat of the Federated Malay States (now the Sultan Abdul Samad Building), became the model for a Malay colonial style (later called “Moorish”). The building was constructed of red brick and featured encircling verandas, Islamic-inspired arches, Islamic-style geometric patterning, towers with bulbous copper domes, and a prominent clock tower. Norman went on to design an “ensemble” of now iconic “Moorish” institutional buildings in Kuala Lumpur including the General Post Office (1894–96), the Sanitary Board Building (1896), the High Court Building (1904), and the Public Works Department Building (1920).20 As in India, these colonial buildings have been assimilated into the history of modern Malaysian architecture.

The colonial bungalow Another colonial design traveled even further. Originally referring to a Bengali peasant hut (the banggolo), the bungalow was adapted by architects from colonial India to Britain, British colonies in Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, and to the United States. In the late eighteenth century, East India Company officials typically lived in simple, tentlike huts. Based on local traditional huts, these early colonial bungalows were freestanding, single story, with a pitched roof and wide veranda, and presumably constructed with local expertise and materials such as mud-brick and thatch. But, unlike the local versions, the British bungalow was designed for colonial administrators rather than farmers.21 After the Crown take over in the mid-nineteenth century, a substantial bungalow became the standard design for colonial administrators. Indians came to associate bungalows with British rule. Although derived from an Indian source, the colonial bungalow was designed for a different lifestyle. Particularly among the peasantry, Indian domestic spaces were sparsely furnished and housed an extended family. India was a predominantly floor-sitting culture in which people slept on portable mattresses. In contrast, the colonial bungalow was notable for three distinctive changes to Indian precedents: its spatial plan conformed (as much as possible) to the European ideal of separate rooms with specialized functions (parlor, bedroom,

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kitchen, dining room); it was detached from a village context; and it was filled with furniture and domestic utensils. For the English, India’s climate created the biggest practical design issue and ventilation, sun shading and the veranda became standard features of the bungalow. Ultimately, the colonial bungalow became a hybrid of local and British design conventions, materials, and construction techniques that became “standardized and codified into a type of dwelling plan, which was vigorously promoted by the Public Works Department throughout India after 1850.”22 Colonial power could not operate without local cooperation. For the wealthy elite of India—from Rajasthani princes to Bombay merchants—maintaining their position required adopting English clothing, language, and social customs. In the nineteenth century, the elite also began to “Anglicize” their homes in various ways.23 The resulting hybrid Anglo-Indian domestic spaces included “a partial appropriation of Western furniture and other furnishings,”24 adopting existing spatial plans to include an English-style parlor for receiving visitors, yet retaining traditional Indian spaces as well. As in Meiji Japan, such homes embodied a “double life.” The growth in Indians working in government service from the 1860s and the emergence of an educated, urban middle class, particularly in the early twentieth century, further stimulated the adoption of British lifestyles, including the colonial bungalow. In 1900, for example, Indian industrialist J.N. Tata financed a development of 100 bungalows. Designed by a British architect in the Queen Anne style, these suburban bungalows in Bombay accrued different meanings to British ones as they were now inhabited by middle-class Indians.25 Although it became commonplace in public buildings, furniture played a particular mediating role between colonial and indigenous cultures in domestic spaces. In the late nineteenth century, local elites required furniture not only for enacting European social rituals but also for its symbolic value as a marker of civilization. However, the wholesale adoption of modern living by Indian elites did not occur until the twentieth century. Best represented by the Art Deco apartments of Bombay’s Marine Drive in the 1920s and 1930s, the “moderne” style “was to be fully realized throughout the Indian middle-class domestic interior.”26 Rather than simply adding a parlor or some British furniture into existing Indian-style homes, the wealthy inhabitants of Bombay’s new apartments adapted to European spatial planning (predicated on a nuclear family) and modern furniture. Finally, it is worth noting that in designing the built environment of colonial India, the British relied on Indian craftsmen, laborers, builders, draftsmen, and various other contractors. In some cities, particularly Bombay, modernization was a “joint enterprise” between colonial power and local elites, as Indian

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entrepreneurs contributed to building modern schools, hospitals, and public institutions.27 Particularly in colonial cities, wealthy merchants adopted British lifestyles, language, and manners and kept up with the latest fashion from London. Similarly, Indian princes who aligned themselves with the British commissioned spectacular palaces in the Indo-Saracenic style. Whether to signal their allegiance to the British or simply to appear “civilized,” the Indian elite adopted British architecture and lifestyles.

Inventing “Indian design” Defining, ordering, and classifying Indian tradition was, for the British, an essential colonial duty. From the conservation of architectural monuments to the collection of antiquities, the patronizing process of preserving and documenting Indian tradition was one in which Indians had little input. In order to understand what “Indian design” might mean, it is worth unraveling how “the fuzzy categories of local products came together in the late 19th century into a bounded entity of national design.”28 Through exhibitions, publications, and educational programs over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, a coherent image of “Indian design” emerged in Britain. Beginning with the 1851 Great Exhibition, Britons came to understand Indian design by its “colour and ornament,”29 focusing on its decorative aspects rather than its functional, social, or ritual values. The culmination of this process occurred in 1886, when Queen Victoria of England and “Empress of India” opened the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in South Kensington (Figure 3.2). Intended as a celebration of Britain’s colonial achievements, the Exhibition attracted five and a half million visitors in just three months.30 In the Indian section—by far the biggest display—visitors marveled at intricately carved wooden screens, sculpted stone arches, colorful textiles, and decorative arts as they strolled around an oriental bazaar, an Indian palace, gardens, and even a simulated jungle. Displays of Indian decorative arts were popular in nineteenth-century exhibitions, but the “Indian Palace” of the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition went further. It contained, according to the official catalog, “the peculiar feature of most oriental Palaces, a ‘Karkhaneh,’ or workshop, where jewelers, weavers, carvers, and others would carry on their trades, and produce before the visitors the marvellous and beautiful objects of their handiwork.”31 Here, in the middle of metropolitan London, visitors could see live Indian artisans crafting traditional artifacts. In Reminiscences of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, Frank Cundall described their work:

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Figure 3.2  Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London: Central Avenue of the Indian Section, 1886. GETTY images: Editorial #: 179803662 /Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images.

They are genuine artisans, such as may be seen at work within the precincts of the palaces of many of the Indian Princes . . . Weavers of gold brocade and kinkhab, tapestry and carpets, an ivory miniature painter, copper and silver smiths, a seal engraver, a dyer, a calico printer, a trinket maker, a goldsmith, stone carvers, a clay-figure maker from Lucknow, a potter, and wood carvers, were all daily to be seen at work as they would be in India.32

T.N. Mukharji, one of the three Indian men commissioned to help organize the exhibition, recalled the effect the craftsmen’s work had on exhibition visitors: A dense crowd always stood there, looking at our men as they wove the gold brocade, sang the patterns of the carpet and printed the calico with the hand. They were as much astonished to see the Indians produce works of art with the aid of rude apparatus they themselves had discarded long ago, as a Hindu would be to see a chimpanzee officiating as a priest in a funeral ceremony.33

Squatting on the ground crafting objects with “rude” tools, for an English audience, the Indian craftsmen represented an ideal image of both traditional and colonial production. This was not an India of rebellious natives—the 1857 Rebellion was a distant memory—but an India of pre-industrial craftsmanship integrated into traditional life.

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The “authentic” manufacturing visitors witnessed at the 1886 Exhibition also served to sell Indian decorative arts in Britain. “Production at the exhibition site,” argues historian Peter Hoffenberg, “provided a further reconstructed ‘Aura’ to replace that found in the locale of the object’s origin and lost in this era of mechanical reproduction and mobility.”34 As well as a feeling of civilized superiority, visitors could also experience traditional artisans producing authentic handcrafted objects. However, the Indian artisans were not in fact master craftsmen, but prisoners recruited from an Agra jail.35 And the reality of colonial India was very different. Bombay, for example, already had not only electricity, trams, and trains, but also large cotton spinning mills powered by steam engines that had been in operation for thirty years.36 The romanticization of Indian tradition was epitomized by George Birdwood’s popular 1880 book, The Industrial Arts of India: the very word manufacture has in Europe come at last to lose well nigh all trace of its true etymological meaning, and is now generally used for the process of the conversion of raw materials into articles suitable for the use of man by machinery. Work thus executed, in which the invention and hand of a cunning craftsman has had no part, must be classified by itself, and under the most intricate and elaborate divisions. In India everything is hand wrought, and everything, down to the cheapest toy or earthen vessel, is therefore more or less a work of art.37

Birdwood advocated a “preservationist” version of colonialism in which Britain’s duty was to protect Indian craftsmen from industrialization (in his book, Birdwood notes the “dreadful” Bombay mills). A Victorian nostalgia for the handcrafted, “authentic” products of “the natives” created “an idealized projection of tradition as ‘good’ and modernity as ‘bad.’ ”38 Collecting, exhibiting, and preserving tradition—protecting it from modernization—thus became part of the “White Man’s Burden” of European colonialism. The Indian artisans’ performance at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition materialized the construction—following Edward Said—of absolute difference between “traditional” India and “modern” Britain.39 For the British public, the Exhibition also collapsed a complex culture comprising numerous languages, religions, and traditions into a singular “India” ruled by the recently crowned “Empress of India.” The Indian Palace’s “Saracenic” design reflected this. Constructed by British architect Caspar Purdon Clarke, the Palace comprised “diverse elements including windows cast from buildings in the city of FatehpurSikri” and included a Hindu structure, Muslim palace interior, and Sikh carved woodwork.40 In the Palace, as in the artisan performance, various traditions were compressed into a spectacle of traditional India for British consumption.

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Design reform and India This colonial construction of Indian design coincided with British “design reform.” Centered on the circle of Henry Cole, Owen Jones, Gottfried Semper, Matthew Digby Wyatt, and Richard Redgrave, design reform had various manifestations, including education, exhibitions, lectures, and publications.41 Cole and his colleagues published the first specialist design journal, for example, the Journal of Design and Manufacturers in 1849, and helped organize the 1851 Great Exhibition. Although ultimately intended to display the superiority of British industrial manufacturing, the Great Exhibition also displayed the manufactures of the non-industrialized world. Ironically, Semper’s response to the Great Exhibition, published as Science, Industry, and Art: Proposals for the Development of a National Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Industrial Exhibition (1852), highlighted the superiority of the decorative arts of “the Orient.” Semper noted the “shameful truth” of comparisons between European massmanufactured goods and the decorative arts of “the half-barbaric nations,” particularly India.42 For this circle of reformers, Indian design functioned as a symbol of the authentic, refined, and traditional. After the 1851 Exhibition, purchases for the new South Kensington Museum (later to form the basis of the Victoria and Albert Museum) included many Indian decorative arts. During the 1860s, Henry Cole became an enthusiastic collector of Indian design on behalf of Museum, and secured the East India Company collection for it in 1875. Owen Jones was also enthusiastic about Indian design in his classic The Grammar of Ornament (1856). The Grammar “offered a model for a new style of British design that was at one radical, orientalist, cosmopolitan and modern.”43 As with the new museum, Jones’ Grammar was a tool for selecting and preserving the tradition of non-civilized, pre-industrial peoples. The systematic collection and cataloguing of Indian designed objects as traditional, unchanging, and authentic provided a useful foil against the industrially manufactured products of British civilization.44 However, exhibitions and publications largely ignored the overt religious, social, or political meanings of Indian objects. In the aftermath of the 1851 Great Exhibition, Cole was appointed head of the Department of Science and Art (DSA) under the Board of Trade. Here, along with his assistants Redgrave, Wyatt, and Jones, Cole embarked on reform of the Schools of Design. Beyond Britain, this reform of design education also had a colonial dimension. The new schools of art in Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta, for example, were “obtaining textbooks, models, plaster casts, drawing materials, and other equipment from the South Kensington repository.

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By the mid-1860s, schools of art in India were recruiting DSA graduates for their teaching positions.”45 The DSA program in India, which included exhibitions as well as education, “cast itself as saviour of the decaying native industries and Indian artisanry under the onslaught of cheap, mass-produced imports from the metropole.”46 The same institution essentially ran two different programs, corresponding to British ideas about what was appropriate design in Britain versus in India. That is, a British designer, trained in a School of Design in Britain, emerged as a professional practitioner conversant with a modern visual language and theory, while an Indian graduate emerged as a traditional artisan. The Mayo School of Arts in Lahore, for example, under the DSA trained Lockwood Kipling, operated as a “craft school.” The curriculum was “a conscious effort by Kipling to draw upon surviving traditions and skills, and to emphasise technical rather than theoretical instruction.”47 This was consistent with the preservationist ideal of British colonialism. Finally, in Britain, the traditional craftsman was a compelling image that could stand in for all that was lost with industrialization. As Dutta puts it: As a figure of difference, the artisan does not disappear with the advent of industrialism. Rather, it appears within it. The imago of the Oriental artisan is born and bred in the anthropological chrysalis of industrial capitalism.48

Meanwhile, in India, colonial officials introduced a patchwork of protectionist measures, particularly in the 1880s and 1890s, including exhibitions and publications that reinforced a particular image of Indian design.49 While in the early modern era, British designers had sought out knowledge about Indian textiles and their production, in the nineteenth century, the image of the Indian handloom worker was associated with backward technology, simple tools, and laborious processes. However, the practical reality of this colonial project was ultimately unsuccessful as Indian “artisans and consumers continually strayed into foreign styles and hybrid uses.”50 It is to the hybrids that we now turn.

Swadeshi and modernity Formally, the Indian independence movement began in 1885 with the founding of the Indian National Congress and the twin concepts Swaraj, or self-rule, and Swadeshi, or self-sufficiency. However, there were two broad visions of how to achieve these aims. Indian intellectuals grappled with the issue of whether Indians should develop modern industries or revive traditional crafts. Scientist Pramatha

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Nath Bose, in a 1909 lecture delivered in Calcutta, “Industrial Development by Indian Enterprise,” outlined a modernizing vision for Indian industries. Currently, he argued, Indian entrepreneurs lacked sufficient capital, India lacked adequate technical training and was held back by “the hereditary aversion of the higher castes for trades and industries which have hitherto been relegated to the lower, and in some cases, to the very lowest classes of the Indian society.”51 Despite these obstacles, Bose noted the success of Bombay textile mills and argued that Indians should develop modern manufacturing and mining. In the same year, Mohandas Gandhi’s book Hind Swaraj outlined an opposing vision. Gandhi rejected industrialization and colonial technological dependence. “India is being ground down,” he argued, “not under the English heel but under that of modern civilization.”52 Elaborating on John Ruskin’s earlier critiques of industrialization, modern textile mills became a potent symbol of colonial oppression for Gandhi. So too were imported consumer products: The tinsel splendour of glassware we will have nothing to do with, and we will make wicks, as of old, with home-grown cotton, and use handmade earthen saucers for lamps. So doing, we shall save our eyes and money, and will support Swadeshi, and so shall we attain Home Rule.53

Drawing on the Bengali Swadeshi movement, formed to boycott British goods and purchase swadeshi, “goods of one’s own country,” Gandhi advocated handspinning, hand-weaving, and Indian self-sufficiency. In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi stressed an intimate connection between the production and consumption of indigenous products and self-government. In 1917, Gandhi founded the Satyagraha Ashram in Ahmedabad to exemplify his ideal lifestyle. Hand-spinning became a central activity and potent symbol of the ashram. Producing handmade textiles implied not only rejecting imported, machine-manufactured goods but also functioned as a critique of modern factory working conditions and a vision of the regeneration of India’s traditional textile industry. But Gandhi was also reframing hand-spinning in a modern context. Regardless of caste, gender, language, or religious divisions, argued Gandhi, everyone could spin (as Gandhi himself, a lawyer by profession, illustrated). Gandhi established the All-India Spinners’ Association in 1925 to oversee the spread of this “democratic ideal” of spinning through instruction, distribution, and advertisements. This marketing of traditional hand-spinning was ironically modern. Importantly, Gandhi’s emphasis on handmade and indigenous production resulted in “the invention and popularization of a nationalist style” centered on homespun cloth, or khadi.54 Visually distinct, khadi was heavy, rough and came

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in plain colors (preferably white), devoid of the patterns or rich decoration that characterized traditional Indian textiles. For Indians, khadi became an important symbolic material of Indian nationalism. Its widespread adoption in the 1920s and 1930s—not only for clothing, but for bedsheets, towels, curtains, and other domestic furnishings—was akin to a lifestyle reform movement, although one associated with anti-colonialism and nationalism.55 Interestingly, by the late 1920s, Gandhi accepted industrially made swadeshi and khadi and, instead of a distinction between handmade and machine-made, emphasized the distinction between Indian and British made.56 Despite the traditional production methods, “the texture and color of khadi symbolized Gandhi’s belief that clothing should express common, rather than individual interests.”57 This was a distinctly modern notion of equality across classes, castes, religions and gender. Historian Lisa Trivedi describes khadi as “a recognizable emblem of identity, clothing the nation through a versatile fabric of tradition that serves an Indian modernity.”58 The means of advertising, marketing, and distributing khadi products was also modern. As new kind of national uniform, khadi was perceived by some as a threat to Indian traditional order and hierarchies inscribed via the design of textiles and clothing. The British, recognizing the threat in the 1920s, banned people wearing khadi in courtrooms and government offices. Khadi became an essential expression of nationalism in India, and remains so today.

Part II: Designing an Asian empire As we saw in Chapter 2, Japan’s rapid modernization was—at least partially—a response to European and American imperial policies. By the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, China and India, once Asia’s dominant powers, appeared helpless and chaotic in the face of Western imperialism. Over the next fifty years, the British (Burma, Singapore, and the Malay Territories), French (French IndoChina), Dutch (Dutch East Indies), and Americans (Hawaii and the Philippines) either expanded or established new colonies in Asia and the Pacific. Given the seemingly logical progression from civilization to imperialism, Japan also acquired a colonial empire. Beginning with Taiwan in 1895, Japan’s imperial expansion included Manchuria, in northeast China, and Korea. Although relatively short-lived, Japanese colonization introduced new technologies, infrastructure, and material culture to its colonies, and, like Britain, Japanese modernization was also affected by culture, people, and ideas flowing back from the colonies. From the Japanese perspective, their near-neighbors Taiwan, Korea, and China all shared a Chinese-derived culture. This made the idea of a common

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“East Asian” identity plausible, culminating in the Japanese vision of a “Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” After 1937, the Japanese military used this vision for further expansion with the invasion of China, Southeast Asia, and war with the United States. Over the first decades of the early twentieth century, Japan saw itself as the leader of Asian modernization and civilization. Japanese colonies functioned primarily as a source of raw materials and agricultural products, but at the same time, their backward and uncivilized peoples were being civilized by the Japanese.59 As was the case with the British Raj, the Japanese colonial administration constructed modern infrastructure in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, including railways, telegraphic networks, postal, sanitation, and irrigation systems. But colonial modernization was selective. Japanese colonialism suppressed industrial development, as well as institutions, technologies, and ideas that might threaten Japanese authority.

Designing Japanese colonies Japanese victory in the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese war not only symbolized “equality” with the Western powers but also resulted in the secession of Taiwan from China. Following the war, the Japanese colonial regime moved quickly to establish control over the island. Modern institutions designed by Japanese architects, including government buildings, hospitals, banks, and schools, served as material proof of “superior” Japanese civilization.60 However, rather than emphasize “Japaneseness,” Japanese colonial architecture comprised an eclectic mix of European historical styles. Japanese architects and planners, typically trained at the Imperial College in Tokyo, reproduced the designs of Meiji Japan in the colonies. For these professionals, the colonies represented a unique opportunity to experiment with new styles and techniques.61 In the eyes of both Japanese and their colonial subjects, the new architecture’s style, materials, and functions were modern, but also inescapably colonial. In Taipei, the new regime’s most prominent architectural symbol was the Governor-General’s Office (now the Presidential Office; Figure 3.3). A Japanese design competition held in 1910 failed to come up with a suitable design but the Architect’s Office of the Taiwan Government-General adopted and altered the second-placed proposal by Uheiji Nagano.62 Completed in 1919, the Taipei Governor-General’s Office was constructed from reinforced concrete faced with red bricks, and featured (in a concession to the climate) an encircling veranda and central courtyard. Consistent with Japanese colonial architecture in general, there were no recognizably “Japanese” details within its interior or on its exterior.63 In keeping with the function of a modern administrative building,

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Figure 3.3  Governor-General’s Office, Taipei, completed 1919, initial design by Uheiji Nagano. Getty Images/Credit: JTB Photo/Editorial #: 506015573/Collection: Universal Images Group.

Nagano’s design was functional, rational, symmetrical, and imposing in its scale (his original tower was significantly extended in the revised design). For the colonized, such institutions became prominent symbols of Japanese authority. However, they served another purpose: confident European design and modern institutions also symbolized Japan’s equality with European colonial powers. Given the consistency of its colonial architecture, Japanese architects clearly viewed European design as the universal language of modernity in the early twentieth century. However, for Taiwanese people, such design—whether it was perceived as European or Japanese—was clearly foreign. Although modern institutions in Taiwan (and in Japanese colonies generally) followed this example, the design of vernacular housing changed little under Japanese occupation. Even as some Taiwanese elite adopted the new “Japanese” style (as Indians did in the Raj) their designs differed from Japanese models. Taiwanese would use modern materials and a Westernized façade, for example, yet maintain traditional spatial plans. In such hybrid domestic designs, the wealthy elite “attempted on the one hand to give a Western appearance to their house to express their social status and wealth, while on the other hand they wanted to continue their daily lives around the courtyard.”64 Although contemporary with the Japanese “double life,” being modern in a colonial context could mean being Japanese as much as Western.

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As the British did in India, the Japanese colonial regime established modern infrastructure and systems in its colonies, regardless of local traditions, forms, or spatial arrangements. A brief example illustrates the comprehensive approach to building modernity in Japanese colonies. Established in 1906 after Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War, the South Manchurian Railway Company, also known as Mantetsu, was more than a railway company. As well as expanding the rail system inherited from Russia, Mantetsu also constructed port facilities, urban infrastructure, and architecture in Korea and Manchukuo. Often referred to as a “puppet state” of Japan, Manchukuo was a Japanese-controlled territory carved from northeastern China that became an official state in 1932. It is perhaps best remembered today as the place where China’s “last emperor,” Puyi, was restored to the throne. By 1916, Mantetsu operated subsidiaries in Manchukuo, including coalmines, steel and glass works, and power and chemical plants. By the 1920s, Mantetsu was Japan’s largest corporation, its wealth built mainly on soya bean exports from Manchukuo. As well as modern infrastructure, Mantetsu contracted architects to design hotels, known as the Yamato Hotels, Western-style buildings at major stations along their rail lines. Initially intended for military purposes and exclusively for Japanese guests, the hotels were also used for tourism. The Yamato hotels’ modern facilities, including Western-style parlors and dining rooms, were at the vanguard of modern luxury. As Japan’s colonial program shifted to include settlement in the 1930s, Mantetsu built schools, hospitals, and administrative buildings and created propaganda posters, films, and advertising. Developing Manchukuo represented a unique opportunity for progressive Japanese architects and engineers, culminating in the construction of a new capital, Changchun. Here, Mantetsu architects and planners designed a city with modern infrastructure and imposing institutions. From a railway town of less than 1000 people in 1907, Changchun became a metropolis of over half a million people by the mid-1930s. The historically eclectic Meiji style dominated early buildings in Changchun, including an art nouveau–inspired Yamato Hotel, built in 1909. Matsumuro Shigemitsu, chief architect of the colonial government who designed many of these, urged Japanese architects to be scientific, progressive, and cosmopolitan. He saw their role as leading agents of a global, rather than simply Japanese, modernization.65 From 1935, professional Japanese architects, contracted by Mantetsu, designed official institutions along grand boulevards, sanitation, and power generation systems, as well as public parks and amenities. Designated the capital of Manchukuo and renamed Xinjing (Shinkyō in Japanese), Changchun’s prominent official buildings of the late 1930s

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incorporated elements of traditional Chinese design. Their horizontal spans, symmetry, and spatial layout borrowed from Beijing’s Forbidden City. However, as a new city of a new nation, its design was ideally international with East Asian details—usually in the form of Chinese rooves on modern concrete buildings— as decoration or surface styling. As in colonial India, the incorporation of local details projected an image of legitimacy for the new regime. The hybrid built environment of Changchun, “technically proficient yet grounded in a regional and racialized context,” highlighted Japanese visions of an East Asian modernism.66 Despite the Japanese designers’ vision, it remained—from a Chinese perspective—a Japanese colonial city.

Designing the Island Empire of the East As was the case with imperial Britain, imperial Japan sought to display its colonies to the world in international exhibitions and fairs. In 1910, for the Japanese-British Exhibition at the 140-acre Great White City site in London, the Meiji Government sent Japan’s largest contribution to date for an international exhibition. Promoted as a celebration of the recent Japan-British alliance, for the first time, a joint exhibition between “the two Island Empires of East and West” implied equality between the two imperial powers.67 Overall, the exhibition was huge: it included 2300 exhibits from Japan and 1500 from Britain, and attracted over eight million visitors in six months.68 In addition to traditional Japanese ceremonial gateways and gardens, the Japanese government were keen to display their modernity. Halls devoted to Agriculture, Machineries, Railways, and Communication included model railways, architectural models of financial, industrial and educational institutions, and exhibits on military achievements. As an aspiring colonial power, Japan’s “Palace of the Orient” contained exhibits from Formosa (Taiwan), Korea, and the South Manchurian Railway Company.69 The colonial exhibits included images of railways, steamships, schools, and hospitals that represented modern development and progress under Japanese colonialism, juxtaposed with the “uncivilized” material culture of indigenous populations.70 Additionally, Japanese designers constructed two native “villages” in which twenty-two Paiwan villagers from Taiwan and fifteen Ainu villagers from Hokkaido resided for the exhibition’s duration. These “human exhibits” performed traditional dances, craft-making, and ceremonies. Such “living” villages of subjugated peoples were common in European exhibitions (as we saw above with the 1886 Indian and Colonial Exhibition), culminating in an extensive survey of villages in the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris. These were, of course, not representations of indigenous reality under

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Figure 3.4  Japan-British Exhibition in London, entrance to an Ainu village, 1910. Getty Images/ photo by Internationale-Illustrations-Agentur Credit: ullstein bild/Editorial #: 542884415.

colonialism, but consciously constructed tableaux. The Ainu village, for example, although made from traditional grass and timber, was modified for the British audience to include a (non-traditional) towering, fort-like entrance (Figure 3.4). Adopting a European evolutionary hierarchy of civilizations, Japanese colonialists regarded the Paiwan and Ainu people as culturally and materially backward. Beginning with the incorporation of Hokkaido (including the Ainu) and Okinawa in the 1870s, the Meiji Government’s assimilation policies included the imposition of Japanese language, dress, and social customs on indigenous people. Despite significant resistance by indigenous people, the policy continued into the twentieth century in Taiwan. Representations of indigenous people, such as those at the 1910 Japan-Britain Exhibition, served two main purposes. First, the primitive tools, clothing, and architecture of the Ainu and Taiwanese appeared to be diametrically opposed to the modern machinery and institutions of the now-civilized Japan. Second, representing the Taiwanese and Ainu as uncivilized helped illustrate the need for Japanese colonization: rather than the British, French, or Dutch, it was the Japanese who were gifting modernity to Asian people. As well as such exhibitions, the Japanese colonial project also included the scientific and systematic classification of indigenous people and their material

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culture. This institutionalization and popularization of native culture amounted to what Yuko Kikuchi refers to as “the invention of ‘native Taiwaneseness’ during the Japanese colonial period.”71 The “primitive” textiles, ceramics, wooden carvings, woven baskets, and ritual objects of the Taiwanese indigenous peoples (most of whom maintained their independence and autonomy during Chinese occupation) were subject to what Kikuchi refers to as “Oriental Orientalism,” “a ‘refracted’ and transformed version of Japanese Orientalism.”72 However, if the Japanese perceived themselves as culturally and materially superior to their Asian neighbors, this was not necessarily the way the rest of the world perceived Japan. Despite four decades of modernization, mainstream British perceptions of Japan remained unchanged since the mid-nineteenth century. The prevalent idea of Japan as the backward Orient, far behind European civilization, was not lost on Japanese leaders and intellectuals. This was one reason why exhibition organizers strove to present the finest examples of Japanese export arts and crafts. Interestingly, while the British audience and critics generally admired the Japanese traditional crafts and painting on display in the JapanBritain Exhibition, Western-style painting by Japanese artists was “greeted with contempt by European art connoisseurs” and seen as simply “imitation.”73 Similarly, the Exhibition’s traditional timber buildings and extensive traditional gardens proved popular, while examples of modern Japanese architecture were condemned by one architectural critic as mere “copyism.”74 Overall, the British press conveyed Japan’s modernization in a relatively positive manner, but the Japanese press were disappointed with the native villages and entertainment (including sumo wrestling), which they felt reinforced a perception of Japan as uncivilized.75 An example from the British press confirmed such fear: The Ainu and Formosan headhunters, who made their debut on Saturday, are worth more than a hurried visit. The headhunters boast of a horrid past, and the Ainu next door have an interest all their own. They believe that the founder of their house was a dog, and their appearance does not justify one in quarrelling over the matter.76

While such perceptions were not what Japanese authorities had hoped for, the Japan-British Exhibition aimed to represent modern Japan and its colonies to a European audience. The implied equality of the exhibition’s title seemed to confirm Japan’s status as a colonial power. The Japanese government also organized exhibitions within their colonies. The Korean Industrial Exposition in 1915, for example, was organized by the

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Japanese colonial administration to document five years of progress in Korea. It was symbolically located within the Kyongbok palace in Seoul, former palace of the Choson dynasty for 500 years. In six weeks, the Exposition attracted over a million visitors. Formerly inaccessible to the masses, the palace complex was opened up by Japanese authorities as part of the spectacle. Juxtaposed with the traditional palace buildings, the Japanese constructed new buildings in Western styles that exhibited over 40,000 objects produced by Koreans and Japanese settlers. For the Japanese, the Exposition represented an exercise in “comparative modernity” in its symbolic juxtaposition of Korean tradition and Japanese modernity, exemplified by the Machinery Hall featuring the latest industrial objects from Japan.77 The Railway Hall, one of the Exposition’s most popular destinations, offered a panoramic view of the Exposition site. Inside, visitors could experience railways, a symbol of progress and civilization, both as miniature models, and in a working cable train in which they could ride around a panorama of Korea. For Koreans, the representation of rail “was staged as an essential prop for visualizing colonial modernity and imperial expansionism.”78 The displacement of the monarchy was spatial, symbolic, but also temporal: the Choson dynasty was consigned to history. However, such colonial staging of Japanese modernity versus Korean tradition also had the unintended effect of bringing Koreans together as a collective. Such comparative representations “provided the colonized with a collective body of the Korean nation which was no longer the unchangeable and sacred realm of the kingdom, but instead a determinable form of a society and its new totality.”79 As was the case in India, colonialism provided the means for later national movements and collective identities.

A colonial coda: The chair If the introduction of Western-style architecture, infrastructure, and public institutions into Japanese colonies symbolized their superior level of civilization, the chair represented a unique problem. Chairs were a potent symbol of a modern, civilized life. But, as we saw in the previous chapter, Japanese culture was traditionally floor-sitting, and even with the introduction of chairs in schools and public institutions in the early Meiji era, Western-style furniture was rare in Japanese homes. The “double life” of Meiji Japan—living Western in public but Japanese in private—caused some anxiety among colonial officials when Japanese colonists continued the practice. Their continuing attachment to tatami mat living presented a paradox—how could Japanese colonists proclaim their superior civilization and modernity while sitting on the floor?80

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Therefore, the Japanese domestic reform movement also included a colonial dimension. The first issue facing Japanese colonists when designing homes was climate. Taiwan’s semitropical climate was not suitable for heavily upholstered European-style furniture.81 A new type of rattan chair, designed for the Mitsukoshi department store in 1911, could serve both domestic reform agendas in Japan (as chairs were an essential part of a new Culture House) and in the colonies. Rattan, indigenous to Southeast Asia (and Taiwan), was ideal as it is a lightweight material and relatively close to tatami mats in color. Historian Jordan Sand argues that rattan functioned “as an intermediary in the transition from the semitropical primitivism of life on the floor to a civilized life with proper Western furniture.”82 Derived from colonially sourced materials, rattan chairs—used both in Japan and in the colonies—linked colonialism and modernity.

Colonial modernity and design The design of modern economic, political, and legal systems, modern government, military, education and medical institutions, as well as modern transportation and communications networks had profound effects on Asian people living under colonial regimes. Modernization legitimated the colonial project and enhanced the unequal power relationship between rulers and ruled. But it also provided the foundation for the development of modern design cultures. The transfer of new technologies, material culture, and ideas under colonial conditions had an immediate effect on traditional production and everyday life. However, as we saw with various examples, a simple modern/ traditional dichotomy, or a simple opposition between the original (of the motherland) and its colonial imitation, is an insufficient model for understanding the complexity of colonial modernity.83 Importantly, the colonial framework of representation—demonstrated through the exhibitions above—cast a long shadow over later perceptions of Asian design. So long, in fact, that it is worth considering if some Asian traditions were at least partially constructed by colonial powers. From textiles and ceramics to ancient monuments (such as Borobudur, noted in the introduction) British, French, Dutch, and Japanese colonists documented, defined, collected, and analyzed “traditions” of their colonies.84 Traditional objects served to demonstrate colonial superiority through juxtaposition with modern design. However, by the early decades of the twentieth century, new print media, radio, film, and department stores became increasingly important mediators of modernity. Urban life in Seoul and Tokyo or Calcutta and London was becoming

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increasingly similar.85 For some colonized people, particularly those interested in the new, colonial centers represented a rich source of modern techniques and ideas. Gandhi studied law in London, for example, as Chinese students studied modern design in Tokyo (we will see in Chapter 4). As well as colonial exploitation and oppression, there was also interaction between individuals. It is these individuals and their interactions—specifically those associated with modern design—that we will consider next.

Chapter 4 Professional Paths

Beyond the state or institutions, professional designers helped form modern Asian design. A modern designer implies a professional with specialized training, engagement with new materials, methods, and theories, as well as a selfconscious desire to shape a modern world. In early Meiji Japan, architects were among the first design professionals, adopting European models of training and practice. As distinct professions, commercial art (graphic design) and industrial design emerged later, in the early decades of the twentieth century. By analyzing three case studies—Japanese professional architecture and commercial art, the first generation of Shanghai graphic designers, and European and American designers working in Japan—this chapter addresses the impact of individuals in the development of modern Asian design.

Part I: East meets west In Europe and the United States, a distinction emerged over the course of the nineteenth century, between architects, who design buildings, and builders, who build them. The intellectual work of design and planning came to be seen as separate from the manual labor of construction. In Japan, no such division existed until after the 1868 Meiji Restoration. Prior to this, a master carpenter (daiku tōryō) combined carpentry with planning, design, and management of the construction process. Master carpenters were either born into or adopted into established carpentry families and trained from an early age through apprenticeship. Manuals, handed down within carpentry families, detailed patterns and techniques. Although we might term this type of practice “traditional,” it was by no means static or formulaic. During the Tokugawa period, for example, Dutch buildings in Yokohama provided inspiration for Japanese carpenters, in terms of both new forms and the use of bricks for military foundries and shipyards.1

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Kisuke Shimizu, a notable early Meiji practitioner, successfully bridged two modes of practice. He began his career as a master carpenter, but his practice changed after winning a commission to design public buildings in 1861. In Yokohama, he collaborated with American R.P. Bridgens and learned European design principles and construction techniques. These he adapted to his carpentry practice. Shimizu’s First National Bank (1872), for example—a wooden-framed structure with masonry-faced walls—embodied this blending of materials, techniques, and forms. However, a new generation of professionals soon surpassed this type of hybrid practice. In 1877, Tokyo’s College of Engineering began a specialist architecture program based on European-style academic training. The College’s entrance exams were based on academic excellence, not building experience or knowledge. Unlike in the earlier apprenticeship system, its students did not engage in construction. This new type of professional training represented a significant break from the apprenticeship system. The first generation of Japanese architects worked as civil servants for government (the main patron of modern buildings), for one of the large industrial-financial conglomerates (zaibatsu) or as academics. Tatsuno Kingo, for example, graduated from the first class of Conder’s architectural course in Tokyo’s College of Engineering in 1879. Over the course of his subsequent career, Tatsuno designed many notable brick and stone buildings for the Bank of Japan, as well as the iconic Tokyo Railway Station in 1914. Although he opened an independent practice in 1903, the mainstay of Tatsuno’s work remained closely tied to the government and new institutions, including designing institutions in the Japanese colonies.2 In Meiji-era Japan, architects were clearly distinct from carpenters. Architects used different materials (brick and stone, later concrete and steel), design methods (based on European design principles), construction techniques, and types of buildings (new public institutions). With these differences also came an image of the architect as a professional with a high social status. This status was reinforced by higher education, professional organizations, and publications dedicated to the new practice. Japan’s first professional organization for architects, for example, Zōka Gakkai (“Building Institute”), was founded in 1886. Modeled on the Royal Institute of British Architects, its aim was to raise standards, promote professional development, and disseminate technical information through its journal. Not surprisingly, the disjunction between this new European-derived practice and traditional carpentry created some controversy during the Meiji era. By the late 1880s, even architects began to question how the new public architecture— based on European precedents—related to Japanese cultural identity. At the

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same time, architects also began documenting Japanese architectural history and integrating some traditional methods into modern architectural practice. In 1889, for example, master carpenter Kigo Kiyoyoshi began teaching at the Tokyo Imperial University (which now incorporated the former College of Engineering architecture course). From the 1880s to the 1920s, a central debate in Japanese architectural circles revolved around the dichotomy beauty (or art) versus utility (or science). This was a recurrent theme in Japan’s first architectural journal, Kenchiku Zasshi (The Architectural Magazine, founded in 1887). A 1915 article, “Theory of Inartistic Architecture” by Noda Toshihiko, for example, comprised a polemical argument for utility over beauty: When a building satisfies its practical purposes, it is always beautiful . . . Whether architecture requires the expressions of the Zeitgeist or individuality is still more absurd. Such conditions are satisfied naturally when the purposes of the building, as a practical item are completely fulfilled.3

Meanwhile, others argued that architecture was an art as well as a utilitarian, engineering-based practice. Debates over the role of beauty, individual expression, and structural engineering comprised the professional concerns of the era. As in Europe and the United States during the same period, a key question was whether beauty was separate from utility. For Japanese architects, this also involved questioning whether Japanese notions of beauty and utility were different from European ones.

Bunriha and Mavo: Japanese avant-garde groups In 1920, six graduating students from the Tokyo Imperial University architecture department formed Bunriha Kenchikukai (“Secessionist Architectural Society”), Japan’s first self-consciously modernist collective. Inspired by the Vienna Secessionists and German Expressionists such as Bruno Taut and Erich Mendelsohn, Bunriha mounted an exhibition at the University and another soon afterward at the Shirokiya Department Store. Comprising Horiguchi Sutemi, Yamada Mamoru, Takizawa Mayumi, Morita Keiichi, Yada Shigeru, and Ishimoto Kikuji, Bunriha was active for eight years. Through exhibitions, publishing, teaching, and architectural practice, Bunriha paralleled the activities and aims of European avant-garde groups of the same period. For these young radicals, Japanese architectural training and practice continued to emphasize a toolbox of historical styles derived from Renaissance, Gothic, and Classical traditions. As in Europe, design had become the practice

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of applying appropriate historical styles onto functional modern structures—a railway station decorated like a palace from Renaissance Venice or a bank in the form of an ancient Roman temple, for example. In contrast, Bunriha advocated a holistic, modernist approach that would abandon such practices. They began by projecting a vision. That is, rather than completed buildings, their early work comprised plans, publications, and a manifesto: We arise! We break away from the realm of past architecture so that we might create a new architectural realm where all of the architecture that we produce is given genuine significance We arise! In order to awaken all that is sleeping in the realm of past architecture In order to rescue all that is in the process of drowning In a state of joy, we dedicate everything that we have to the attainment of this ideal and we will wait expectantly for it until we collapse and die In unison, we declare this to the world!4

The Bunriha manifesto was contemporaneous with similar European avantgarde proclamations such as Walter Gropius’ “Bauhaus Manifesto” (1919) and Le Corbusier’s magazine L’Espirit Nouveau (1920). Like their European counterparts, these self-styled Japanese modernists sought to secede from an architectural practice grounded in (European) historical styles in favor of one based on functionalism. They also—again, like their European counterparts— understood that publications, photography, and promotion were an essential part of modernist design practice.5 Despite the vague practical aims of their utopian vision, Bunriha architects proclaimed the essential role of modern design in social and political transformation. For this generation of Japanese architects, modernism was both an international and an individual expression. New materials (particularly reinforced concrete), advanced engineering methods, and scientific approaches all appear in their writings.6 Unlike Meiji-era architects, they did not link their practice specifically to national development and sought new patrons beyond the government. But the potential loss of Japanese identity with modernization remained an unresolved issue. Although there were few overt Japanese references in their writings or their built work, Bunriha architects did not completely reject the past, but drew equally upon Greek and Buddhist temples. By analyzing one particular member’s practice, we can see how modernist ideas developed in a Japanese context.

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Horiguchi Sutemi: A model modernist Horiguchi Sutemi was Bunriha’s intellectual and theoretical leader. Inspired by Otto Wagner, Peter Behrens, and Josef Hoffmann, Horiguchi embraced a holistic idea of modern architecture that incorporated new furniture, interiors, and lifestyles.7 Horiguchi’s first major project was a series of temporary pavilions for the 1922 Tokyo Peace Exhibition, including the Electrical and Machinery Pavilion, the Transportation and Flight Pavilion, the Mining-Forestry Pavilion, and a prominent Tower. In contrast to the eclectic historicism of other pavilions, Horiguchi’s Pavilions appeared stark and functional. Inspired by Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Wedding Tower, Horiguchi’s Tower was not made from the latest industrial materials, but constructed from timber. However, when considered within the context of a popular (and temporary) exhibition, Horiguchi’s structures functioned as “stage sets foreshadowing a modernist city yet to come.”8 Such structures complemented the Exhibition’s Culture Village (discussed in Chapter 2). In 1923–24, Horiguchi traveled to Europe to see modernist buildings in Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris, and Amsterdam, and visit the Bauhaus in Weimar. He developed a particular interest in Dutch modernism (on his return he wrote Contemporary Dutch Architecture, published in 1924), the Viennese Secessionists, and Peter Behrens. The Viennese and German modernists’ idea of a gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art,” reminded Horiguchi of the relationship between architecture, utensils, and ritual in the Japanese tea ceremony. Upon visiting Behrens’ house in Darmstadt, he noted the consciously integrated design of the architecture, furniture, fixtures, and even the food. “This individual design,” he wrote, “extending all the way to the coordinated sweets, recalled the attitude of the tea master Sen no Rikkyū.”9 For Horiguchi, the Japanese tea ceremony’s holistic design seemed modern. Furthermore, he also noted how European modernism’s purity and simplicity recalled Japanese vernacular architecture, particularly the Katsura Imperial Villa.10 As we saw in Chapter 2, the dichotomy between Japanese tatami mat rooms (flexible, with little furniture) and European fixed and excessively furnished rooms remained into the twentieth century. Modernist architects such as Horiguchi still struggled to integrate the seemingly incompatible forms, functions, and materials of modern interiors and furniture into Japanese domestic space in the 1920s and 1930s. A newly wealthy, cosmopolitan clientele began to patronize modernist architecture in Japan and, along with new commercial buildings such as cinemas, cafes, and department stores, provided professional architects such as Horiguchi with opportunities. Horiguchi’s 1939 Kikkawa House, for example, exemplified Bunriha’s modernist approach, but also illustrates its adaption to Japanese lifestyles.

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A member of Tokyo’s wealthy elite, Kikkawa Motoaki commissioned a large house over three floors with flat rooves and rooftop terraces. Formally, Horiguchi drew upon Dutch modernism and Japanese vernacular design in the house’s geometric forms. He also used a traditional proportion method, and incorporated traditional wood and paper as decorative interior surfaces. The architect envisaged the reinforced concrete frame “like a fossilized timber frame” with some flexibility for later reuse or renovation (possibly an evolution of the traditional Japanese house).11 Although designed for a chair-based lifestyle, Horiguchi made concessions to Japanese expectations. For example, critic Ken Tadashi Oshima notes that Horiguchi “lowered chair heights to accommodate the typically smaller proportions of bodies in Japan. In effect, these chairs engendered a spatial feeling akin to that of a traditional tatami-based space, because people sat on one-foot-high seats in rooms with relatively high ceilings.”12 At once modernist in accordance with international standards, the design of the Kikkawa residence also responded to Japanese conditions. Horiguchi’s “grand tour” of European modernist buildings was only one means for Japanese architects to learn about European modernism. While higher education was considered essential for a modern professional, for architects and designers, additional training under a recognized “master” was still considered important. Kunio Maekawa, for example, worked in Le Corbusier’s atelier in Paris from 1928 to 1930, and was followed by Sakakura Junzō from 1931 to 1936. After returning from Paris, Maekawa worked in Antonin Raymond’s Tokyo atelier and translated Corbusier’s L’Art Decoratif d’Aujourd’hui into Japanese. He then established an independent architectural practice, Maekawa Associates in 1935. With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, Maekawa opened branch offices in occupied China, and designed a number of significant colonial projects (during which time a young Kenzo Tange was a staff member). He was not only an architect but also a writer and theorist.13 Maekawa’s own house, completed in 1941, was an essay in the progress of Japanese modernism. Constructed from timber (as concrete and steel were limited due to the war), the spatial design was primarily Western, with separate bedrooms in a symmetrical plan, hard floors rather than tatami, and Westernstyle furniture. But the house also included a formal Japanese-style entry space that shielded inhabitants from the street, and a mix of glass and shoji sliding screens. After the war, Maekawa’s practice continued, and he utilized some of the modernist principles and techniques he had learned in the 1930s in more uncompromising settings. These included the use of exposed concrete construction for apartment buildings and a prefabricated construction system he designed in response to the post-war housing shortage.

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Futurists and Mavo In 1920s Japan, similar avant-garde collectives emerged in other fields. For young artists, modernism represented an alternative to the existing system of European-style training, exhibitions, publications, and patronage. The Futurist Art Association, which ran from 1920 to 1923, for example, hosted a series of exhibitions that featured experimental artists working in Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism. Although directed at a different audience, “A Futurist Manifesto,” written in 1922, conveys the same provocative spirit as the Bunriha manifesto: Friends! Wake up! Come new young, healthy artists! Come to the new epoch of creation! Friends! Wake up! Escape from all copying! Take your penetrating mind, your sensitive psyche, and your centripetal nerves; seize the connection between nature and complicated, real daily life. Make large numbers of new works! All at once break and extinguish the subject you are using in order to express the passion and the speed of life in flux.14

Following close behind the Futurists, another group of self-styled radicals, Mavo, formed in 1923. The Mavo manifesto presented an image of artistic rebels revolting against existing practices.15 In the reconstruction effort after the Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed much of Tokyo in 1923, Mavo artists also dabbled in construction and created murals and public art. Tellingly, Bunriha architect Takizama Mayumi denounced such activities as artists “rampantly spread madness and selfishness.”16 Although a minor debate, the fact that an architect was criticizing artists working in the built environment confirms an acute awareness of professional boundaries. Mavo’s magazine exemplified the new aesthetic approach. It incorporated many new techniques, including photographic collages, innovative typography, and, for the cover of number 3, a collage or “constructivist assemblage” including real price tags, human hair, and a firecracker (the firecracker was removed by the censor). The Mavo journal’s disruptive visual language can be seen as an aesthetic response to rapid industrialization and modernization. But Mavo members were also working in shōgyō bijutsu (commercial art), linking fine art and design “by adopting interchangeable aesthetics and art practices.”17 Artists associated with Mavo also designed book covers, posters, and magazine illustrations. As in Europe, there was a crossover of practices between avant-garde art and the emerging commercial design industry in the 1920s and 1930s.

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Importantly, Mavo’s modernist ideas were not produced in isolation. By the 1920s, Japanese artists were intimately linked to international currents in avantgarde art and design. Mavo editor Tomoyoshi Murayama, for example, sent copies of Mavo to European artists and designers, and received copies of Kurt Schwitters’ Merz and Theo Van Doesberg’s De Stijl magazines in return. These artists and commercial artists were part of an international exchange—of not only theoretical ideas but also the expressive typography and dynamic layouts of such avant-garde publications.18 These common expressions of modernity, though variable according to local cultural and social conditions, indicate an increasingly global modern design language. This burgeoning design modernism of the 1920s and 1930s was global at least in part because travel was faster and more affordable than in the nineteenth century. Although Japanese students had gone abroad for study since the 1860s, few had gone to study architecture or design. By the 1920s, this had changed, and Japanese designers could experience European and American modernism first-hand. Architect Iwao Yamawaki and textile designer Michiko Yamawaki, for example, studied at the Bauhaus from 1930 to 1932.19 The Yamawakis, supported by Michiko’s family wealth, attended at the Bauhaus during a turbulent period—they arrived just as Hannes Mayer was deposed as director. Far from being surprised by the design and architecture they encountered at the Bauhaus, they were clearly already conversant with modernist design. In his diary, Iwao wrote that on arrival in Dessau he knew the Gropius-designed Bauhaus building through photographs and even noted, “I was thoroughly familiar with the floorplan.”20 On their return to Japan via New York, the Yamawakis taught at Renshichiro Kawakita’s short-lived “Japanese Bauhaus” and Michiko staged exhibitions of modernist textiles. However, in their private lives, they continued what Helena Čapková terms a “transcultural aesthetic.” Although affirmed modernists, they included a Japanese room in their Bauhausstyle villa in Tokyo and were enthusiastic about Japanese ceramics and Mingei crafts.21 Like so many Japanese designers, the Yamawakis found ways to adapt modernist ideas to Japanese conditions.

Part II: Shanghai modernists In September 1928, an advertisement announcing the services of a young designer and painter, Qian Juntao, appeared in several Shanghai journals, including Dushuzazhi (Reader’s Magazine) and Xin Nuxing (New Woman). As well as a price list for his book cover designs, it noted the following:

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A good designer can. . . transform the spirit of the contents into form and colour, to stimulate a feeling of beauty in the viewer and increase the interest of reading. Our friend Qian Juntao is good at painting and especially excellent in book design. His cover designs are all the rage and are placed in the display windows of every bookshop.22

Qian had already established a reputation designing book covers for Kaiming Shudian (Enlightenment Book Company). Kaiming’s store was situated on Fuzhou Road in the International Settlement, amid the cluster of bookstores that comprised Shanghai’s cosmopolitan Wenhuajie, or “Culture Streets.” Kaiming was one of dozens of small, progressive publishers specializing in modern literature and ideas. In Shanghai’s prolific publishing industry of the mid-1920s, even a small company like Kaiming was publishing ten books per month, including books by modern writers such as Mao Dun, Ba Jin, and Ding Ling. Qian’s book covers—which number over 1700—were diverse.23 Although he began as a music editor, Qian soon shifted to designing book covers, eventually creating a recognizable Kaiming style. In 1920s China, there were few constraints or expectations on book design, no weight of tradition as in painting. Traditionally, books were bound with string and their front and back covers were plain, with a handwritten title slip pasted onto the front. With the introduction of lithographic printing into Shanghai, a wave of illustrated magazines during the 1870s and 1880s began to change the possibilities. The idea of a book cover as art was still relatively new in the 1920s and designers such as Qian had ample opportunity to experiment. Qian’s book covers of the late 1920s and 1930s included organic motifs and ancient Chinese patterns, Dada-esque montages and geometric abstraction. Su-Hsing Lin argues that the “naturalistic inclination” of Qian’s early cover designs reflected the influence of Feng Zikai’s cartoon-like illustrations and the English Arts and Craft movement. She also notes his wide-ranging traditional references: ancient bronze and Han dynasty stone patterns, seal carving, and calligraphy.24 Ultimately, Qian’s absorption of modern Japanese designers such as Sugiura Hisui and Takehisa Yumeji, local mentors Li Shutong and Feng Zikai as well as Berlin Dada, Russian Constructivism, and American magazines such as Vanity Fair and Esquire resulted in a “synthesis of pictorial cultures.”25 Born in 1907 in Zhejiang Province, Qian enrolled in the Shanghai Normal Art School in 1923 where he studied music (Western and Chinese) painting, and meishu zhuanye tu’an or “professional art design.” The school was founded by Liu Zhiping, Feng Zikai, and Wu Mengfei in 1920. Liu had recently returned from

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studying music in Japan. Feng, who taught Western painting and design, had also studied briefly in Japan. Later, Feng designed book covers and illustrations for the Kaiming Book Company, as well as writing books (such as A History of Western Art in 1928) and translating Japanese books on art and music. All three—Liu, Feng, and Wu—studied with a Chinese pioneer of commercial design and Western-style painting, Li Shutong.26 At the Shanghai Normal Art School, Qian met Tao Yuanqing, who also became a graphic designer and painter. Tao was older than Qian, and had worked for the Shanghai Times before studying. In 1925, Tao compiled a book of patterns reproduced from ancient bronzes, Chinese Ancient Design, aimed at “the cultivation of the art of designing as key to improving Chinese made commodities.”27 Like Qian, Tao’s work was eclectic, but he was particularly interested in Japanese and European design as well as ancient Chinese motifs. His career was cut short by his premature death in 1929, but even in the five years of his creative life, Tao’s designs had a significant impact. Along with Tao and Qian, the third well-known professional designer in 1920s Shanghai was Chen Zhifo. From 1919 to 1923, Chen studied applied art at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. Upon his return to China, he taught in Shanghai and opened the (short-lived) Shangmei Design Studio, with the aim of designing textiles, but he also designed packaging, posters, and advertising. Like Qian and Tao, Chen designed numerous book and magazine covers in the 1920s including regular work for the journals Eastern Miscellany (Dong fang zazhi) and Short Story Monthly (Xiaoshuoyuebao). His aesthetic was eclectic, drawing upon Japanese techniques, a frequent use of the female form and experimentation with Chinese characters. In 1930, Chen published what is considered China’s first graphic design textbook, Tu’an fa ABC (“The ABC of Design Method”). In the early 1920s, tu’an was a relatively new Chinese word, and was initially used to distinguish design from painting. In a 1920 essay, Wu Mengfei, one of the founders of the Shanghai Normal Art School, wrote: “In China, there have been only terms such as moyang and huawen [decorative pattern]. The term tu’an was new. It was translated from Western languages, ‘design’ in English, by the Japanese [using Chinese characters] and subsequently imported to China. The term, unwittingly, began to be used in the field of education.”28 In Chen Zhifo’s textbook, tu’an referred to artistic conception prior to producing an object, though he was primarily concerned with two-dimensional design such as decorative patterns for textiles. Importantly, the term was a new one, borrowed from Japan, and flexible enough to be able to accommodate the new Chinese designers’ eclectic practice.

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Modern writing, modern design In 1927, Lu Xun passed by the Kaiming Bookstore windows and noticed Qian Juntao’s striking book covers. Lu was an affirmed modernist and rising literary star due to his many essays, short stories, poetry, and translations. Inquiring after the designer, Lu met Qian and invited him to see his art collection, which included rubbings of Han Dynasty stone reliefs and bronze engravings, Chinese classical paintings, and European woodblock prints. Lu Xun’s writing was radical and experimental. He vehemently rejected the classical Chinese literati wenyan—elite, scholarly, obscure writing—and exalted baihua, or vernacular, accessible writing. Unlike the well-rooted Chinese tradition, the weed-like “wild grass” of modern vernacular writing was mobile and ephemeral.29 Lu was profoundly influenced by Japanese and European literature such as Rousseau, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Nietzsche (a similarly eclectic mix to the designers). However, Lu’s “hybrid” baihua combining vernacular Chinese with foreign experimentalism was at odds with his egalitarian aims—modern literature was no more accessible to the Chinese masses than traditional poetry or painting.30 In China, calligraphy was traditionally the connection between writer and artist and between text and image, but Lu was searching for a new connection. Lithography and mechanized printing were first introduced in Shanghai in the late nineteenth century and early pictorial magazines and illustrated books established a close relationship between artists and book publishing.31 While early literary books had traditionally plain covers, the popular “Mandarin Duck and Butterfly” genre of romantic fiction (popular in the 1910s) featured covers with sentimental, stereotypical images of female beauties. In contrast, the Shanghai modernists aimed to create covers that were not literal illustrations of the contents but, like the modern writing within, engaged with new ways of seeing and experiencing the world. Lu seriously considered the question of how to integrate writing and visual imagery and initially designed covers for his own books. From 1924, he collaborated with Tao Yuanqing, who designed covers for some of his most famous books, including Wandering. At Lu’s insistence, his books included the designer’s name and he used it in the marketing of new publications.32 Lu’s translations of Kuriyagawa Hakuson, a Japanese professor of Western literature, also featured covers designed by Tao. Kuriyagawa’s themes of individuality, sexual repression, and creative freedom (influenced by Freud and Bergson) appealed to Lu as a foil against traditional Chinese values. Tao’s cover designs, featuring fragmented female forms and expressive line work, suggest the

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eruption of Bergson’s life force or Freudian (that is specifically male) desire. Radical, avant-garde writing thus appeared to Chinese readers within a radically new modern book. At the same time, book cover design was also becoming a serious consideration in Europe and the United States. Qian, Chen, and Tao were contemporaries of Edward McKnight Kauffer. Although now best known for his poster design and advertising, Kauffer also designed numerous book covers in the 1920s and 1930s for English literary publishers such as Nonesuch Press and Hogarth Press. Another contemporary, American William Addison Dwiggins designed book covers in the 1920s for Alfred A. Knopf and Random House. In a similar approach to the Shanghai designers, Dwiggins’ book covers incorporated modern typography, ornamental patterns, abstract illustrations, and calligraphy. Designing books was part of an emerging professional practice that Dwiggins termed “graphic design.”33 In Europe, the United States, and Shanghai, the book cover was outlet that reconciled artistic self-expression with the commercial demands of the new mass consumer marketplace. In the mid-1920s, Shanghai was a usual city—a semicolonial space due to the extraterritoriality of the International Concessions—but also a commercial and cosmopolitan port. It was China’s first modern metropolis, the first city with electricity, trams, and modern communications systems. As the center of the Chinese publishing, advertising, fashion, and film industries, Shanghai was the place where the new and modern were promoted, popularized, and disseminated, a production center for a “modern imaginary.”34 Books were at the intersection of the city’s industrial production—Christopher Reed estimates that there were 10,000 people working in the Shanghai printing industry in the mid-1920s—and cultural production was driven by commitment to ideas rather than profit maximization.35 The Kaiming Book Company, for example, was described by an editor as “a family artisan workshop” run by “friends who shared common interests” rather than a modern, commercial publisher.36 Publishers, writers, designers were all involved in creating an audience for modern ideas. Ling Shiao argues, “Though profitability of their ventures was important, the new presses strived to be agents for cultural change rather than cater to mass readership.”37 Freed from traditional systems of patronage, these modern urban intellectuals engaged in the marketplace of ideas as much as books and magazines. Since the end of the Qing Dynasty, the Opium wars and defeat by Japan in the 1898 Sino-Japanese war, modernization was seen as imperative, particularly by young intellectuals. The popular formation of this was zhongti xi yong, “Chinese learning for essence, Western learning for means” (made

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famous by Zhang Zhidong in his 1898 “Exhortation to Learning” essay). Cultural reformers urged Chinese to adopt instrumental features of Western learning yet retain an inner Chineseness. Implicit in this binary is the equation of the East with tradition, religion, and spirituality, and the West with modernity, science, and materialism. If Chinese intellectuals adopted an evolutionary and universal historical consciousness, then China was clearly “behind” the West. However, while the first generation of May Fourth intellectuals equated modernity with Western civilization, the second and third generations—of which Lu Xun and the designers were part—did not necessarily see things so simply. For some, the First World War had exposed inherent problems with European civilization. The May Fourth movement began in 1919 as a mass demonstration by Beijing students protesting a decision at the Versailles Peace Conference to transfer former German concessions in China to Japan. Even as Japan remained a central mediator of all things European, there was a growing suspicion about Japan’s military intentions. For May Fourth intellectuals, the crucial problem of the 1920s was what to borrow from the West and how to use it. Their problem was ultimately how to construct a modern nation after the downfall of the Qing Dynasty (the Republic was formally declared in 1912). Western material culture had long been around in China, particularly Shanghai, but now Chinese were starting to create their own. For designers such as Qian, Chen, and Tao, there was no question of “imitating” modern design from Europe or the United States. In Republican China, the word xin (new) was “the crucial component of a cluster of new word compounds denoting a qualitative change in all spheres of life”—from xinwenxue (new literature) and xinwenhua (new culture) to xinshidai (new epoch).38 May Fourth intellectuals popularized the idea of living in a new era. Designers did not simply live in the new era, but actively created the visual and material culture of Chinese modernity. However, this brief sketch is not the complete picture of China’s first professional designers. Ruptures to the Shanghai scene in the late 1930s, particularly the Japanese invasion in 1937, followed by war, halted design activities. After the war, the communist aversion to capitalist print culture ended the possibility of a graphic design career in China for several decades. While Tao died young, the other two professionals followed similar trajectories after the war. Despite avoiding traditional painting in their book cover designs, Chen became well known for his later career in which he is credited with reviving traditional “bird and flower” painting, while Qian was best known for his later painting, calligraphy, and seal carving. Ironically, after less than two decades of frenetic innovation, the first Chinese professional designers abandoned design and today are better known for their traditional art practices.

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Chinese modernity arose in a confluence of historical circumstances— modernization to combat Japanese and Western imperialism, strategic attacks on tradition yet revival of other traditions—the 1920s and 1930s were not characterized by a singular modernity but a sense of forward momentum and possibilities. Young radicals saw the modern vernacular language (visual as well as Lu Xun’s baihua) as part of a future national culture. Modern design’s origins in China are ambiguous—Chinese designers were engaged with European, American, and Japanese imagery, ideas, and technology mediated by translation and dislocation. Through their book covers, advertising, publishing, and teaching, designers such as Qian, Chen, and Tao helped establish a space for modern ideas and a role for professional designers.

Part III: West meets east In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, just as Asian designers adopted and adapted European and American ideas and models of practice, so too European and American designers borrowed from Asia. In 1876–77, for example, Christopher Dresser, although officially an advisor on how to modernize Japanese craft industries, also learned from Japanese artisans. Dresser’s four months in Japan affected his subsequent design work both formally and through the incorporation of Japanese decorative motifs. From his Japanese experience, Dresser also learned that even humble, everyday objects could and should be carefully designed. However, his book Japan: It’s Architecture, Art and Art Manufactures (London: Longmans, 1882) not only popularized Japanese design for an English audience but also confirmed an existing idea of Japanese culture as static and traditional. For design reformers, traditional Japan represented an appealing alternative and counter to industrial Britain. Japanese design’s simplicity, artisan production methods, highly refined everyday objects, and an aesthetics derived from nature all aligned with ideals of the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic Movements. But even these admirers of Japanese design depicted its culture as frozen in time— like medieval Europe, Japan represented a traditional culture untouched by modernization.39 For witnesses such as Dresser, modernization was damaging Japanese arts and decorative objects. “[T]he art works of Japan,” he wrote, “have deteriorated to a lamentable extent having had contact with the West.”40 Dresser’s criticism was part of a pattern among European and American designers and critics. Ultimately, such criticism led to the paradoxical assumption that Europeans could adopt Japan’s traditional culture, but Japanese should not adopt modern European culture.

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Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan Frank Lloyd Wright embodied a particular image of the modern architect—an uncompromising creative individual, polemical writer, and holistic designer whose practice encompassed architecture, interiors, furniture, and garden design. Although associated now with a particularly American modernism, Wright also had a long and often understated relationship with Japan. From as early as 1902, Wright was a serious collector and, later, dealer in Japanese woodblock prints and this interest contributed to his later aesthetic theory. Although not one to admit borrowing ideas from anyone or anywhere, Wright clearly adopted ideas from Japanese architecture and design into his Chicago practice in the early 1900s. Tellingly, when he embarked upon his first trip abroad in 1905, it was not to Europe (as one might expect), but to Japan. Even before going to Japan, Wright had absorbed Edward Morse’s 1886 Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings and the Japanese Pavilion at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition.41 Although Wright admitted an aesthetic debt to Japanese woodblock prints, he denied any architectural debts. However, critics at the time (and today) noted the similar free spatial plans, integration of house and garden, and decorative motifs abstracted from nature. Wright was a product of American visions of Japan in the late nineteenth century, an idealized view of a feudal society as “captured” in Morse’s popular book. Morse’s meticulous observations of traditional Japanese houses, interiors, and objects became the standard for American architects and designers. The image of Japanese traditional homes as simple, functional, and aesthetically integrated appealed to critics (such as Wright) of the Victorian excess and historicism that constituted the mainstream of architectural education and practice at this time. Wright’s famous Prairie House designs, for example, with their integration of house and garden, merging of interior and exterior, elimination of excess, and open spatial plans, certainly coincided with his interest in Japan.42 For Wright, the Japanese house was both “a perfect example of the standardizing I had myself been working out” and “a supreme study in elimination—not only of dirt but the elimination, too, of the insignificant.”43 Other potential borrowings from Japanese architecture were Wright’s preference for built-in furniture and shelving. As in Morse’s descriptions of the Japanese house, Wright’s interiors, furniture, and fixtures were integral to the whole.44 Finally, Japanese prints certainly had an impact on Wright’s documentation. The plans and renders produced in his studio by Marion Mahony, particularly in their abstraction, framing, and asymmetry, clearly owe a debt to Japanese woodblock prints. Wright’s chance to design a building in Japan finally came with the commission for the new Imperial Hotel (Figure 4.1). The protracted commissioning process

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Figure 4.1 Frank Lloyd Wright, Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, designed c. 1913–20, opened 1922. Getty Images/Hulton Archive/Stringer/Editorial #: 3228617.

began in 1912 through Wright’s print collecting connections. The design process required Wright to travel to Japan and back numerous times. In all, from the end of 1916 to the end of 1922, he spent half his time in Japan and half in the United States.45 Wright was determined that the Imperial would not be an “American” design imposed upon Japan but a modern design inspired by Japanese aesthetics. Wright’s innovative approach in designing the Imperial included its reinforced concrete frame, flexible foundations, cantilevered structures that incorporated garden terraces, and ornament incorporated into the structural elements (following his mentor, Louis Sullivan). Its free-floating concrete foundations survived the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, adding considerably to Wright’s reputation in Japan. In a 1922 article, Wright wrote that his new Imperial Hotel “is not designed to be a Japanese building: it is an artist’s tribute to Japan, modern and universal in character.”46 For Wright, this was “organic” design, in which beauty is integral to the whole rather than historical styles applied to a modern structure. Wright refers to the modern public buildings in a European-style in Japan as “bad copies, in bad technique, of bad originals”47 and as “the empty folly of imitation.”48 Elements of Japanese design that most appealed to Wright at the time were standardization, minimal ornamentation, integration of a complete aesthetic ideal, and the idea of raising everyday life and rituals to the level of art (as in the tea ceremony, for example).

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However, if it was neither wholly American nor Japanese, the Imperial Hotel was unmistakably a “Frank Lloyd Wright” design. As Louis Sullivan wrote in 1925, “This vast sumptuous building, in all its aspects: structural, utilitarian, and aesthetic was the embodiment, and is now the revelation, of a single thought tenaciously held by a seer and prophet, a craftsman, a master-builder.”49 Here Sullivan illustrates the idea of the modernist designer as a creative genius, pursuing a singular vision. The reality of the collaborative process—Wright had a studio of assistants and consulted closely with the hotel’s management board— is ignored in this image of the architect as a romantic visionary. The original Imperial Hotel, opened in 1890, was Japan’s first Western-style hotel constructed of timber, brick, and plaster, in an eclectic European style. At the time, it was considered the height of luxury accommodation for foreigners and a social hub of modern Tokyo. Wright’s task was to design a larger hotel with twentieth-century amenities. For Wright, the new Imperial Hotel was to be more than simply a commercial hotel; it was intended as “a distinguished center of social entertainment for the life of the capital.”50 For this purpose, he included a grand banquet hall and a revolving stage that could seat 1000 people. As a place where foreigners and locals could meet on equal terms, the Imperial was an updated version of the Rokumeikan (see Chapter 2). It is difficult to assess the impact Wright’s Imperial Hotel had on Japanese architects and designers. There is no evidence, for example, that Wright was in contact with the young Japanese architects associated with Bunriha. Certainly, one of the lasting impacts of Wright’s Japanese visits was bringing Antoinin Raymond and his wife Noemi to Japan in 1919 to assist with the Imperial Hotel project. The Raymonds stayed on in Japan and established an architectural practice that not only continued to develop modernist architecture in Japan, but also served as a training ground for several of the next generation of architects, including Maekawa Kunio. Raymond’s Tokyo practice varied—from the French embassy renovation (1930), to the Toyo Steel Products Office Building (1931) to the Tokyo Golf Club (1932) and many private residences—but was uncompromisingly modernist in its cubic forms of reinforced concrete. Like Wright, the Raymonds were profoundly affected by Japanese design. In their 1936 book, they wrote: “An architect working in Japan has the advantage of seeing materialized before him in Japanese architecture and civilization, fundamental principles—the rediscovery of which is the goal of modern architecture.”51 They clearly saw design principles that aligned with their modernist practice, when they continued: “Is there any other civilization for which beautifying means elimination? It is through increased simplicity and elimination

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that the man of taste finds elegance.”52 Interestingly, the Raymonds also noted the practice of “Kimon,” the science of conciliating the household gods. When plans are sketched, the architect and the client must consult a scholar in this science who will tell them whether the various parts of the house, entrances, W.C.s, bed rooms, kitchen, etc. are auspiciously situated in reference to the center of the house or if it is probable that disaster and ill-health will befall the unfortunate occupant.53

They do not scorn this practice, but accept it as part of local culture.

European modernists in Japan The next wave of international design exchanges occurred due to the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry and Kōgei Shidōsho, the Industrial Arts Research Institute, who invited prominent German designers to Japan. Architect Bruno Taut, from 1933 to 1936, interior designer Tilly Prill-Schloemann in 1939, and furniture designer Charlotte Perriand in 1941 all came to advise on design but, like Dresser, learned a great deal from their Japanese experience as well. Taut in particular was enamored with traditional Japanese architecture, and his book Houses and People of Japan (1937), popularized the Katsura Imperial Palace as an exemplary model of Japanese architecture (his other touchstone was the Ise shrine). Like earlier critics, Taut had little to say about modern Japanese architecture. Prill-Schloemann and Perriand were particularly interested in mingei (folkcraft) for modernist and export potential.54 The refined, undecorated everyday objects of Japanese tradition appealed to European modernists, aligning with their reductive aesthetic and utilitarian emphasis, while the tatami mat modular system aligned with their interest in standardized systems of construction and proportion. Taut’s Japanese experience was revealing. Upon arrival in Japan in 1933, he refused hotel accommodation, wanting to experience a traditional Japanese house in the countryside. However, once there, was “appalled by the lack of thermal comfort, the hardness of the futon and the high temperature of the communal bath.”55 He was also critical of the “primitive” kitchen and the proximity of the toilet to the living space, among other things. Undeterred, Taut eventually found his ideal Japanese design in the Katsura Imperial Palace. Its simplicity, austerity, and utility confirmed for Taut a design ideal that provided “a valid base for modern architecture.”56 But even here, argues Kisho Kurakawa, Taut and other modernists who followed him (including Walter Gropius, who also wrote about Katsura) ignored the decorative aspects of Katsura—as well as the many

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other traditional structures, from temple architecture to shogun castles—that did not align with their vision. Taut was encouraged in this by young Japanese modernists who were keen for an authority to confirm a particular tradition that aligned with their modernist vision too. Perriand’s experience was equally revealing. Her exhibition “Selection, Tradition, Creation” at Tokyo’s Takishimaya department store in 1941 combined furniture designed by Perriand and constructed in Japanese workshops— bamboo stools and a table, for example—with traditional ceramics and lacquer work that she considered appropriate for export.57 For Perriand, her prototypes represented a blend of modern European and Japanese design. She also adapted earlier furniture designs to Japanese conditions and local materials, including a bamboo version of the 1929 “LC4 chaise longue” (originally designed in collaboration with Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier using tubular steel) as well as original designs for bamboo and timber beds and chairs, designed low to the ground to better fit with Japanese expectations.58 To make the connections between European modernism and Japanese tradition clear, the exhibition’s entrance featured a photograph of Katsura next to one of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s houses. Before her Japanese trip, Perriand worked in Le Corbusier’s studio, primarily as an interior designer and furniture designer. Here, she met both Maekawa and Sakakura, and through Sakakura, she was invited to Japan. Perriand’s assistant and guide while in Japan was Sori Yanagi, son of Soetsu Yanagi, founder of the Mingei movement and while in Tokyo, she stayed at Wright’s Imperial Hotel. Her Japanese experience had an impact on her later design theory, what she termed l’art d’habiter, or “the art of living,” in which humble objects and rituals are endowed with aesthetic refinement. While the aesthetics and serenity of the tea ceremony influenced her thinking, she also adopted practical solutions such as integrated shelving and sliding doors to allow for flexible interior spaces. The affinity between Japanese tradition and modernism was clear to Perriand when she wrote: “I was amazed to discover how absolutely modern the tatami was”59 and “I was delighted to see the principles of our avant-garde dreams expressed throughout an entire country.”60 She also wrote admiringly about Katsura Imperial Palace. However, in her reminiscences of Japan in her Autobiography, Perriand does not mention Tokyo’s modern architecture, railways, department stores, or cinemas. As if she were wearing blinkers, all she recalled seeing was “traditional” Japan. Such blinkered visions of Japan and its traditions did not go unnoticed by Japanese designers. The patronizing attitude of some European and American architects and designers toward Japanese tradition was not appreciated, nor

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was the idea of them claiming Japan as an unknown culture. Taut is still referred to today as the “discoverer” of Katsura Imperial Palace, for example.61 Designer Katsumi Masaru, in a round table discussion with Charlotte Perriand, summed up this frustration: First of all, we ourselves want to make use of the splendid wisdom of our ancestors, and have no need to be told to do so by foreigners. However, [that wisdom] must be filtered through modern, scientific rationality. If, instead, we complacently swallow those things that express the exoticizing view of foreigners, then the future of our Japan will be imperilled. Because the thorough dissemination of science is still necessary in Japan, it is a great nuisance to healthy intellectuals when this is ignored and a small minority of those with a taste for nostalgia is catered to instead.62

Katsumi was a member of the Institute that supported Perriand’s trip to Japan and these comments illustrate that not all favored the idea that modern Japanese design should be derived from local crafts. For the Japanese modernists present at the discussion, including Yamawaki Iwao and Kenmochi Isamu, Perriand’s presentation of Japanese “tradition” was an Orientalist one, in which she was drawn to a primitive ideal of the non-European Other rather than engaging with modern Japanese life in 1941.63

From modern to traditional Both European and Japanese designers noted the affinity between modernist ideas and Japanese “tradition.” The refined aesthetic, modularity, unadorned surfaces and raw materials, restraint, and austerity all aligned with modernist “good taste.”64 A particular Japanese aesthetic—the rustic simplicity of the tea ceremony and the formal purity of Katsura—was “discovered” by modernists. As Le Corbusier or Gropius might look to the Parthenon as a model, Japanese modernists could look to Katsura, and European modernists such as Taut confirmed its legitimacy. However, it is important to understand this as a selective tradition in which modernists highlighted only those aspects of Japanese culture that paralleled their own practice, and ignored the rest.

Chapter 5 Consumer Paths

In addition to producing modern design, ordinary people in Asia consumed it. From the late nineteenth century, particularly in urban centers, a new consumer landscape emerged. Mass-produced objects and their accompanying advertising, branding, and marketing were at once global yet also adapted to local conditions. For the modern consumer, identity was no longer tied to traditional social classes but rather to the products they bought. But modern consumerism was not simply a case of European or American corporations diffusing their products throughout the world. It was also a case of local entrepreneurs, designers, and consumers mediating those products. Individuals often used imported goods in unintended ways. Importantly, the new methods of design, marketing, and promotion also represented opportunities for Asian entrepreneurs and designers to create their products. In this chapter, we will examine a single mass-produced machine, the Singer sewing machine, the reinvention of traditional Chinese medicine, and a new space of consumerism, the department store, as a means of surveying modern design in an Asian consumer context.

Part I: The herald of civilization How people used and understood a modern object like the Singer sewing machine in various Asian cultures differed from how it was used and understood in the West. The global diffusion of a mass-manufactured commodity such as the sewing machine parallels similar machines such as bicycles, typewriters, clocks, and, later, cameras, gramophones, and radios. These imported machines were part of a constellation of objects that comprised the new consumer culture transforming Asian cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, as we shall see with the sewing machine, modern objects were always “localized” and their multiple local uses and meanings defy simple generalizations.

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Patented in 1851, Isaac Merritt Singer’s machine was one of a range of new sewing machines that improved on existing technology. It was capable of 900 stitches per minute, for example, as opposed to hand sewing’s maximum of fifty per minute. Originally conceived for factory use, Singer’s restyled version for the domestic market was light and compact. Beyond the stylish design, the Singer Company’s innovative advertising, marketing, and retailing (including product demonstrations, instalment payment schemes, and after-sales service) made Singer “the world’s first global brand.”1 Although Singer never dominated the American market, by 1879, it completely dominated the global sewing machine market.2 The Singer sewing machine’s design was the same everywhere, but how consumers used it and what it meant varied. One of Singer’s most successful early promotional campaigns was a set of “trade cards” and advertisements depicting people from around the world in their “native” dress. Originally issued in 1892, the cards proved so popular that the company produced several versions over the next decade, known as the “Singer National Costume Series.”3 Each card featured a color lithographic image on one side and a description of the country’s geography, people, and culture on the reverse side. The reverse of the India card, for example, reads: Under British rule India is making rapid strides in modern civilization. Our picture represents the Singer Manufacturing Company’s native employees in the usual costume. The Singer Sewing Machine has been a factor in helping the people of India toward a better civilization for nearly twenty years, and thousands of them are in use.

Although the cards featured a few European cultures, the majority featured— for an American audience—“exotic,” foreign cultures such as India, Ceylon, Japan, China, Zululand, and Tunis. The focus on traditional people in traditional clothing seated at a Singer was apparently particularly enticing for American women, Singer’s main target market (Figure 5.1). In the late nineteenth century, American commercial expansion was seen (by Americans at least) as superior to European imperialism. American “informal imperialism” proceeded via the distribution of industrially manufactured commodities and the establishment of a modern consumer culture.4 American commerce also followed the discourse of civilization in which Anglo-European races were understood to be superior, while others were inferior (as in the advertisement’s reference to “unprogressive China”). Modern mass-produced machines such as the sewing machine were, as one Singer advertisement put it, the “herald of civilization.”5 In Asia, American commercial expansion overlapped with European colonialism, both aiming to spread “civilization.”

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Figure 5.1 Advertisement for Singer Sewing Machines. National costume series features China, 1899. Getty Images/Photo by Jay Paull/Editorial #: 143229034.

Active agents But Asians were not simply passive recipients; they were active agents in their own modernization. Ordinary people absorbed modern design and ideas into their lives in ways that did not necessarily equate with Western “civilization.” By considering the Singer sewing machine in a range of contexts, we can see how Asians not only failed to live up to the stereotypes represented by the American trading cards, but actively used new machines to transform local craft practices, economic conditions, and social and gender roles. Although evidence of local consumption practices in late nineteenth-century Asia is limited, by drawing together official documents, photographs, advertisements, and personal accounts, scholars have begun to picture how modernity entered everyday life. Importantly, Asian consumers were neither colonial “natives” conservatively clinging to tradition nor uncritically embracing all new and foreign technologies but, like consumers everywhere, they mediated between these extremes. In India, uptake of the sewing machine was relatively late, rising dramatically from the 1890s and into the first decades of the twentieth century.6 As in other Asian markets, Singer officials initially assumed their market was not local Indians but middle-class European women. As well as racist assumptions about the

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Indian aversion to new technology, officials also assumed that because much Indian clothing was “stitch-less,” Indians had no need for sewing machines. However, Nasarvanji Mervanji Patell, employed as Singer’s Indian agent from 1875 until 1911, saw the machine’s potential. Cultural barriers prevented direct sales to Indian women in the home, but Patell oversaw a marketing and distribution strategy to sell Singer machines to darzi, or Indian tailors. The darzi was a figure in British minds that was (like the performers at the 1886 Colonial exhibition) “representative of the perceived temporal and spatial immobility of India’s artisan classes.”7 Importantly, the Indian darzi was male and typically worked for a British “master.” Although initially introduced by British employers, sewing machines soon became a means for darzis to set up independent businesses in tailor’s shops, bazaars, or on the streets (Figure 5.2). The sewing machine transformed existing darzi practices in various ways: sitting upright rather than working on the ground, producing new types of clothing and making or repairing a new range of items requiring stitching such as curtains, bedding, bags, or ship’s sails. Fashion, diverse across India, was rapidly changing in the late nineteenth century. The sewing machine facilitated the spread of ready-made clothing (adapted to Indian conditions) and uniforms—for

Figure 5.2  Street tailors working at their Singer Sewing Machines, India, 1929. Getty Images/ Editorial #3318364/Hulton Archive.

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not only armies and schools, but also for employees of railways, post offices, and other new professional workplaces. In India, the Singer sewing machine was used in different ways than in the United States and elsewhere. While the Singer’s American image as a middleclass woman’s essential parlor accessory was lost in India, its laborsaving aspects were instantly understood. Despite his popular association with the “traditional” spinning wheel, even Gandhi eventually praised the sewing machine’s laborsaving virtues. In a dialogue with a student published in Young India in 1924, for example, Gandhi explained he was not against machines themselves (the spinning wheel was a machine, he notes), but advocated limiting power-driven machines and factory production with “intelligent exceptions.” He continued: “Take the case of the Singer Sewing Machine. It is one of the few useful things ever invented.”8 Indeed, as historian David Arnold points out, many swadeshi objects, including the iconic “Gandhi cap,” required close stitching. Ironically, the foreign sewing machine played an important role in developing local swadeshi industries.9 In British colonial Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the first Singer shop opened in 1877, and the sales and marketing there was overseen by Patell in Bombay. The Ceylon operation was relatively more successful than the Indian one, partially due to the island’s longer history of Portuguese and Dutch colonization. Historian Nira Wickramasinghe argues that “the style of clothing was already Europeanized, or combined sewn clothes with draped clothing in many cities and coastal areas,”10 and the Sinhalese embraced the credit and instalment plans that did not work in India. The Sinhalese home was not as restricted as the Indian home was, and women were relatively freer compared to in India, making direct sales strategies easier. In Ceylon, Singer made faster inroads into the domestic market for women than in India. Similarly, in the Philippines, due to the long history of Spanish colonization, Western clothing was more widespread than in India. Singer established their first store in Manila in 1882 and expanded rapidly with American colonization after 1898. Sewing machines were marketed to middle-class Tagalog women as part of the “technological infrastructure of the good life”—the sewing machine became part of a Philippine desire to be modern.11 In the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Javanese or Chinese men used sewing machines in tailor’s shops as in India, yet early Singer domestic users were mostly female servants. While the sewing machine in colonial Indonesia reinforced existing gender roles, at the same time, it also “accelerated the production of traditional costume when embroidery by machine replaced hand sewing.”12 As in India, the sewing machine did not necessarily imply Western clothing, but could also modernize “traditional” clothing.

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Many Asian cultures had no tightly stitched, tailored clothing, making a connection between the sewing machine and Western-style clothing inevitable. In China, for example, Singer failed to make significant sales and closed their Shanghai office in 1888. According to a report by London representative John Mitchell, the Chinese fashion for loose stitch or no stitch clothing and wealthier families not wanting their daughters using foreign machines were the reasons for poor Chinese sales. In an effort to breach the massive Chinese market, Singer’s new Oriental department tried marketing a “chain stitch” machine adapted to looser Chinese clothing in 1904.13 However, after the widespread adoption of Western clothing in China in the first decades of the twentieth century, the universal lock stitch machines were finally marketable in China. Singer’s Japanese marketing began relatively late, with the opening of a Tokyo store in 1900. Beginning in the 1880s, Meiji reforms included governmentled campaigns on the adoption of Western-style clothing, at least in government, business, and military contexts. Adopting the dress code of “civilization,” the Meiji Emperor first wore a suit in public in 1872. As we saw in Chapter 2, this period was characterized by the “double life”—the simultaneous presence of objects and practices both Western and Japanese. In fashion, the “double life” resulted in new words such as wafuku (Japanese clothes) and yōfuku (Western clothes) to distinguish between the different dress codes, and wasai (Japanese sewing) and yōsai (Western sewing). Attached to a range of everyday objects and practices, the prefix yō was perceived variously as a threat, a necessity to overcome this threat, or a desirable new lifestyle. As in China, the sewing machine was believed to be unsuitable for Japanese clothing. Known as simply mishin in Japanese, women’s magazines promoted the Singer sewing machine alongside Western-style clothing. However, Singer marketing executives also tried to uncouple the perceived connection between Western clothing and the sewing machine. Historian Andrew Gordon notes, for example, a 1910 advertisement in a popular monthly magazine, Fujokai (Women’s World), that claimed the Singer was “dual use for Western and Japanese dress.”14 Even in the 1930s, Singer was still advertising that their sewing machines could be used to stitch kimonos. Traditionally, the kimono’s sewing was relatively simple and loose as it was unstitched and resewn with each washing. By the 1920s, reform societies began to penetrate deep into Japanese home life, promoting a more rational, efficient approach to everyday life. The sewing machine was promoted as a means to resolve the dilemma of the “double life.” In fashion, this amounted to “a nested array of commonsense binary oppositions: Japanese sewing, hand stitching, kimono and ‘tradition’ set against Western sewing, machine stitching, Western dress, and ‘modernity’.”

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However, as Gordon argues, “it is profoundly misleading to view the debate over sewing and dress modes as a simple fight between ‘Japanese’ tradition and ‘Western’ modernity.”15 Advancing the project of civilization and enlightenment required change. Western dress was seen as functional, practical, and efficient, particularly for urban business and factory work. Ultimately, Singer created a female domestic market in Japan centered on a new female image in which “sewing machines figured prominently in efforts to promote the ideal of a good wife and wise mother in service of family, nation, and empire.”16 The Singer sewing machine was one of many new machines responsible for modernizing everyday lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although it was a standardized, mass-produced object, its effect across Asia was not necessarily homogenizing due to its local adaptations and uneven distribution. The Singer sewing machine was also part of a profound shift in marketing and advertising practices that created new, global brands. It was not simply a new machine but it arrived enmeshed in a new system of direct sales, instructional techniques (Singer established “academies” to educate users), instalment payment, and credit plans. Importantly, while the association between the new machine and the adoption of Western dress was strong in many cases, the sewing machine also initiated a reappraisal of traditional dress, including “modernizing” it.17

Part II: New patent medicines From the late nineteenth century, a cheaper range of mass-produced, imported commodities—from soap to cigarettes—proved popular among Asian consumers. Local entrepreneurs responded by manufacturing their own products or redesigning traditional products and marketing them in modern ways. The advertising and branding of patent medicines is a compelling case study, with entrepreneurs Huang Chujiu in China and the Aw Boon brothers in Southeast Asia providing examples of both the development of modern consumer businesses and the redesign of traditional ones. Entrepreneurs were one of the most influential forces in new advertising, marketing, and consumerism, not only in developing a modern visual culture in Asia, but also in the design of modern business systems.

The new medicine: Design, production, distribution The encroachment of foreign powers since the Opium Wars and the SinoJapanese war brought significant pressure for reform in late nineteenth-century

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China. Medical reform was one among many aspects of modernization affecting Chinese people in this period. Broadly, there were two aspects to this: the spread of Western “scientific” medicine and the modernization of traditional medicine. Leading intellectuals in favor of Western-style reform were critical of Chinese medicine. Lu Xun, for example, initially studied (Western) medicine before turning to literature, and remained skeptical of traditional medicine. However, in the consumer marketplace, savvy entrepreneurs overcame the potential incompatibility between the two systems and their respective practices and products. The consumer marketplace presented a new possibility: the patent medicine. Patent medicines simply referred to a new type of trademarked medicines. These were not necessarily scientifically tested combinations (such as Bayer’s Aspirin), but any new pills and potions (including those whose potent ingredients might be alcohol or opium, for example). Their real test was in the consumer marketplace, where the new patent medicines relied on mass advertising and innovative marketing. As with many modern products, patent medicines relied on standardization—one standard pill for everyone—and mass production, meaning they were cheap to produce and cheap for consumers. Initially, Chinese consumers encountered patent Western medicines and their new modes of marketing and promotion in treaty ports such as Shanghai and Guangzhou. At best, the new medicines were based on a Western scientific model of the body as a machine of independent parts. In contrast, Chinese medicine was based on a more holistic approach in which a doctor would examine the balance of Yin and Yang throughout a patient’s body. In early twentiethcentury Shanghai, the two systems coexisted. However, while practitioners and intellectuals saw sharp distinctions between the two systems, consumers did not. Both cost time and money. In contrast, new patent medicines promised efficient, convenient, and cheap cures. Traditional Chinese pharmacology was complex and subtle; medicines were altered by individual practitioners and varied according to weakness, strength, and combinations of drugs required. There were also varying forms—pills, powders, and ointments.18 The marketing around such products included woodblock prints containing diagrams and instructions for application that combined advertising and directions for use. These were typically black and white and text-heavy. When European companies such as Bayer, for example, began marketing in China in the early twentieth century, they could tap into such existing techniques and distribution networks. An early success story in China was Dr Williams’ Pink Pills. The Canadian Dr Williams’ Medicine Company opened a Shanghai branch in 1908. In the United

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States, the company had already been embroiled in an ongoing debate about the effectiveness of patent medicines. It was under pressure from both government regulators and medical associations. Regardless of its medical effectiveness (its main ingredient was sugar), the success of Dr Williams’ Pink Pill was built on new advertising and mass-media marketing strategies. The advertising claimed Dr Williams’ Pink Pills cured ills from dizziness to depression, acne to hysteria. For consumers, they were affordable, simple, and accessible. In early twentieth-century China, there was little market for foreign medicines beyond that of the foreigners in Shanghai or other treaty ports. So, the market was created through advertising and the new print media.19 Historian Emily Baum argues that progressive Chinese consumers saw patent medicines as an essential part of a modern lifestyle: “being modern required the maintenance of good health, health similarly required the consumption of modern products.”20 Even though it was clearly a foreign product that appealed to scientific methods, in China, Dr Williams’ Pills also appealed to Chinese medical ideals. In its advertising, for example, it claimed to cure “weak qi” and alluded to Chinese mythology.21 Although supposedly created by a doctor (as the name suggests), Dr Williams’ pills were created outside the medical establishment, so were neither part of Western nor Chinese medical practice. Chinese entrepreneurs soon began to produce their own patent medicines. The most successful was Huang Chujiu, whose products and stores made him incredibly wealthy. Born in Zhejiang Province south of Shanghai, Huang grew up as an apprentice in his father’s traditional medicine shop and later began selling traditional medicines on the streets of Shanghai. He built up a small business in a traditional drugstore. In 1890, he moved to the French Concession and began experimenting with new products. Significantly, he changed the store’s name from Hall of Long Life (Hall was often used for traditional Chinese medicine stores) to Great China-France Drugstore (Drugstore signified the new, and it was in the French Concession of Shanghai). In English, it was referred to as the Great Eastern Dispensary, and he included the foreign names alongside the Chinese name in subsequent advertising and marketing material. His most popular product, Ailuo bunaozhi, Ailuo’s Brain Tonic, sounded Western, and on the label, Huang included English text and a note that “Dr T.C. Yale” invented it. Although there was nothing Western about the product or its origins, Huang used these to give a sense of legitimacy to a domestic product. As the first Chinese patent medicine, Huang’s tonic was a direct response to foreign medicines such as Dr Williams’ Pink Pills. Huang advertised his “Western” brain tonic in Chinese terms by referring to traditional medical theories as well as Western ones. After a highly public court case in 1907 in

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which a Portuguese doctor named Yale tried to sue him, Huang’s medicine became even more popular and made Huang very wealthy. By 1911, his store was one of the biggest in Shanghai, and he was exporting his medicine beyond Shanghai. Soon the Great China-France Drugstore manufactured hundreds of trademarked drugs and inspired several other Chinese-owned drugstores to do the same. Another of Huang’s most popular medicines in the Republican period was his Humane Elixir, a copy of a popular Japanese-made medicine. First marketed in 1911, Huang promoted it as a Chinese alternative to the Japanese product, capitalizing on anti-Japanese and anti-foreign sentiment. Huang’s later “Pink Spirit Pills” with their “First President” trademark that featured an image of Sun Yat-Sen appealed even more specifically to Chinese nationalist sentiment in the late 1920s. Of course, given their name, Huang’s Pink Spirit Pills quickly became a direct competitor to Dr Williams’ (foreign) Pink Pills. As in the United States, the patent medicine business in China was promoted in the new mass media. As we saw in Chapter 4, Shanghai was China’s print media capital in the early twentieth century, and a popular base for all kinds of modern businesses. Commercial artists produced advertisements in newspapers and magazines, billboards, posters, leaflets, and calendars. An essential part of this modern marketing was the repetition of a recognizable trademark and signature imagery to a mass audience. Due to the ubiquitous presence of his medicines in the popular media, Huang came to be known as the “King of Advertising” in early twentieth-century China.22 Huang employed both painters and copywriters in his specialized advertising section. One of the best-known painters, Hang Zhiying, later founded his own successful studio. His initial training was in the Commercial Press art department school, and after working for Huang, he founded his own studio (in 1920 or 1922) specializing in posters, magazine covers, and product packaging. The studio produced 200 advertisements and covers per year, about eighty calendar posters annually for clients from China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Southeast Asia.23 Hang’s imagery typically depicted glamorous women, either classical beauties or modern women in provocative poses and revealing clothing (Plate 4). For the new patent medicines, as much as for cigarettes or soap, such advertising could bypass the complexities of both (Western) scientific research and (Chinese) traditional knowledge by appealing directly to a consumer’s desires. Huang’s innovative marketing and branding strategies went beyond print advertisements. In 1928, for example, he specified his “Basic Guidelines for the Design of New Stores.” These depicted five-story buildings with yellow and green rooves and large plate-glass windows for product displays. Regional

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stores were modeled after the main Shanghai store, which featured a clock tower and brightly lit interiors and displays to entice customers inside. Huang’s design principles were based on Western commercial architecture rather than traditional stores.24 Traditional drug stores were typically one or two stories high and constructed from timber, and had little in the way of promotional material, few windows, and no seductive interior décor that might appeal to modern consumers. The design of new retail spaces to display his products was clearly an important part of Huang’s branding strategy. Another was entertainment. Huang’s famous “Great World” (Da Shijie) amusement hall in Shanghai opened in 1917 with popular entertainment from Chinese opera to games, concerts, and restaurants. Its walls were covered inside and out with advertisements for Huang’s patent medicines. Fully engaging with the new mass media, Huang also founded his own radio station and featured advertisements for his products preceding films at cinemas. In short, Huang took full advantage of all the modern means of marketing and advertising to promote his products. Eventually, he developed his business into a modern commercial network covering much of China. From his Shanghai headquarters, the business extended to regional branches and local franchises as far away as the Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. Interestingly, the Chinese patent medicine business survived various political regimes and even prospered in tumultuous times. Although Huang died in 1931, his Great China-France Drugstore survived the Republican era, the Japanese occupation of Shanghai (1937–45), and the post-war Nationalist government (until 1949). Finally, like all pharmaceutical companies, the communist government nationalized Huang’s business in the 1950s. Ultimately, the rivalry between Western medicine (xiyi) and Chinese traditional medicine (zhongyi) was fought between doctors and intellectuals while in the consumer marketplace entrepreneurs such as Huang found an alternative path. For Chinese consumers, such West versus East divisions were not so important in what one historian termed the medical “pluralism” of the first half of the twentieth century.25

Designing Eng Aun Tong, The Tiger Medical Hall In 1908, two brothers, Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, inherited their father’s medicine shop in Rangoon, capital of the British colony Burma. They developed their own formula for an ointment they initially called Ban Kim Ewe, Ten Thousand Golden Oil. The brothers made it in their family kitchen. Boon Par had pharmaceutical knowledge to improve the formula, while Boon Haw began promoting it as a cure-all.26 As well as the ointment, Boon Par experimented with

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other formulas including a powdered “Headache Cure” and “Chinkawhite” for constipation. In 1909, Boon Haw toured China, Japan, and Hong Kong in order to further his business knowledge and learn new branding, advertising, and distribution strategies. In his travels, Aw Boon Haw noted two types of business: traditional Chinese medicine halls and new Western-inspired businesses that sold patent, packaged, and branded medicines, such as aspirin.27 Upon his return, Boon Haw rebranded the ointment as “Tiger Balm” and packaged it in distinctive hexagonal glass jars and small red tins, labeled with images of a leaping tiger and the two brothers. Over the next few years, Boon Haw traveled Burma, distributing samples and developing a branding strategy. For example, he “gave free racks and display cases to his dealers to display his wares. These he ordered in bulk as he did with all his other materials and had them attractively finished with a fierce springing tiger.”28 In traditional Chinese medicine, tiger parts have long believed to have healing qualities: the tiger’s strength and mythical power reputedly helped treat chronic ailments, cure disease, and replenish the body’s energy. Tiger Balm products did not, in fact, use tiger parts, but the associations clearly resonated with consumers. With its distinctive packaging and marketing, as well as its relatively low cost compared to foreign medicines, Tiger Balm sales increased and its distribution spread to Siam, Malaya, and Indonesia. In 1926, the brothers moved their business to Singapore, a more convenient port for further expansion. They opened a new factory there but all of their products were still produced and packaged by hand. Women completed the labor-intensive packaging and labelling. The instructional “directions” leaflet, for example, was folded over six times before it was wrapped around the container. Given its wide distribution, the label included instructions in Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, Malay, Tamil, and English. After these instructions, “[e]ach jar was then completely wrapped again in colorful paper. A circular seal on each end protected the product against imitators.”29 Distinctive, full color packaging, multilingual instructions, and a lower cost than foreign medicines meant the Singapore factory was producing in its first year ten times what the original Rangoon factory had produced each year (Figure 5.3). Finally, the brothers moved into the Chinese market with a factory in Guangdong Province. However, the design of packaging, containers, and even the advertising of Chinese medicines were not entirely new. Traditional Chinese pharmacies had sold at least some well-known “mass-produced” medicines for centuries, “systematically manufactured and sold with great effort throughout the country. Since one in the same remedy, e.g. the ‘pills with the eight treasures’ or the ‘elixir for the sha disease,’ were industrially manufactured and marketed by many

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Figure 5.3  Aw Boon Haw and some of the Tiger range of products. Getty Images Jack Birns/ Editorial #: 50519835.

pharmacies, advertising was as important as it is today.”30 Medicinal powders and pills had long been packaged in distinctive containers such as small porcelain jars that could be reused as vases. Labels illustrated with mythological figures, auspicious sayings, or classical poetry aimed at distinguishing between “brands” (particularly for educated consumers), while woodblock printed posters and flyers advertised them.31 What was distinctive and modern about Tiger Balm’s success was its distribution to a mass market, an intra-Asian business, and its expansion with modern mass communication and transportation systems. It was also an example of a successful transnational enterprise operating across British colonies (Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaya) and to Chinese communities in Siam, Indonesia, and the Chinese Republic. Like Huang, Boon Aw took full advantage of modern mass media for advertising and promotion. Outraged by the high cost of newspaper advertising, and engaged in an advertising war with a rival medicine entrepreneur, Boon Aw started his own newspapers. Between 1929 and 1939, Aw founded eleven Chinese language newspapers in Southeast Asia and China.32 Boon Haw filled his “Star” (Xing) newspapers, beginning with Singapore’s Xingzhou Daily, with Tiger Balm advertisements and fictional “letters” from satisfied customers.

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Between 1929 and 1938, he also created a chain of amusement parks, “Tiger and Leopard Gardens,” including the Tiger Balm Gardens in Singapore and Hong Kong. As we saw above with Huang, entertainment was part of larger branding strategy, with the Tiger trademark appearing all over the gardens. In the 1910s and 1920s, Tiger products were initially distributed through the large department stores Sincere, Wing On, and Da Xin in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Later, Boon Aw established formal branch offices manned by relatives and people of his native place that shared linguistic and social networks. By the 1930s, his business network extended from Rangoon to Taipei, Beijing to Jakarta. Like Huang, Boon Aw made use of mass media and large-scale advertising, but on a transnational level, across colonial boundaries too. Tiger products were ubiquitous in the British colonies Singapore, Burma Malaya, but not in French Indo-China due to an agreement with another patent medicine entrepreneur intended to keep the markets free from competition.33 Tiger products survived the Japanese invasion of China and Southeast Asia, and even thrived in wartime conditions. But in 1951, the communist government shut down their Chinese operation and banned all Tiger products from being imported into China. Aw’s springing tiger had “transcultural” appeal, as it was purely visual.34 Aw recruited the well-known calendar poster designer Guan Huinong (Kwan Wai Nung), based in Hong Kong. In 1912, Guan moved from Hong Kong to Shanghai to become a member of the Lingnan School of painting (founded by Gao Qifeng and Gao Jianfu, brothers who had studied painting in Japan). With them, Guan co-founded The True Record, a pictorial magazine that featured tiger paintings on the covers (as a symbol of Chinese nationalism). Guan returned to Hong Kong in 1913 and painted tigers for Aw Boon Haw. However, these were modern paintings. A typical example featured a woman in a silk gown wearing a wristwatch, identifying her as a fashionable consumer, posed as a commercial artist with Western brush and easel. But it also featured the springing tiger, now a symbol of transnational commerce in the form of Aw Boon Haw’s Tiger Balm. As on the packaging, in advertisements and posters, the name of the product often appeared in several languages. But, Tiger’s strategy was predominantly visual rather than textual as the new visual media could overcome linguistic and cultural barriers, and attract Chinese and non-Chinese consumers (the association between tigers and healing powers noted above was common in various Southeast Asian cultures). Chinese calendar posters employed a European-style visual language—anatomically proportioned figures, perspective to illustrate depth and chiaroscuro to produce volume, for example. Western techniques of painting and drawing were known in China, and in the nineteenth

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century, particularly in the port cities such as Guangzhou, painting was an established business.35 In the consumer marketplace, both Huang and Aw Boon adapted Western business models and ideas to Chinese traditional practices to create modern business empires. Their success was built upon integrating production, distribution, and advertising within the same company, as well as their modern branding strategies. These examples prove that Western corporations were not the only ones responsible for spreading consumer culture in Asia. In fact, it is worth noting that in the first half of the twentieth century, Westernbased pharmaceutical companies were not as successful as Chinese-owned businesses in China.36 This is despite the popular intellectual idea of adopting Western science and technology as a means of “strengthening the nation.”

Part III: The department store Department stores functioned as conduits for Asian modernity, places in which people could experience the spectacle of masses of manufactured products. The new department stores were tied to mass production, particularly readymade fashion, cosmetics, accessories, and household objects from utensils to furniture. Known in Japan as hyakkaten and in China as baihuo gongsi, these “one hundred good” stores were characterized by their large scale, division into different departments, and a new type of shopping experience. Modern communication and transportation systems—the telegraph, railway, and steamships—made department stores hubs of global trade, finance, and information. Finally, the department store was a particularly urban form that required a mass consumer base, and their physical design became a model for other new retail spaces.

Japanese department stores In 1905, the venerable Japanese dry goods store Mitsukoshi issued their “Department Store Declaration” in the form of a full-page newspaper advertisement. It promised an American-style shopping experience. Mitsukoshi’s manager, Takahashi Sadao, had traveled to Philadelphia to study the Wanamaker Department Store and had begun to implement some changes in his store’s structure and retail methods.37 Mitsukoshi’s retail “revolution” began with renovation of the existing store to include display cases, then the inclusion of shop windows. Mitsukoshi slowly expanded its lines of goods, beginning with hats and umbrellas. Similar stores, including Takashimaya, Diamaru,

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Matzsuakaya, and Shirokiya, soon followed suit. Running parallel with the statesponsored drive to reform Japanese lifestyles we saw in Chapter 2, department stores promoted themselves as agents of social progress and modernity. In 1914, Mitsukoshi opened its new three-story Tokyo store. The new building included an elevator, the first escalator in Japan and—in the tradition of Bon Marche, Harrods, and Wanamaker’s—marble columns, a grand staircase, and a stainedglass ceiling. The new interior gave customers a sense of luxury while the building’s modern form featured in advertising as an important part of the Mitsukoshi brand (Plate 5). Following European and American precedents, Mitsukoshi also featured restaurants and halls for exhibitions, fashion shows, and concerts. No longer simply a fabric store, it was a shopping and entertainment destination. Modernization included new sales methods, a new form of accounting in double-entry bookkeeping, higher sales volumes, more rapid turnover, and a new management structure. For employees, it included a new type of service, and required sales assistants trained in global service levels of etiquette, attitude, and appearance. For consumers, modernization meant an increased diversity of products as well as new interior spaces and displays, new advertising and branding, fixed pricing, and exchange policies. In short, the department store was a modern retail environment. And, with the introduction of the Mitsukoshi magazine and a mail order facility, the department store’s offerings spread beyond Tokyo. During the Edo Period, a traditional dry goods store such as Mitsukoshi catered only for Tokyo’s elite. There were no window displays and a discreet, curtained entrance ensured that only certain people entered. Once inside, customers did not browse the merchandise; instead, an assistant retrieved suitable fabrics from a back room. Customers were expected to purchase something and prices were negotiable.38 In contrast, the new department stores were monumental, multistory buildings with wide, open entrances and plate glass windows along their street frontage. Customers were welcome to browse and handle the merchandise within the brightly lit interiors, without purchasing anything. These changes in Japan were by no means new. Paris’ Bon Marche, London’s Harrods and Selfridges, New York’s Macy’s, and Philadelphia’s Wanamaker’s introduced many of these retail innovations from the mid-nineteenth century. These department stores also set the standard for global middle-class consumerism with their diversity of products, fixed prices, cash payment, and returns policies. At least initially, Japanese department stores became emporiums of imported goods from Europe and the United States such as cosmetics, bags, shirts, socks, shoes, household goods, furniture, and electrical goods. In Asian cities, as in European ones, department stores functioned as “cathedrals of consumption.”39

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Mitsukoshi played a pioneering role in Japan’s retail revolution but also a more general role in its path to modernity. Particularly for the urban middle class, department stores were educational. They shaped ideas about the modan raifu, or “modern life,” and the type of objects required to construct and maintain one. In this sense, department stores operated in conjunction with government and lifestyle reformers in modernizing Japan in the early twentieth century. They also created a new role for designers and artists, or what critic Tomoko Tamari referred to as “cultural intermediaries” who promoted modern, Western tastes.40 As the demand for mass-manufactured goods increased, Japanese department stores not only imported them but also manufactured their own. From 1913, for example, Mitsukoshi developed its own branded products, beginning with soap, then expanding into foodstuffs, utensils, and tools. These added to their already large range of foreign products including shoes, hats, umbrellas, textiles, bags, and jewelry. This range expanded in 1914 with the opening of the new store to include cosmetics, furniture, stationary, and ready-made clothes. By 1929, Mitsukoshi had ninety-eight departments selling everything from sewing machines to electrical goods.41 For historian Brian Moeran, the department stores played an important role in “the formation of a new hybrid consumer culture through its conscious and conspicuous blending of Japanese and foreign goods.”42 After the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, reconstruction saw the retail center of Tokyo shift to the Ginza district—which, as we saw in Chapter 2, was central to Meiji modernization. In the mid-1920s, the area was reshaped into a shopping and entertainment district with multistory department stores forming key hubs. Matsuzakaya, for example, opened in 1924, Matsuya in 1925, and Mitsukoshi opened a Ginza branch in 1930. They also took advantage of new transportation systems for not only bringing in and distributing goods, but also customers. The culmination of this strategy was Mitsukoshi’s deal with the Tokyo Subway Corporation to construct its own station (paid for mainly by Mitsukoshi) with an underground passage connected to the store in 1932. The other big department stores followed with their own stations. The department store was now also a tourist destination. Monumental, multistoried buildings illuminated with electric lights created a “sense of department stores as a fairyland environment.”43 Utilizing modern materials such as steel and concrete, Art Deco decorative motifs and geometric patterns on the interiors, this wave of 1920s department stores were characterized by high ceilings and light-filled spaces. Large windows on main thoroughfares became sophisticated theatrical displays featuring wax mannequins. Window shopping became a new urban activity. In their associated commercial art,

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department stores commissioned billboards, posters, and, later illuminated signs, becoming an important part of the new advertising industry. Other branding and promotional strategies included a Mitsukoshi delivery van with the store’s name on the side. At a time when cars were relatively rare in Tokyo, this attracted significant attention.44 Another strategy was the introduction of fashion “seasons.” Mitsukoshi not only designed their own kimonos for different seasons but employed geisha to wear their brand when performing. Previously, stores such as Mitsukoshi sold from only a fixed range of kimono patterns—regardless of season or age—but the Parisian ideal of constantly changing seasonal styles took off in Japan too. Together with their magazine and advertising, department stores such as Mitsukoshi stimulated and educated consumers about fashion (the other big stores also had their own magazines in the early 1900s). A slogan of 1915, for example, stated: “Don’t talk about fashion without first visiting Mitsukoshi.”45 Hisui Sugiura, chief designer at Mitsukoshi from 1910 to 1934, was a leading professional and pioneer in the new field of shōgyō bijutsu, “commercial art.” He produced graphics for the company magazine, advertisements, and posters. A typical poster features a mother and daughter in front of the main Mitsukoshi store (Plate 5). The mother wears a kimono and her daughter wears a Westernstyle dress and hat. The kimono, with its abstract patterns and bold colors, is modern, suggesting she is a fashionable, independent consumer. Department stores certainly promoted themselves as family destinations, the larger ones included playrooms and their restaurants included children’s meals and the galleries featured children’s exhibitions. There is also an underlying assumption of a modern, nuclear family. Presumably, the husband is at work in a middleclass occupation, while mother and daughter go shopping. It is worth noting women’s conflicting roles within this new consumer culture. For Elise Tipton, the department store functioned as “a public space that Japanese middle class women entered for the first time as consumers and workers.”46 She notes that retail was previously a male occupation in Japan, but by 1930, women comprised over 40 percent of the workforce at Mitsukoshi’s Ginza store (although these were not at management level).47 However, as the advertising poster shows, women were also the subject of a new identity within the store’s commodities and advertising. Fashionable clothing, cosmetics, and accessories brought about a new focus on women’s bodies, and the formation of new female identity through modern commodities. Finally, Japanese department stores expanded with Japanese imperialism, with large stores such as Mitsukoshi, Takshimaya, and Minakai all establishing branch stores in Korea and Manchuria, to serve both Japanese colonists and

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wealthy locals. The Japanese government and military aided in their expansion. In Seoul in the 1930s, for example, customers could shop at four large Japanese stores—Mitsukoshi, Chojiya, Minakai, and Hirata—and one Korean store, Hwashin. Koreans made up the bulk of consumers in the 1930s and 1940s, and these stores introduced modern lifestyles as in Japan, but, unlike in Japan, little local manufacturing followed.48 Mass-produced goods for these stores were imported from Japan, contributing to the lack of Korean industrialization. For the Japanese stores, the colonies represented a convenient source of raw materials (such as Korean ginseng and Taiwanese rattan for furniture) as well as a new market for Japanese-made products.

Chinese department stores Although a little later than in Tokyo, consumers on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road could shop at one of China’s “big four” department stores, Sincere (1917), Wing On (1918), Sun Sun (1926), and Dah Sun (1936). As with the Japanese stores, these Shanghai stores offered not only a new shopping experience but also entertainment and even accommodation. Wing On, for example, adjoined the Great Eastern Hotel, a large complex containing accommodation, theaters, and music halls. Although all four department stores were Chinese owned and managed, all were located with the cosmopolitan, semicolonial International Settlement of Shanghai, with branches in British Hong Kong. Their transnational spread contrasts with the Japanese experience. In colonial India and British Southeast Asia, British firms first established new forms of consumption. Whiteaway and Laidlaw, the “Selfridges of the East” for example, were established in 1882 in Calcutta.49 They spread to twenty branches by the first decade of the twentieth century in colonial cities across India and Southeast Asia. Whiteaway and Laidlaw built an empire primarily on textiles, home furnishings, and imported household products. In Shanghai before the big four Chinese firms were established, there was already Whiteaway and Laidlaw (established in 1904), Hall and Holtz, Lane Crawford, and Weeks and Co. However, these foreign-owned stores served primarily foreign residents and had little impact on Chinese consumerism.50 Retail shopping in nineteenth-century China comprised a mix of familyowned stores, peddlers, specialty stores in larger cities, and foreign goods stores. By the early 1900s, some of the larger ones became known as baihuo gongsi, “one hundred goods,” stores that were a precedent for the later Chinese department stores. Other “general merchants,” “general outfitters,” and “dry goods merchants” established in colonial cities in the 1900s and

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1910s also provided models for early Asian department stores. But the Big Four Chinese stores were modeled on Sincere and Wing On, founded by welltraveled entrepreneurs. One of the most influential Chinese entrepreneurs of the era was Ma Yingbiao. Born in Guangdong in 1860, Ma went to Australia during the gold rush, eventually opening his own business there. Returning to Hong Kong in 1900, with other partners also returning from Australia (Philip Gockchin and Choy Cheung), he established the Sincere department store. In its business model, Sincere was influenced by Anthony Horden & Son’s department store in Sydney, particularly its fixed price policy and store format.51 Sincere’s initial innovations in Hong Kong were window displays, fixed prices, and specially trained sales assistants. Ma instructed his staff to be courteous to customers and to maintain a clean appearance. Following its initial success, Sincere opened branches in Guangzhou in 1912 and Shanghai in 1917. Yet, unlike in Japan, hiring female staff proved too controversial in mainland China. The sensation of female shop assistants led to crowds of curious customers and nervous investors, leading Ma to shelve the idea. Following Anthony Horden’s, Ma included restaurants and entertainment as part of the shopping experience in his Chinese stores. In 1915, he established production factories in Guangzhou to produce craft objects and simple machine-made products to sell in his department stores, and the Shanghai branch included a workshop for producing machine-made consumer products. Ma’s biggest competitor was the Wing On department store, founded by brothers Kwok Lock (James Gocklock) and Kwok Chin (Philip Gokchin, a former partner in Sincere) in 1907. Like Ma, the brothers had worked in Sydney in a Chinese fruit and vegetable wholesale business (one of its founders was Ma Yingbao).52 They established the Wing On fruit store in Sydney, soon expanded into distribution, and eventually invested in a Fijian banana plantation. Returning to Hong Kong in 1907, the brothers returned with knowledge of English and business skills to open the Wing On department store. They also practiced the fixed pricing structure like Sincere, and expanded to open branches in Shanghai and Southeast Asia. Other marketing strategies included consumer credit, gift vouchers, and a mail order service. Like the Aw Boon brothers, the Kwok brothers employed family members and Xiangshanese kin in management positions. Family and cultural connections created a workforce bound by familial and social expectations. By 1932, Wing On had branches in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Guangdong, Southeast Asia, Australia,

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and the United States. The goods they sold included furniture, electrical goods, groceries, fashion, medicines, cosmetics, bags, umbrellas, and shoes. Shanghai’s Nanjing Road was the commercial thoroughfare of the city. Ma Yingbao established a store on a central intersection of Nanjing Road in 1917, and the Kwok brothers followed in 1918 with a store directly opposite. The Wing On Department Store was designed by Hong Kong-based Palmer and Turner, an architectural firm with a reputation for their monumental, classical-inspired banks and other public buildings (Figure 5.4). The six-story building included a hotel, restaurants, and an amusement park. Both stores found rapid success in Shanghai. From 1920, Wing On offered a mail order service in China, enabling them to expand their distribution beyond Shanghai. The Kwok brothers diversified into real estate, banking, insurance, and manufacturing, beginning with the purchase of a foreign-owned knitwear factory, they renamed Weixin, “reform.” In Shanghai, they established the Wing On Textile Manufacturing Company in 1921, capitalizing on anti-foreign and nationalist feeling. This offered greater control over supplies for their department stores, and they eventually ran three textile mills in China that produced a wide range of cotton goods.53 As in Japan, department stores such as Sincere and Wing On were important spaces of modern consumption in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and in Southeast Asian cities. As well as imported luxuries such as cosmetics and modern foreign appliances and furniture, they also sold locally made patent medicines, food, clothing, homewares, and furnishings. However, while stores such as Sincere and Wing On were founded on the idea of a Chinese-owned and -managed store, the imported goods sold in their mainland stores made them the subject of boycotts of foreign goods.54 In these brief case studies of Chinese department stores, we start to glimpse a modern consumer culture stretching from colonial Hong Kong to Republican China and down through British colonial southeast Asian ports, created by “overseas” Chinese entrepreneurs. However, the turbulent years of 1930s Republican China took its toll on these businesses, and at different times, anti-Japanese, anti-British, and anti-American sentiments threatened their foreign business models. But, such protests could also provide a means by which these entrepreneurs could exploit nationalist sentiments, both in China and among overseas Chinese populations, by promoting their Chinese origins. This first era of Chinese department stores halted with the 1937 Japanese invasion of Shanghai, southern China, and, later, of Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Although many survived the war, changes in the post-war

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Figure 5.4  Wing On Department Store, Shanghai. GETTY IMAGES: Credit: Kylie McLaughlin/ Creative #: 148587652.

years, particularly communist rule in China, fundamentally altered the role of the department store. In China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asian cities, the new culture of the department store centered on the nuclear family, consumption, and a new visual

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culture. As physical spaces created in new architectural styles, department stores displayed new interior design concepts, as well as the array of modern goods and technologies. They played an important role in domesticating Western mass-produced goods and in the creation of an urban middle class in Asian cities. Importantly too, department stores were spaces for the sale of mass-produced merchandise for everyday life to a mass consumer market— everyday wear and daily use—increasingly focused on mass rather than elite consumption. Finally, for women, department stores represented both public spaces for consumption and spaces for work.

Section II Asian Modernity, 1940s–2000s

Chapter 6 Postcolonial Design and the State

Japan’s military surrender represented a significant turning point in Asia. In 1945, the Japanese army withdrew from China and Southeast Asia, including the British colonies of Hong Kong, Malaya, Burma and Singapore, French Indo-China, the Dutch East Indies, and the American Philippines. Although the Japanese impact on these cultures was short-lived, the post-war era unleashed a wave of independence movements that redrew Asia’s geography. Former European colonies gained independence in the two decades following the war, resulting in new nations. These included the Philippines (1946), India and Pakistan (1947), Indonesia (1949), Cambodia and Laos (1953), Vietnam (1954), Malaya (later Malaysia, 1957), and Singapore (1965). In the wake of Western colonialism, new nationalist governments and leaders pursued various modernization programs. By considering contrasting case studies from India, China, and Singapore, we can see how design helped pave new paths to modernity in Asia. The top-down path to modernity of these nations produced variations in modern Asian design, highlighting cultural difference as much as global uniformity.

Part I: Chandigarh For South Asia, independence from Britain came at a price. In 1947, colonial authorities divided the Raj into two separate nations, Pakistan and India, a partition that resulted in violent conflict and ongoing tension. The northern province of Punjab was literally divided between the two countries. Its former capital, Lahore, was in Pakistan, leaving the Indian Punjab without a capital. For India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, designing a new capital could serve both administrative and symbolic purposes. “Let this be a new town symbolic of the freedom of India,” he said, “unfettered by the traditions of the past . . . an expression of the nation’s faith in the future.”1 Named Chandigarh, the new capital of the Punjab was to be a modern city, free from social, cultural, and

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religious traditions. For a diverse nation in the midst of ethnic conflict, a modern city could potentially be a unifying symbol. It also fitted with Nehru’s broader mission of transforming India by design. Along with Gandhi, Nehru was one of the leaders of India’s independence movement in the 1920s and 1930s. But Nehru’s vision of a modern, industrial India opposed Gandhi’s vision of an agricultural, hand-spun India. As India’s first prime minister, Nehru, implemented a new approach to modernization by actively pursuing industrial development. The “Nehru era,” which lasted from 1947 until his death in 1964, was devoted to rapid industrialization through projects such as hydroelectric power plants and steel mills. Nehru’s education policy emphasized technical and professional education and helped establish the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institutes of Management, and the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. However, the design and construction of Chandigarh illustrates the complex character of modernity in the first two decades of postcolonial India.2 In 1948, Indian engineers selected an ideal site for the new city. Situated at the foot of the Himalayas, the 8500-acre site was flat, had an accessible water supply and plentiful stone for building materials. Nehru favored an Indian design team, but there was little local professional experience in urban planning.3 Thus, in 1949, responsibility for the city’s Master Plan was given to an American, Albert Mayer. Mayer had already been involved in town planning in India and knew something of the local conditions and culture. Mayer’s plan, he wrote, aimed to be “the most complete synthesis and integration” of recent planning ideas, yet “strongly Indian in feel and function, as well as modern.”4 Derived from American “City Beautiful” and British “Garden City” models, Mayer’s plan comprised a series of repeated “superblocks” made up of housing, shopping facilities, schools, and parks. Mayer’s overall planning principles included efficient traffic circulation and separating administrative, industrial, and residential sectors of the city.5 However, after Mayer’s partner, Matthew Nowicki, died in an air crash and Mayer could no longer continue with the project, the Indian administration sought out a new design team. In 1950, they approached the well-known modernist Le Corbusier. Corbusier’s urban plans such as La Ville Radieuse (“The Radiant City,” 1934) and his theories on modern urbanism had brought him admirers but no large-scale planning commissions. A series of unrealized urban design projects made him initially skeptical of the Indian proposal. But the Indian team convinced English architects Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who in turn convinced Corbusier. Corbusier requested the inclusion of his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, as the other senior architect on the project.6 Fry, Drew, Corbusier,

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and Jeanneret already knew each other from CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, founded in 1928), a transnational organization devoted to modernist architecture and urbanism. For Chandigarh, Corbusier was responsible for the city’s Master Plan and the architecture of the city’s Capitol Complex. Fry, Drew, and Jeanneret, along with an Indian team comprising M.N. Sharma, A.R. Prabhawalkar, B.P. Mathur, Piloo Moody, U.E. Chowdhury, N.S. Lamba, Jeet Lal Malhotra, J.S. Dethe and Aditya Prakash, and chief engineer P.L. Verma, were responsible for designing housing, schools, shopping centers, and civic buildings.7 Tellingly, Corbusier refused to live in India during Chandigarh’s design and construction, but agreed to extended visits. Fry and Drew lived in Chandigarh for three years, and Jeanneret lived and worked there as Chief Architect until 1965 (when M.N. Sharma took over). The project was to take over fifteen years, although the design of a city (perhaps more than any other design project) is never entirely complete. Nor is it ever designed by a single individual. In this respect, the design of Chandigarh was a collaborative effort between Corbusier, the architectural team, Nehru, the Punjab government, and the city’s inhabitants.

Designing a modern Indian city New Delhi loomed in the background of any consideration of how to design an Indian city. Designed by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker and officially opened in 1931, New Delhi was a potent symbol of British colonial power. Built adjacent to the old city, this monumental new city was centered on a collection of stately administrative buildings at the end of broad, tree-lined avenues. Critic George Birdwood described the projected aim of New Delhi as “an Imperial City—the symbol of the British Raj in India—and it must like Rome be built for eternity.”8 For Nehru, Corbusier’s modernism could break with this colonial legacy as well as the earlier Indo-Saracen style (discussed in Chapter 3). His rational planning principles, minimal aesthetic, high-tech materials, and modern construction methods could also break with the legacy of Indian building traditions and village lifestyles. Importantly, modernism’s emphasis on standardization and efficiency promised high living standards at a low cost. Corbusier began with Mayer’s initial plan of self-sufficient “superblocks” but revised it in a modernist manner. Drawing upon CIAM precedents, Corbusier’s Master Plan reworked the blocks into a geometric order and straightened Mayer’s winding roads into a grid punctuated by green corridors. Corbusier’s plan reinforced Mayer’s separate zones for dwelling, working, recreation, and traffic. However, Corbusier went further, renewing his pre-war application

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of mass-production principles to cities and their inhabitants. A city was like a machine, its design and functioning driven by industrial materials and methods. For its inhabitants, Corbusier’s ideal was mass-produced living units complete with standard modern furniture. Fulfilling his vision outlined in earlier urban plans, Corbusier proposed highrise residential apartments, an idea opposed by the architectural team and their patrons. Hence, Corbusier contributed little to the design of the city’s buildings. Instead, he concentrated on the Master Plan and the “signature” buildings of the Capitol Complex.9 This left Jeanneret, Fry, Drew, and the Indian team to design the city’s fourteen housing types (for various levels of city employees, from Chief Minister to street sweeper), as well as shops, schools, a university, a library, and a hospital. Given the celebrated status of Corbusier among architects, architectural histories of Chandigarh tend to concentrate on the Capitol Complex.10 The rest of the city receives relatively less attention, despite its scale and the fact that its designers were more intimately involved than Corbusier. Corbusier’s Master Plan clearly separated the Capitol Complex from the city’s commercial center, industrial zone, and residential neighborhoods. Prominently situated in an elevated position, the Complex’s monumental scale implied a dialogue with New Delhi’s Capitol.11 On a large, open site, the Complex comprised only three main buildings: the Legislative Assembly, the High Court, and the Secretariat, each conceived by Corbusier as a separate sculpture distributed within a carefully composed geometric order. He derived this order from his earlier “Modulor” system, and determined the proportions of the buildings and the relationships between them by the Golden Ratio.12 Materially, the buildings continued his long-standing experiments with raw concrete. Corbusier’s predetermined design principles and aesthetic continuity with his work in France implied that modernism was universal. As for the city, Jeanneret, Fry, Drew, and the Indian team worked within the Master Plan’s residential blocks, set in “village-like” environments situated away from major traffic routes (so residents could walk around for daily activities).13 Chandigarh’s buildings were relatively low-rise, between two and four stories and composed primarily of brick (concrete was too expensive). To ensure aesthetic uniformity and cost efficiency, the design team produced housing, commercial, and public buildings to standardized designs (but Fry and Drew refused to use Corbusier’s Modular system). Jeanneret designed timber furniture, much of it produced on a large scale, for the city’s university, hospital and schools.14 Conceived as a monumental gesamtkunstwerk, every detail of the city’s physical structure, from bus shelters to drinking fountains, conformed to a

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modernist aesthetic. Even the city’s cast-iron sewerage covers were imprinted with Corbusier’s Master Plan. As a model of mass-produced housing, Chandigarh represented new ideas in India. Although varied in size and internal plans, the architects designed the city’s fourteen housing types from simple cubic forms. Modern infrastructure was integral, so even the cheapest apartments had basic kitchens, sanitary systems, and access to mains electricity and water. Yet the designers also made concessions to the local context. Chandigarh’s three- and four-story apartments included a precast concrete version of a jalis, or perforated screen, as well as solid sun breakers and internal plans that utilized natural cross-ventilation. The architectural team (Drew in particular) consulted with the city’s future inhabitants while formulating their housing, “acting as ‘facilitators’ rather than formmakers.”15 However, while addressing the climate was clearly a concern, the designers made little concession to traditional Indian spatial planning or cultural differences. Instead, Chandigarh embodied an idealistic image of modern life that ignored existing Indian social and caste stratification. The overarching vision, comprising a population “living in private houses designed for a single family,” resulted in standardization around a middle-class lifestyle.16 That is, the design of the residential blocks assumed Western standards of private homes for nuclear families, separate from workplaces in the Capitol, industrial or commercial center (accessible only by automobile or bus). However, this was not simply a case of European designers imposing European ideas but part of a modern vision shared by Nehru, the Punjab bureaucracy, and the Indian architects who helped design the city. Chandigarh was a utopian project, striving for an ideal yet to exist in the Punjab. Existing local conditions, for example, often required a close relationship between working and living spaces, yet the city zoning clearly delineated these functions. Planned around the automobile, even three decades later, the majority of Chandigarh’s population were too poor to afford one, and the Master Plan included no provision for a mass public transport system. Corbusier’s ideal of a technologically driven construction process also fell short of expectations. Donkeys carting materials and laborers breaking rocks with hammers on site, for example, did not fit with the city’s modern image (Figure 6.1). Furthermore, by the end of the 1960s, Chandigarh had outgrown initial population estimates of 500,000 and unauthorized shops and dwellings had sprouted up.17 Nehru’s vision for Chandigarh had some continuities with colonial practice.18 To make way for the modern city, for example, twenty-four villages, comprising 9000 people, were relocated.19 Despite the aim of a universal

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Figure 6.1 Laborers breaking rocks for concrete with residential apartments in the background, Chandigarh, 1958. Getty/James Burke, Editorial #: 50670426.

modern standard that might unify the city, the new physical structures did little to quell existing tensions between Hindu and Sikh populations. Some Indian critics argued that Corbusier and his followers represented the final episode in “a century and a half of the imposition of Western architecture and the destruction of native traditions.”20 And, despite Fry and Drew’s attempts at local participation, modernist architecture and urban planning “did not usher in a revolutionary modern era as Nehru had hoped, because the people the representative citizens, were not involved in the process, were not properly represented.”21 For Nehru as much as for Corbusier, Chandigarh was an exercise in social engineering. They considered designing a modern city as a means of designing a new society for a modern India envisaged as neither colonial nor traditional. However, architectural critic Ravi Kalia summed up the outcome succinctly when he described Chandigarh as “a designed city, not a planned one.”22 That is, he argues, both client and designers placed too much emphasis on the city’s physical and aesthetic aspects—designing functional modern buildings and infrastructure—and not enough on planning that accounted for the social, economic, and religious characteristics of the region’s diverse population. Despite potential problems, Corbusier’s Master Plan was enshrined in government policy: the “Punjab Capital Buildings Rules” of 1952 aimed to

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preserve the city’s design. Even so, as with earlier modernist projects, inhabitants soon appropriated Chandigarh in their own ways. The best example of this is the Rock Garden, a sculpture garden assembled over thirty years by road supervisor Nek Chand. Chand secretly created the garden by recycling broken ceramics, tiles, stones, and concrete from the city’s building sites. Surreal and idiosyncratic, Chand’s installation of waste generated by Chandigarh’s construction opposed the city’s strict planning rules and controls on design.23 Although in violation of the Master Plan (including Corbusier’s ban on monuments and sculptures), the Rock Garden’s popularity with Chandigarh’s inhabitants ensured it gained official status in 1976 as a tourist attraction.

Beyond Chandigarh As the first planned, modernist city in India, Chandigarh became a model for later Indian cities and its architecture had a significant impact on later Indian practice. Modern urbanism and mass-produced housing offered potential solutions to managing India’s growing urban populations. Crucially, modernism appealed to politicians determined to order and manage a society torn by religious and cultural differences. Modernist urbanism and architecture offered secular solutions that were not Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, or British. The promises of raising living standards and improving sanitation and urban congestion in Indian cities were also clearly attractive in the Nehru era. Perhaps Chandigarh’s biggest impact in India over the next two decades was on the design of subsequent low-cost housing. The high standard set by Jeanneret, Fry, Drew, and the Indian team, particularly with regard to modern amenities, new spatial plans, sanitation, and standardized components, was copied in later government projects. Indian architect Charles Correa later noted that “much of the Chandigarh vocabulary has become standard for public works departments all over this subcontinent.”24 However, government housing projects often reduced this vocabulary to an aesthetic “style” applied to projects that otherwise lacked the functional qualities of Chandigarh’s housing and facilities.25 Chandigarh’s new aesthetic, materials, and forms also had a significant impact on a generation of Indian professionals who began their careers in the 1950s and 1960s. Chandigarh received generous coverage in Marg, for example, India’s first modernist architectural magazine.26 Leading architects Balkrishna Doshi (who worked in Corbusier’s studio) and Charles Correa, for example, acknowledged Chandigarh’s importance on subsequent Indian design. Their housing projects of high-density, low-rise housing in the 1970s and 1980s built

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on ideas of modular types and standardization. But Doshi and Correa also began to absorb traditional planning, aesthetics, and craft into their low-cost housing projects not long after the completion of Chandigarh, responding to some of its shortcomings. As a model modern city, Chandigarh was an inspiration for other Indian state capitals, such as Bhubaneswar in Orissa and Gandhinagar, the new capital of Gujarat.27 Neighboring Pakistan also designed a new capital during this period, Islamabad, planned between 1959 and 1963 to a Master Plan by Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis. Pakistan faced similar circumstances in creating a new capital that might serve as a unifying symbol of the new nation.28 Modernist design and urbanism commissioned by postcolonial governments in South Asia elicited mixed reactions. Certainly by the 1970s, architects and designers, governments, and their leaders began to question the idea of a universal modernism, applicable anywhere in world.

Part II: Designing the People’s Republic of China After the Japanese military withdrawal in 1945, China descended into civil war. By 1949, Mao Zedong’s communists took control, renaming the country the People’s Republic of China. Like Nehru, Mao pursued a path of rapid modernization. But Mao’s transformation of China in the 1950s and 1960s was far more comprehensive. Beginning with the Great Leap Forward and culminating in the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s policies ranged from abolishing private property and restructuring social relations to developing a new mass culture. Although the aesthetics of Chinese communist culture did not resemble European and American post-war modernism, its visual propaganda and everyday objects were nonetheless modern. That is, designing revolutionary objects automatically implied mass production for a mass audience and the projection of utopian ideals. A melting pot of influences produced Shanghai’s unique modern design culture in the 1920s and 1930s (as we saw in Chapter 4). The port-city was a hub of social, political, and cultural reform, where Chinese people encountered the new visual languages of advertising and graphic design, new spaces such as the cinema, café, and department store and new technologies. Not surprisingly, Shanghai was also a conduit for new political ideas and the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Adopting a modern European ideology (Marxism, filtered through Lenin), Chinese communists sought a route to modernity that followed Soviet Russia rather than Western Europe or the

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United States. In terms of design, their favored approach was very different to that of earlier Shanghai modernists who were soon denounced as bourgeois and decadent. Although still recovering from civil war, Mao’s new political ideology was based on mass mobilization, large-scale state planning, and rapid industrial development. The Communist Party controlled all aspects of state power, from economic and legal administration to the military, and quickly reshaped the nation. Aided by Soviet advisors, Mao’s communist government built factories and power stations, extended the railway network and constructed standardized architecture after Soviet models.29 Modernization began in earnest with the Great Leap Forward (1956–64), a series of policies that created rural co-operatives (later communes), abolished private property and nationalized industries (as we saw in Chapter 5 with patent medicines). Initially, some of these initiatives, such as the railway extensions and healthcare reform in rural areas, for example, proved relatively successful. In 1958, Mao confidently announced “a technological revolution” by which China would catch up with Britain within fifteen years.30 Such statements embodied the Great Leap Forward’s ambitious modernization program. Party policy decreed that China would double its steel production to 10.7 million tons in 1958, then to 30 million in 1959, then to 60 million in 1960.31 But China’s economy was still predominantly agricultural. Rather than importing foreign machinery and expertise, Mao retained faith in the masses. In order to reach steel production targets, for example, rural villagers melted down scrap metal in “backyard furnaces” to create (worthless) low-grade iron. Meanwhile, exaggerated production figures masked a grain crisis that resulted in three years of famine. In the aftermath of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, a power struggle within the Party led to an even more comprehensive upheaval, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76). A People’s Daily editorial announced its aims: The Proletarian Cultural Revolution is going to thoroughly eliminate all the old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting classes, which have corrupted the people for thousands of years, and to create and construct the proletarian new ideas, new culture, new customs and new habits among the masses.32

Mao’s Red Guards—typically students—took to the streets in 1966 to destroy the “old” in the form of traditional paintings, calligraphy, books, religious statues, and temples. In the ensuing violence, chaos, and destruction, they also denounced and destroyed anything perceived to be foreign or bourgeois. The

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Cultural Revolution was an aesthetic as much as a political and social revolution, and produced a design culture that opposed many of the ideals of the Shanghai modernists of the pre-war era.

Designing revolution: Standardization and mass-produced propaganda The Party’s design of everyday life constituted a top-down process in which designed objects were carefully controlled and monitored in accordance with political ideology. From visual imagery to architecture, fashion to household appliances, standardization and mass production were crucial in creating and mobilizing a mass audience. The era’s standard “uniform,” for example, comprising a blue jacket, trousers, and cap, confirmed one’s allegiance to Revolutionary ideals. The Mao suit, as it came to be known, was austere, egalitarian, and unisex. Western business suits, cosmetics, jewelry, and highheels were denounced as bourgeois, while traditional dress was denounced as one of the “olds.”33 The redesign of everyday life was comprehensive, but three examples—the poster, the Little Red Book, and the Mao badge—exemplify how design operated during the Maoist era. Particularly during the Cultural Revolution, visual propaganda saturated public spaces and private homes in China. In homes, schools, hospitals, and clubs, its most dominant and ubiquitous form was the poster.34 Posters were ephemeral, cheap, and mass-produced in the millions. A poster could convey a political message with vibrant colors and a compact narrative that required little literacy, so was a good means by which to communicate to a largely rural and illiterate population. While European and American modernists advocated simplicity through abstraction, communist designers advocated simplicity through narrative.35 Above all, visual propaganda needed to transmit a clear political message. The basic principles for visual propaganda were established in 1942 in Mao’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art.” Cultural production, argued Mao, was essential in the broader struggle against Japanese and Western imperialism as a means of unification and education. His aesthetic theory rejected individual expression and proclaimed political intent as fundamental. All forms of culture, he argued, should “serve the people” and cultural workers should “conscientiously learn the language of the masses.”36 Similar to Stalin’s socialist realism, Chinese communist propaganda aimed to educate the masses in an accessible visible language through heroic characters and stories. Accordingly, such characters should be “nearer the ideal, and therefore more universal than everyday life.”37

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In occupied China, Japanese colonial authorities produced graphics and texts promoting their regime and denouncing Chinese Communists and Nationalists. From their base in Yan’an, the Communists responded with their own visual propaganda. This included woodcuts (popularized in the 1920s by Lu Xun), as well as New Year calendars and simple cartoons with revolutionary themes. Once in power, communist government posters focused on the Civil War, then the Korean War and agricultural collectivization. Posters quickly became an essential mass communication tool. During the Great Leap Forward, for example, peasants pasted propaganda posters on at the entrance to their homes, as they had previously featured door gods. During the 1950s, many poster designers adopted the style of Soviet realiststyle oil paintings. However, there were also posters based on woodcuts, New Year paintings, and traditional landscape paintings.38 Although focused on political themes, some posters featured traditional symbols such as peonies, lotuses, goldfish, or peaches. However, the condemnation of the “old” in the Cultural Revolution eliminated overtly traditional themes, techniques, or symbols. Instead, posters featured images promoting collective agriculture, progressive industry, and military victory, as well as advances in health, education, and work. The color red was particularly symbolic and featured in many posters and visual propaganda. At the end of 1966, when Red Guards began enthusiastically painting offices, shops, and houses red, the Party issued a proclamation titled “Notice about Restraining the Indiscriminate Action of the So-Called Red Sea.”39 Typically, posters featured inspiring characters—heroic soldiers, peasants, or industrial workers—on which people could model their behavior (Plate 3). Signifying their allegiance to the Party and Chairman Mao, these characters were adorned with a new range of symbols such as the Little Red Book and Mao badge. Above all, such posters were theatrical, used vibrant colors, and aimed at creating an accessible story by repeating well-known themes. Many related to stories from other popular cultural forms such as Revolutionary Operas or that of the model (though fictional) soldier, Lei Feng. Although gender equality was another major theme of propaganda posters, feminism was denounced as “bourgeois,” and the Party rarely lived up to its rhetoric of gender equality.40 Editor of Meishu (Fine Arts) journal, Wang Chaowen, explained in a 1960 speech: The specialty of the propaganda poster is that it attracts attention the moment it is seen, and gives people a clear and deep impression at a glance. But it should also have the capacity to make people want to look at it for longer. It is not enough if one look suffices. It should also yield more on closer study.41

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From at least the 1960s, some artists and designers worked full time producing propaganda posters. However, their works were not celebrated as the result of an individual expressing an original concept, but a collective production designed to express political content. During the Cultural Revolution, the Party actively promoted the idea of amateurs producing propaganda, and impromptu studios were established in villages, factories, or schools. The government even produced copybooks to instruct people on how to paint visual propaganda, and some amateur efforts were converted into mass produced posters.42 In an era of constant instability, Mao’s portrait became a stable and unifying symbol on many posters, an iconic image directly associated with the state and the nation. Known officially as the “Great Leader, Great Teacher, Supreme Commander and Great Helmsman,” the cult of personality around Mao reached its peak during the Cultural Revolution. One historian estimated that Mao’s portrait featured on 2.2 billion posters.43 Images of Mao saturated the visual landscape of China, in workplaces and homes, usually sited in a prominent place. At times, he appeared as a dominant, godlike figure, at other times talking with peasants or workers, identifying with the people. Typically reproduced from oil or watercolor paintings, posters characterized the leader as hong, guang, liang—red, bright, shining.44 An example is artist Liu Shaoqui’s iconic oil painting, “Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan” The painting was the basis of an estimated 900,000 posters, most featuring the caption, “In Autumn 1921 our great leader Chairman Mao went to Anyuan and personally kindled the flame of revolution there.” The image features Mao in a scholar’s gown, striding toward the viewer, one hand clenched in a fist, the other holding an old umbrella (symbolizing hardship endured for the revolution). The Anyuan coal miners’ strike was an important event in Chinese labor history—but, despite the caption, Mao played no part in it. In this case, photography could not fabricate the past as well as painting. Paintings proved easier to manipulate, color, and change expression or settings. Posters comprised only part of a range of revolutionary material, including books, children’s toys, badges, enamel mugs, porcelain figurines, and alarm clocks, emblazoned with Mao’s image. Of all of these, badges were particularly accessible, portable, and popular. Estimates of the numbers of Mao badges produced during the Cultural Revolution ranges from 2.5 to 5 billion, in more than 20,000 different varieties.45 Though most were small and round, Mao badges were produced in various forms and sizes, primarily from aluminum, porcelain, and plastic. Mao badges typically featured a portrait of the Chinese leader but the variation—in poses, expressions, age, and settings—was vast.

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As with posters, the color red was essential in designing badges. In the traditional Chinese symbolic vocabulary, red represents prosperity, but within communist China, the color became the Party, the communists’ Red Flag, and the nation itself. In this context, even the use of a single color became “a visual code of allegiance with Mao’s thought.”46 Although primarily pictorial, some badges also featured simple, repetitive slogans such as “long live Chairman Mao.” Traditional symbolism, such as pine trees, associated with growing fast, strong, and straight, was also used. Above all, Mao badges became a visual representation of the wearer’s political character. The earliest badges date back to the Yan’an period when communist soldiers wore Mao badges while fighting the Japanese. The cult of personality around communist leaders also contributed, as portraits of Mao, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin adorned Party talks and conferences. In the 1950s, the Party produced a limited number of commemorative issue badges, typically celebrating events or achievements such as the opening of a power station. But production accelerated with the 1966 Cultural Revolution when the Beijing Red Flag Badge Company and Shanghai United Badge Company produced the first Mao badges for mass public consumption. During the Cultural Revolution, public enthusiasm for Mao badges was seemingly endless. One factory, the Shaoshan Mao Badge Factory, reputedly produced the greatest variety of badges. It employed “over four hundred designers and technicians” at its height and artists from all over China sought work there.47 Although Mao badges were centrally produced by government factories, thousands of other organizations, including army units, Red Guard units, offices, co-operatives, and schools produced their own versions.48 Within such organizations, badges were presented as rewards and creating a distinctive design became a symbol of allegiance and patriotism. However, in 1969, after less than three years of badge frenzy, the Party ordered badge production to cease. Collecting, trading, and creating unique Mao badges had become contrary to the ideas of limited consumption, restraint, and standardization. A nationwide aluminum shortage even prompted the Party to order a badge recall for recycling. In 1964, Lin Biao, China’s Minister of Defense, compiled a selection of Mao’s writings and speeches and published it as Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong. The book was a compact collection of 427 quotations arranged in thirty-three chapters. It drew upon several precedents, including modern collections of Marxist and Leninist thought such as the Russian ABC of Communism (written by Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky in 1919), as well as ancient Chinese collections of anecdotes such as the Analects of Confucius. Commonly

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known as the Little Red Book, its contents stressed self-sacrifice, self-reliance, and revolutionary struggle. On Lin’s initiative, the book became a standard item given to every solider in the People’s Liberation Army. The design of the Little Red Book was eminently practical for military purposes. Its water-resistant, vinyl cover was more durable than card, and the plain red color associated it immediately with revolutionary ideals. The book was also designed specifically to fit into the pocket of a soldier’s uniform. As an object, the book took on almost supernatural powers, and for some soldiers it became a good luck talisman. Mao personally approved the Book and in 1965 factories began mass producing it for a broader, non-military audience. As with posters and badges, the communist government mass produced the Little Red Book in vast quantities. During the Cultural Revolution, printing the Little Red Book took over much of the Chinese publishing industry.49 On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, twelve million books had been printed; between 1966 and 1971, over one billion copies were printed (Figure. 6.2).50 Production exceed one copy for every citizen as printers constantly increased production. In 1966, for example, 234 million copies were printed, in 1967, 370 million copies. By 1971, not only was the Chinese market completely saturated, but the Cultural Revolution was over. Government printers

Figure 6.2  Employees of the Government Printing House, Beijing, pack copies of Mao’s Little Red Book, 1971. Getty Images/Stringer/Editorial #: 182265969.

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stopped printing copies of Little Red Book and over 100 million copies sat in storage until in 1979 they were pulped.51 Similar to the badges, the Little Red Book became a required symbol of loyalty and standard issue for citizens during the Cultural Revolution. Factories, schools, and social clubs organized study sessions, lectures, and performances based on the Quotations. The Book proved ideal for study groups. It was portable, compact, and its simple layout made it accessible and easier to memorize quotes. Mao’s Little Red Book became a mass-produced object embedded in rituals of reading, studying, and discussion of Mao’s political ideology, but it was also a guide to transformation of the world. As a modern ideology, communism claimed its truths as scientific and universal. Consequently, the Little Red Book was translated into three-dozen languages and over a billion copies were printed in less than a decade—at a time when the world’s population was four billion.52 The Party utilized all communication channels to convey messages, from Chinese opera and children’s books, folk songs to paintings. Across various media, the emphasis on accessible communication, simple slogans, and recognizable images comprised a coherent visual and symbolic language. In terms of design, an individual designer was less important than central authoring and dissemination of official Party policy by the masses. Indeed, it is worth noting the active participation of the population in the design and dissemination of visual propaganda such as posters and badges.53 While the Maoist era ended with Mao’s death in 1976, a resurgence in the visual imagery of the era occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The resurgence in Maoist imagery peaked with the centenary of his birth in 1993 when Maoist memorabilia made a return in China as a collectors’ items or for its nostalgic value. At least for some Chinese people, Mao still represented a symbol of stability in a constantly changing state.

Part III: Singapore—Designing a postcolonial society On August 27, 1965, modernist architect and urbanist Le Corbusier died. Three weeks later, Singapore was born. Given the city’s development over the following three decades, the coincidence is worth noting. Corbusier’s utopian ideal of a high-rise, modern city characterized by efficiency, standardization, and a uniform aesthetic finally came to fruition, not in his adopted home of France, but in a tiny city-state in Southeast Asia. On a much greater scale than Chandigarh, Singapore is an exemplary case of a top-down modernization project. Through the state’s Housing Development Board (HDB), Singapore evolved as a distinctively modern city. Importantly, the design of the city and its

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citizens were mutually entwined as new housing, infrastructure, and government policy comprised a holistic approach to modern living. In 1959, Lee Kuan Yew became the first prime minister of Singapore, then a state within the newly independent Malay Federation. Educated in law at Cambridge University, Lee led Singapore through a remarkable transformation over the next three decades. From its independence in 1965 until Lee retired in 1990, Singapore was consciously redesigned from a colonial port with no natural resources into a prosperous modern city-state. As in India, modern architecture and urbanism were a crucial part of a strategy to unify a diverse postcolonial nation. But Lee’s modernization was founded on a more comprehensive vision than that of Nehru and Corbusier’s for Chandigarh. From its foundation in 1819 as an outpost of the British East India Company, Singapore developed as a commercial port. Although colonial, the city’s population comprised indigenous Malays, immigrant Chinese and Indians. For Lee’s new nation that broke away from the Malay Federation in 1965, an identity needed to be largely invented. English remained the language of administration, yet other languages and traditions—Malay, Chinese, and Indian—coexisted. The national culture became a distillation of Chinese Confucian, Indian Hindu, and Islamic Malay culture promoted via the catch-all phrase “Asian values.”54 The dominant Chinese population, educated in modern Chinese language and culture rather than the classics, found inspiration in the early successes of communist China.55 The Singapore government’s initial strategy was to establish industries and attract multinational companies producing textiles, toys, and electronics. Singapore’s base in colonial trade networks also made it a logical place for a regional financial industry. Tight government controls included family planning policies, corporal punishment, and subtle repression of political dissent through the law and the media. A cornerstone of Singapore’s success in nation-building was its housing policy. Overseen by the Housing and Development Board (HDB), the number of government-designed public apartments rose from 23,000 in 1959 to over 667,000 in 1990. Today, Singapore has one of the world’s most comprehensive public housing programs—80 percent of Singaporeans live in HDB flats.

Housing a new nation: The HDB flat In the nineteenth century, the British authorities, whose main priority was trade, had no official policies concerning housing. But, as the city’s population grew, the colonial government established a “planning vocabulary” based on British

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town planning ideas.56 In 1927, they established the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) to oversee new housing, roads, and infrastructure. Many later planning principles, including legislation, zoning, and master planning, were inherited from these early British models. The 1958 Singapore Master Plan, for example, was based on British plans to resettle squatters and solve overcrowding through building new towns outside of the existing city.57 But decolonization brought changes too. In 1960, the HDB replaced the SIT, and this new body was driven by the immediate problems of rapid population growth, limited housing, resources, and land. The HDB was unique as it integrated and coordinated various planning agencies into a single department. Its first five-year plan aimed at housing the population in high-rise, modern apartments, later referred to as HDB flats. A comprehensive 1971 Concept Plan set out a series of high-density new towns linked to the city center via freeways and a public rail system. Due to its integrated nature, the HDB designed housing alongside infrastructure such as roads and sewage, and public amenities such as parks, schools, and libraries. In these HDB “master plans,” Corbusier’s ideal of a totally designed urban environment has come closest to fruition. Previously, Singaporeans lived in a variety of housing types. Indigenous Malay housing, for example, typically comprised one-story timber houses grouped in kampungs (villages). Singapore’s urban Chinese population typically lived in shophouses, a distinctive Southeast Asian type of row housing that combined living and working spaces. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British built colonial bungalows (derived from Indian models) and classically inspired public institutions. By the 1950s, Singapore also had a large squatter population living in overcrowded improvised housing with poor sanitation and no access to electricity or water. The HDB’s modernist high-rise blocks were radically different from all of these housing models. Their scale, standardized form, aesthetics, patterns of social interaction, and behavior represented not only a new type, but a new lifestyle for Singaporeans.58 As well as political, Singapore’s split from Malaysia was cultural. While Malaysians could draw upon indigenous and Islamic traditions for their national identity, Singapore opted for the culturally “neutral” modernism. In architecture and urban planning, this was “exacerbated by the fact that Singapore’s official planners and architects were trained abroad in Australia, the USA and England at a time when modernization and modernism were the faith and the form.”59 In the 1950s and 1960s, modernist design principles were understood as universal, not rooted in tradition or the particulars of place. Symbols of the past, such as Singapore’s remaining kampongs, shophouses, and bungalows, were demolished to make way for the new.

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Singapore’s HDB strategy comprised a threefold approach to designing housing and infrastructure: The concept of a sole agency A sole agency in charge of public housing enabled more effective resource planning and allocation. This concept made it possible for us to secure the land, raw materials, and manpower for large-scale construction to optimise results and achieve economies of scale. A total approach to housing By adopting a total approach covering planning and design, land assembly, and construction, the housing task was carried out as a seamless whole— through allocation, management, and maintenance. Strong government support Support from the government in the form of political and financial commitment, complemented by legislation, helped put early public housing on the right track quickly, which made housing the nation that much smoother and fruitful a journey.60

The HDB’s total design strategy and power over planning decisions resulted in a city that appears very much like modernist utopias projected by architects in the 1920s: repetitive blocks of multistory housing, efficient transportation and circulation plans, public amenities, parks, and gardens (figure 6.3). Ultimately, the HDB program represented the top-down management, planning and design of public housing and public space. Even Singapore’s natural environment was transformed, as hills were leveled and trees cut down to make way for new towns. Interestingly, the HDB’s decision to adopt modernism was based less on ideology, aesthetics, or even a desire to appear technologically advanced, than it was upon a pragmatic decision. According to HDB Executive Officer Lui Thai Ker: The HDB has taken from the start a realistic and pragmatic stand by deciding that, in order to house every citizen decently, the residential density must be high. In order to sustain a high standard of living conditions, the dwelling units must be as large as the applicants can afford. To meet the criteria of highdensity and large flats, the buildings have to be high-rise.61

However, for the Singaporean state, modernization was also seen as part of a trajectory of development from the traditional to the modern. This set of policies was characterized by one critic as “disciplinary modernisation,” in which the government consciously reshaped traditional social organizations and culture

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for modernist efficiency and function to meet its development goals and the needs of global capitalism.62 Singapore’s “stack-up factories,” for example, six stories high, combine several factory spaces, designed with its own container truck access to enable efficient shipping and land usage.63 In order to circumvent problems already identified with high-rise public housing in Europe and the United States, Singaporean HDB flats came with rules and regulations. Public housing was a means of integrating the new nation, and HDB policies included social engineering an ideal multi-ethnic mix within each block, to discourage “ghettos.” And, unlike in the United States where public housing was often associated with the working class or working poor in the decades following the Second World War, in Singapore, HDB flats quickly housed the majority of the population. Although referred to as public housing, the HDB model included a home ownership scheme whereby citizens eventually own their own apartment. The total design of the HDB apartment blocks also extended to the interiors. For many, the move into a modernist high-rise involved radical changes to their lifestyle. As well as high-rise living, inhabitants needed to come to terms with the blocks’ visual uniformity, structural standardization, and fixed floorplans. As part of its total design approach, the HDB offered design advice on interiors through its publication Our Home, distributed free from 1972 to 1989. Singapore’s highrise public housing program went beyond simply providing shelter and became a means of shaping behavior and instilling values. Our Home contained not only advice on interior design but also on codes of behavior for high-rise living. However, despite the standardization, some inhabitants adjusted and renovated their HDB flats to accommodate specific cultural practices. Chinese residents, for example, included altars and realigned interiors for better feng shui, while Islamic Malay residents included prayer rooms.64 Additionally, residents invested in furniture, domestic appliances, and electronics in order to create their own sense of luxury or personalize the spaces. But, for the most part, modernist principles reigned supreme. Researchers have noted the prevalence of white, minimal spaces, simple furnishing and the avoidance of clutter and ornamentation.65 Again, such an approach was driven less by modernist design theories and more by a pragmatic dialogue between state and citizens. Beyond its physical infrastructure, Singapore is a designed nation in which little is left to chance. Regular cleaning of public spaces and a ban on spitting and chewing gum exemplify an anxiety about modern hygiene standards. But one technological device became synonymous with the city-state. When asked about Singapore’s success, Prime Minister Lee noted its distinctive multicultural mix, and a single invention:

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Figure 6.3  Singapore HDB flats. Photograph credit: author.

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Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.66

For a city on the equator, Lee’s celebration of the air conditioner highlights the idea of ultimate control and comfort. However, the environmental impact of a concrete city constantly cooled by air conditioning is a problem rarely raised in Singapore. Singapore’s urban planning and housing is unusual in Southeast Asia where policy on urban design, planning, and management has rarely been centralized.67 High-rise housing, particularly public housing, is often viewed in a negative way in Europe and the United States. This is not so in Asian cities where it has fast become the dominant housing type and in Singapore, a type that has been designed with a high degree of livability.68 Hong Kong’s public housing program is a comparable one, and Singapore and Hong Kong are among the most densely populated cities in the world and cities in which high-rise living has created distinctive modern lifestyles.69 The success of the HDB program has resulted in Singapore exporting its model of modernist design and planning to China and developing countries in Africa.70

Post-war modernization in Asia In varying ways, new nation-states in Asia responded to decolonization in the first few decades after the Second World War and pursued their own paths to modernity. Key questions included how to achieve a modern standard of living, how to engage with new technologies and the possibilities of retaining cultural identities and traditions amid all these changes. The process of modernization presented in these examples from India, China, and Singapore were all brought about by the state as the major agent of change. Particularly in China and Singapore, the role of individual, professional designers seemed less important than the role of larger agencies in coordinating design activities to serve particular ideals.

Chapter 7 Design and Development

In the three decades after the Second World War, “development”—a term describing a broad process of economic, technological, social, and cultural transformation—encapsulated the new wave of Asian modernization and industrialization. From the 1950s to the 1980s, design’s role in development followed two trajectories. In the first, Japan led an export-oriented path and became renowned for well-designed domestic appliances, electronic devices, automobiles, and motorcycles. In the second, countries that lacked the infrastructure and socio-economic conditions, such as India, looked to alternative paths. For designers in the so-called Third World or developing countries, design meant not only creating new consumer products but an interdisciplinary activity aimed at improving fundamental human needs.

Part I: From domestic appliances to digital lifestyles Post-war Japan faced numerous challenges. As well as the humiliation of defeat, its population suffered food shortages, occupation by American troops, repatriation of colonists from the empire, and rebuilding the homes, factories, and businesses destroyed by war. Stripped of its empire (a vital source of raw materials and a market for finished goods), Japan needed a new approach to industrialization. In 1949, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida’s government established the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to promote export-oriented manufacturing. Its goals were “absorbing leading foreign technologies, improving our domestic technology, and domesticating production of imported machinery.”1 Importantly, MITI stimulated a new wave of modernization based on the idea that progressive technology was the key to economic prosperity and higher living standards. The American occupation lasted until 1952 and the ongoing relationship with the United States had a profound effect on post-war Japan. Well-fed American

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troops introduced a new popular culture—comic books, Coca-Cola, and Hollywood films—that came to be associated with an affluent modern lifestyle. The American administration initiated a new constitution and restructured the Japanese economy. The Korean War (1950–53) provided a much-needed boost for Japanese industry through supplying the American army with goods and services. Most importantly, access to American technology through aid funding and corporate partnerships proved essential to Japan’s industrial recovery. Local contractors helped build houses, furniture, and household objects for American troops stationed in Japan, gaining insight into a lifestyle characterized by efficiency, comfort, and convenience. Raymond Loewy’s 1952 visit was particularly influential. The celebrated consultant’s logo and packaging for Peace cigarettes and his autobiography, Never Leave Well Enough Alone (translated into Japanese within a year), presented a new image of design. Loewy’s high fees drew attention to design as a legitimate profession and the idea that styling could “add value” to mass produced objects. Other American designers, including George Nelson and Russel Wright, also toured Japan in the 1950s, lecturing and advising government and industry. At the same time, leading Japanese designers studied in the United States. Kenmochi Isamu, for example, made a study tour in 1952, and Kenji Ekuan studied in California in 1956 (see Chapter 8). Japan’s post-war design culture was shaped by an American ideal of a modern world driven by technological progress.

Development by design From the mid-1950s through to the early 1980s, Japan’s exponential growth, although often referred to as an “economic miracle,” did not occur miraculously. It is better understood as development by design: a convergence of government, corporations, and professional designers. Japan’s government aided exportoriented industries via subsidies and protection tariffs, particularly for electronics and automobile manufacturing. Through MITI, the government also provided aid for investment in new machinery and research. It also, as we will see below, provided support for professional designers. Older corporations, including Mitsubishi, Seiko, Yamaha, Nippon Electrical Company (NEC), Toyota, Hitachi, Sharp, Nikon, Matsushita Electrical Company (later Panasonic), Nissan, and Canon, modernized their products and manufacturing processes in the first decade after the war. New corporations established after the war such as Sony, Honda, and Sanyo, grew quickly in the burgeoning economy. To counter Japan’s reputation for cheap, poorly made products, these corporations aimed for high standards and implemented

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innovative manufacturing processes.2 Their distinctive work culture, founded on loyalty and security (generated through the corporation’s lifetime employment guarantee), teamwork, discipline, and flexibility, also helped reinvigorate Japanese industry. In post-war Japan, the design profession was tied to the modern corporation. Despite Loewy’s model of the independent design consultant, Japanese corporations generally favored “in-house anonymous individuals, or teams, who received no personal credit or international recognition for their work.”3 Matsushita, reputedly the first corporation to employ an in-house designer (in 1951), was soon joined by several other companies who employed designers in the early 1950s, including Canon, Toshiba, Honda, and Sharp. Industrial design grew quickly within large Japanese corporations, primarily as a means to increase the value of their consumer products. Sony employed its first in-house designer in 1954 and by 1961, it employed seventeen designers.4 However, design activities, including drawing in the corporate style, were not associated with individual creativity.5 Design organizations, such as the Japanese Industrial Designers’ Association (formed in 1952), raised the professional profile of design. Through MITI, the government established the Design Promotion Council and the G-Mark awards for design excellence in 1957. The 1960 Tokyo World Design Conference represented the culmination of just under a decade of professional design activity in Japan. Focused on the theme “Our Century: The Total Image—what designers can contribute to the human environment of the coming age,”6 the Conference brought over 250 designers from around the world to Japan. It was the first global design event in Asia and signaled modern Japanese design’s entrance onto the world stage.

Electrifying the home As we saw in Chapter 2, Japanese assimilation and adaptation of modern technology and ideas was part of a long trajectory going back to the Meiji Period. By the 1930s, Japan had relatively advanced infrastructure, technical knowledge, mass manufacturing, and a modern consumer culture.7 Lifestyle reform movements promoted electric cookers and vacuum cleaners as essential items for a modern lifestyle, even if such appliances were out of reach of many consumers. Thus, before the war, rationalization, efficiency and the electrification of the home were connected in many people’s minds if not yet in their homes.8 The story of the Matsushita Electronics Corporation illustrates design’s role in the post-war, electrified Asian home.

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In 1917, Konosuke Matsushita left his job with the Osaka Electric Light Company to start his own company producing light sockets. In 1923, he designed a “bullet-shaped” battery-powered bicycle lamp that was far more efficient than others on the market. Matsushita followed this with the design and development of other consumer products, including an electric iron and a radio. Marketed under the National brand, Matsushita’s products proved popular. In 1933, he established three divisions within his corporation, one for radios, one for bicycle lamps and batteries, and one for wiring devices, electrical sockets, and synthetic resins. By the end of the 1930s, Matsushita’s factory outside Osaka was producing over 200 different types of products, from electric fans to light bulbs. As with all large Japanese corporations, Matsushita’s factories were co-opted into the Japanese war effort in the late 1930s. As a result, after the war, his company faced dissolution by the American administration. However, with intense lobbying, Matsushita narrowly escaped this fate and kept his corporation intact. In 1951, he visited the United States. Impressed with American prosperity, industrial production, and management techniques, he initiated a joint venture with the American subsidiary of Philips to gain access to new electronic technologies. On his return, he restructured his company and focused its production on domestic electrical appliances. By the mid-1950s, the Matsushita Electronics Corporation was a leading supplier of the “three sacred treasures” (Sanshu no Jingi) desired by Japanese consumers—washing machines, refrigerators, and televisions. As well as these, Matsushita’s eighty-nine factories manufactured fans, radios, televisions, tape recorders, rice cookers, and vacuum cleaners (Figure 7.1). Although he began with the Japanese market, increased sales in the United States in the 1960s (marketed under the Panasonic and Technics brands) made Matsushita Electronics one of the world’s largest manufacturers of consumer electronics. In 1962, Matsushita featured on the cover of Time magazine in a profile that stressed his ideal of material abundance: “the mission of the industrialist,” he said, “is to fill the world with products and eliminate wants.”9 Importantly, Matsushita’s trip to the United States also changed his ideas about design. On his return, he hired Zenichi Mano as his company’s first fulltime product designer. Early products drew upon American or European models. However, Mano managed to “domesticate” a portable radio in 1953, consciously drawing upon Japanese aesthetics. The lines of its plastic shell referenced shoji panels or wooden shutters, and the simple black and white color scheme recalled traditional architecture. However, such conscious references to local traditions were rare: electronic appliances had no traditional precedents.

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Figure 7.1 Konosuke Matsushita, founder of the Matsushita Electronics Corporation (later Panasonic), with products manufactured by the corporation. Getty Images/Credit: Bill Ray/ Editorial #: 50549280. Collection: The LIFE Picture Collection.

By the end of the 1950s, Mano oversaw a team of over fifty designers, and when Matsushita opened its Osaka design center in 1973, it had grown to over 200. In addition to the in-house design team led by Mano, Matsushita also established International Industrial Design in 1962 as a separate design firm associated with his company. In 1965, they designed an innovative vacuum cleaner. Its plastic housing was lighter than contemporary metal models, while its red casing and golden hose added visual appeal. The case included a window so the user could see when the holder needs emptying. Designed to be safe for use on tatami mats, Matsushita’s vacuum cleaner was extremely popular in Japan and sold over 600,000 in two years in production. As well as a new emphasis on product design, Matsushita also utilized modern promotional techniques. In 1956, the corporation’s advertising department changed to “PR Headquarters” to reflect the new, Americaninfluenced approach. Their role included creating advertisements, branding, and packaging, as well as market research in the form of focus groups and surveys designed to understand domestic and foreign consumers. In Japan (as elsewhere), consumers needed to be educated on the value and use of new appliances. Demonstrations, lectures, exhibitions, and pseudo-scientific

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studies displayed the time, cost, and health benefits of using electric cookers, refrigerators, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners. In 1957, Matsushita even founded a promotional magazine, Fountain of Living: The Guide to Creating a Bright Electrical Lifestyle, in a stylish modern format.10 One of Matsushita’s first appliances to become ubiquitous not only in Japanese homes but across Asia was the electric rice cooker. In 1955, Toshiba launched the first version, the RC-10. Its simplicity and functionalism set the standard form for electric rice cookers for decades—a white enamel finish (that resembled a porcelain bowl), an aluminum lid, and minimal controls. However, a year later Matsushita launched a more efficient rice cooker that proved popular not just in Japan, but as an export to Asian markets. Rather than stirring rice in a clay pot over a gas stove or charcoal burner, this self-contained unit guaranteed perfectly cooked rice every time. Convenient, efficient, and easy to clean, the electric rice cooker prefigured an automatic home driven by technical devices. And, unlike radios, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners, there was no American or European competitors. However, despite being designed as a functional appliance with universal appeal, the electric rice cooker proved subtler than expected. Matsushita’s rice cooker’s success as an export was not simply due to its Japanese design, but to modifications suggested by Hong Kong entrepreneur William Mong Man-Wai. Mong began his long relationship with Matsushita in 1954, with an order for radios.11 His initial problems were the legacy of pre-war Japanese exports, exemplified by cheap but poor-quality flashlights, and memories of the war, both of which made Japanese products difficult to sell in Hong Kong (and the rest of Asia). But in time, Mong established a market in Hong Kong for Matsushita electrical appliances, and soon after its Japan launch, Matsushita sent their rice cooker to him. Given there was no precedent, it was not immediately apparent to local consumers what this new appliance was for. As in Japan, Mong organized public and home demonstrations. But, in the course of his demonstrations, Mong realized that the rice cooker needed redesigning specifically for Chinese needs. In 1960, Mong collaborated with Matsushita to design a new version with a glass viewing pane on the lid (to see the cooking process) and adjustments in the timing for the jasmine rice popular in Hong Kong. He also promoted the idea of adding sausage or fish on top to create a complete meal in the rice cooker (a use not considered in Japan). In 1961, Matsushita exported the new version to Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia where it proved popular. In the early 1960s, a Japanese rice cooker was one of the first electronic appliances many Asians would possess. Along with radios and electric fans, the electric rice cooker became a conspicuous symbol of modern living.

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With the Hong Kong experience, Matsushita learned that something as seemingly simple and apparently universal as a rice cooker needed to be adapted to different consumer needs. Rice proved to be a subtle food with differences in texture, form, and preparation. But it was a staple food in many cultures. In 1967, Matsushita launched a version for the Iranian market, for example, adapted to Iranian long grain rice and a cooking method that required a golden crust. Redesigned with a silver exterior to appeal to local taste, it became a best seller in Iran. Although originally designed in Japan, local distributors and consumers contributed to the redesign of Matsushita’s electric rice cooker, adapting it to local requirements.

Lifestyle devices Another export, audiovisual electronic devices, aided Japan’s post-war development and contributed to its reputation as a modern design center. The rise of this sector is exemplified by the rise of Tokyo Communication Industries. Founded in 1946 by engineers Ibuka Masaru and Morita Akio, the company initially focused on audio equipment and bought a patent for a transistor from the United States. In 1955, they launched their first transistor radio, the TR-55. Compact, simple, and functional, the radio featured a plastic casing and a circular, perforated aluminum speaker grill. The radio was called Sony, a word that evoked the Latin word sonus (“sound”), as well as a shortened form of “Sonny.” Sony soon became associated not only with the radio but with the company. The name stuck. A later transistor radio, the TR-610, designed in 1958, became Sony’s first major export. It was slim, small enough to fit into a pocket, and designed to be easily operated with one hand. By 1960, transistor radios were Japan’s secondbiggest export (after ships) and not only Sony, but also Matsushita, Toshiba, and Hitachi were exporting small transistor radios.12 Exploiting their expertise in designing miniaturized parts, transistor technology also appeared in Japanesedesigned televisions, also known for their compact, portable nature. Japan’s audiovisual exports were founded on thousands of lowly paid “transistor girls”— mostly straight out of school at fifteen or sixteen—who worked the assembly lines with tweezers and a microscope assembling transistors.13 For Sony, the United States represented a vast potential market so in 1962, Akio Morita moved to New York to oversee American marketing, distribution, and, later, production. Morita noted that upon opening an American factory in 1971, Sony first assembled Japanese components into finished televisions, then increasingly used American components.14 This illustrated the rapid

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technological flows of the period: in the early 1950s, Sony began by assembling American components in Japan; less than twenty years later, they were assembling televisions in the United States using Japanese components. Then, using American components, Sony’s televisions were locally manufactured but designed in Japan. By 1978, Sony centralized its design functions within the “PP Center” (later renamed the Design Center). Here, Sony developed a distinctive interaction between designers, engineers, managers, and research technicians. The Design Center’s first director, Yasuo Kuroki, argued that what differentiated Sony design’s approach was access to upper management, an integrated culture between divisions, and “creative reports” in which designers would present at least one new model of a proposed product every month. Of the latter, he explained: These mock-ups enable frequent discussions between designers and engineers to work out the design details, as they consider what devices can be incorporated for a particular shape or what materials can be used for a desired finish. As for the engineers, they’re probably more inspired with ideas and can imagine possibilities better by looking at an attractive mock-up than a flat sketch. Through this process, we overcame conflicting factors in design, engineering, and production and achieved consistent product development.15

As well as such processes, Sony’s design impact progressed beyond technical problems. That is, rather than simply designing more efficient radios or televisions, Sony began focusing on culture and lifestyle. Launched in 1979 for the Japanese market, the Sony Walkman epitomized this. A personal cassette player, the Walkman “radically transform[ed] the individual experience of social space in the late twentieth century.”16 A compact, blue and silver portable music player, the original Walkman came with lightweight headphones, also designed by Sony. The later WM-2, or Walkman 2, launched in 1981, was even more popular. Its redesigned casing, vivid colors, and simple silver buttons made it less “technical” than the original version. Importantly, an individual listening device meant a larger market as now everyone could have their own Walkman (and in this sense, Sony paved the way for later digital devices). By the late 1970s, design within Sony was treated seriously, on par with engineering. In the development of the Walkman family of products, for example, the Sony Design Center’s involvement included not only proposing new forms and functions but also marketing and advertising. Product innovation meant not simply creating a new technological device but creating a lifestyle concept that resonates with various consumers. Thus, Sony designed different versions to

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target different markets—an FM radio Walkman, a waterproof “sports” Walkman, and a children’s Walkman, for example. Although critics often attributed the Walkman’s design to Japanese traditional essences—simplicity, miniaturization, refined details—these might equally apply to contemporaneous Scandinavian or German design. The Walkman was less a self-consciously Japanese product than a global one.17

Console systems The convergence of ideas and technology across corporations and sectors was another key aspect of Japanese electronics success. The rise of Japan’s video game industry is an exemplary case. Nintendo, for example, began as a producer of playing cards in the 1880s, and updated their products to include plastic playing cards after the war. In the mid-1960s, Nintendo began exploring possibilities for the development of electronic games and started producing arcade games. Television technology, combined with software design, represented a large potential market. Nintendo soon developed low-cost video game console systems for home use, its hardware adopted from Mitsubishi Electric’s television technology and its software designed in-house.18 Although a variety of companies made arcade games and home video game consoles in the 1970s and 1980s, Nintendo’s breakthrough came with Game Boy. Launched in 1989, Game Boy was the video game version of the Walkman—a portable, handheld console featuring Nintendo’s popular arcade games. Its design was simple and robust. A gray plastic case (the size of a transistor radio) featured a simple, cross-shaped direction controller and four buttons. Users were already familiar with the controller as it drew upon the design of Nintendo’s home gaming console. Although battery-operated, the Game Boy’s simple engineering meant its batteries lasted for long gaming sessions. Nintendo’s innovations with the Game Boy include the miniaturization of computer components, the pocket-sized and personal character of the console, and the flexible system of interchangeable cartridges that offered different games (including the influential Pokémon in 1996). Nintendo’s games were equally innovative. Video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda, was an industrial design graduate whose toy designs originally got him a position at Nintendo. Miyamoto’s Donkey Kong in particular changed the industry as he proposed the narrative before the software programing—designing the gaming experience preceded engineering. By integrating software and hardware, an electronic device such as the Game Boy represented not only a discrete product but a system.

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Designing digital lifestyles Although Japan dominated the design of electronic consumer products in Asia for three decades following the war, by the 1990s, serious competition had emerged from neighboring South Korea. For the most part, South Korean development followed the Japanese path. In 1963, Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian government implemented a series of five-year development plans that characterized Korea until his assassination in 1979. The devotion to industrialization and modernization included investment in design promotion, education, and support for local manufacturing. Government policies such as tariffs on electronic goods and automobiles and a ban on importing Japanese consumer electronics aided local industries. After success in the domestic market in the 1960s and 1970s, Korean corporations including LG (originally Goldstar), Samsung, Hyundai, and Kia began exporting electronics and automobiles in an export-led economic boom similar to Japan’s. Samsung is perhaps the biggest global success story of Korean design. In 1969, Lee Byung-chul, then Korea’s richest man, expanded his already massive Samsung conglomerate with the establishment of Samsung Electronics. They began by assembling components, mostly from Japan, into finished televisions and refrigerators. The most important issues were cost, speed, and scale— efficiency and engineering—rather than design innovation. Determined not to be dependent on Japanese technology, Samsung soon developed their own components. However, for the most part, Samsung produced cheap imitations of Japanese consumer electronics under various brand names. But in the 1990s, Korean-designed televisions, mobile phones, and flat computer monitors began to have an impact in the American and European markets, and Samsung began promoting their own brand. In 1996, Samsung chairman Kun-Hee Lee announced that “design would be the source of corporate competitiveness in the new century.”19 The previous year, he had established the Innovative Design Lab in Seoul as a training center for Samsung’s in-house designers. It functioned as a kind of interdisciplinary finishing academy that included training, overseas travel, and collaborations with California’s Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. This was a global, holistic approach and, as in Japan, design was integrated into the corporation. From 2000 to 2004, Samsung doubled its design staff to 470, and established design centers in London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Shanghai. In 2015, Samsung employed over 1600 designers.20 Samsung’s reputation in product innovation began at the turn of the century’s transition from analog to digital technologies. As DVDs replaced video cassette

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recorders, LCD televisions replaced cathode-ray tube models, and new wireless devices connected to the internet, consumers needed new products. This required a new approach to design. A Samsung executive explained: “Five years ago, engineers told designers what the products would look like. No more. Now the designers tell the engineers what features they want.”21 In the first decades of the twenty-first century, Samsung’s success was founded on design for digital convergence, that is, combining several electronic products into one: a mobile phone, for example, that integrated a camera, video games, a music player, and internet access. Samsung built a brand increasingly on designing accessible products for such convergence.

Design management and systems Finally, both Japan and Korea’s export success was founded on the design of systems and management structures as much as on innovative products. In this, the automobile industry is the exemplary case. As we saw in Chapter 2, Toyota was founded in 1926 as the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works and the Toyota Motor Company and began manufacturing automobiles in 1938. Like all large Japanese corporations, Toyota restructured after the war. In 1951, its senior management’s five-year plan aimed to double output with the aid of new machinery imported from the United States. Additionally, Toyota adopted American management principles such as those of statistician W. Edward Deming (who lectured in Japan in 1950). By 1959, Toyota’s new factory was producing passenger cars and trucks using a new, efficient mass production system. One of the crucial problems facing post-war manufacturing—particularly for large, complex products such as automobiles—was that the mass-production process was founded on standardization. However, consumers demanded everchanging variations. In its Fordist version, the American model of mass production was founded on minimizing product diversity in order to maximize economies of scale.22 Toyota focused efforts on developing more flexible and efficient massproduction systems in the 1950s and 1960s, and were followed by other Japanese corporations such as Nissan, Mazda, and Daihatsu. Led by executive Taiichi Ohno, Toyota’s innovations rivaled the early achievements of Henry Ford and were later transferred to Japanese factories based in the United States. The Toyota model diverged in three crucial ways. First, the development of “just-in-time” manufacturing involved using the same machinery for different models or components, as well as mixed schedules for machines and assembly lines. Second, the use of standardized components across product lines that

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increased options and variations for finished automobiles. Third, Toyota made extensive use of subsidiaries and subcontractors (vertical “de-integration”) to enable more flexible manufacturing. These production innovations allowed for not only more efficient production processes, but the flexibility to respond to changes in consumer demand. The so-called Toyota Production System became the successor to the Ford (assembly-line mass production) and Taylorist (scientific management) systems. It enabled cost reduction and productivity improvement through waste elimination (created through overproduction, excessive inventory, unnecessary capital investment) and allowed for much greater flexibility.23 The standardized Ford/Taylor system enabled little “room on the manufacturing floor for creativity, innovation, or incremental improvement,” while Japanese manufacturers such as Toyota pioneered “continual rather than one-time improvement, achieved through successive process refinements and a greater integration of workers and suppliers into the production system.”24 Toyota’s design of new systems and manufacturing processes was at least as important as its design of new automobiles. Although not noted for their fashionable styling, Toyota’s automobiles proved incredibly successful. Toyota’s Corolla, launched in 1966, for example, became a global best seller.25 Originally designed for Japanese commuters, the Corolla was compact, reliable, functional, and affordable. It was first adapted to the Australian and Malaysian markets in 1967, then a year later for the United States. Toyota’s flexible production system enabled regional variations and redesigns such that there have been eleven “generations” of the Corolla over the past fifty years. In 1973, Toyota established their first foreign design base, the Calty Design Research Center in Newport, California, and later established a European design center in Belgium. Such design centers allowed Toyota to design automobiles more specifically for specific markets through research on appropriate exterior and interior styling, features, colors, and materials. In designing new products and systems, Japanese post-war design was particularly successful in driving economic development. Ultimately, the hightech Japanese path was market-led rather than theory-led. In-house design teams designed, restyled, and improved products to sell to consumers at home and abroad. Japanese production systems encouraged gradual innovation and improvements in efficiency and production volumes. However, in Japan as in many advanced economies, technological innovation failed “to grasp the relationship between the individual product and the wider industrial and social system.”26 That is, the broader social and environmental effects of increasing volumes of consumer electronics and automobiles and their rapid obsolescence received little consideration.

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Part II: Design for development Japan’s post-war experience was exceptional. A design culture founded on high-tech industries such as electronics and automobiles was not possible elsewhere in Asia. New nations from India to Indonesia lacked the infrastructure, industrial base, and technical knowledge. Instead, postcolonial governments sought various paths to development in the 1950s and 1960s. For the most part, their values and assumptions derived from American or European models—essentially, development meant industrialization. For nations without a strong industrial base, emerging design cultures struggled with two options: adapting foreign technologies and ideas into local contexts or modernizing indigenous traditions. India stands out as a model case for considering design’s role in a relatively non-industrialized nation. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the emerging Indian design culture looked very different to Japan’s. On a national level, one of the Nehru government’s efforts to modernize the nation resulted in a distinctive approach concentrated around the National Institute of Design. On an international level, efforts by organizations such as the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) through their global network of practitioners resulted in the Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development in 1979. Particularly in India, design innovation came to be understood not simply as creating a new product. Beyond high-tech solutions, alternatives emerged that challenged both the materialist and consumerist basis of modern design practice.

The India Report and its aftermath In contrast to Japan, post-war Indian culture comprised a wide diversity of languages, religions, and traditions. Despite limited industrialization in coastal cities, craft-based traditions remained, particularly in villages and rural areas. In colonial India, British design education remained detached from these living traditions of art, craft, and architecture. In postcolonial India—as we saw with Chandigarh—modernist design offered a potential break with both the colonial legacy and village traditions. However, another alternative emerged. This is what Indian critic H. Kumar Vyas described as “selective assimilation from the many levels of technology which are appropriate to a country’s chosen path of development and are best suited for a multi-level transition from the traditional handwork skills to the relatively new skills of machine-craft.”27 That is, a design culture that could combine local traditions and modern methods.

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In 1957, with Chandigarh already under construction, Nehru’s government officials contacted American designers Charles and Ray Eames to advise on Indian industrial design. With sponsorship from the Ford Foundation, the Eames toured India for five months, taking in numerous craft villages and factories, and meeting government officials (including Nehru). This was not their first encounter with India. In 1955, the Eames participated in Alexander Girard’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition, “Textile and Ornamental Arts of India.” One of the exhibition’s Indian advisors (and a personal friend of Nehru’s), Pupul Jayaker, met Charles Eames and was instrumental behind the scenes in getting the Eames to India.28 A critic and founder of the Indian Handlooms and Handicrafts Export Council and the Indian Crafts Museum, Jayaker was also influential in reviving and promoting Indian traditional crafts. In the 1950s, design in India was associated with British colonial education and attitudes that institutionalized tradition and craft (ironically as village craft cultures disappeared), and distinguished it from modern industrial production.29 As with Chandigarh, Nehru saw modern design as a potential catalyst for change. Appointing the Eames to advise on design, government officials expected advice on how to mechanize craft industries or which new technologies or methods to adopt. Instead, the Eames submitted what reads like an essay on design philosophy beginning with a Foreword from the Bhagavad Gita. Light on detailed practical advice, the Eames’ 1958 “India Report” was influential nonetheless. The Report begins with an outline of their task: “We have been asked to state what India can do to resist the rapid deterioration of consumer goods within the country today.”30 Their recommendation is the creation of “an institute of design, research and service which would also be an advanced training medium.” The graduates, write the Eames, “should be trained not only to solve problems— but what is more important, they should be trained to help others solve their own problems.” Interestingly, their ideal Indian designer’s role is not—as in the United States or Japan—restyling or designing new products for the consumer marketplace. Design’s role, they argue, is to solve problems. And they recognized India’s immediate problems such as food and shelter should be central to any designers’ mission. Rather than advocate new technologies, materials, or methods, the Eames’ Report contains an analysis of the Indian lota, a round, typically brass vessel for carrying water. The lota, they argued, represented accumulated knowledge as it was an object designed over generations.31 Their aim in elevating the lota was to draw attention to an everyday, local object as an example of a refined design solution, and to think through its formal, material, functional, and aesthetic qualities. As a form evolved over time, the lota presents a challenge to design

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history—impossible to attribute to a singular designer, its long design process is impossible to recreate.32 Importantly, the Eames did not suggest continuing to design in a traditional manner, but that their institute might “hasten the production of the ‘Lotas’ of our time.” The Eames’ concept of design in an Indian context was not entirely new. The swadeshi movement and Gandhi also emphasized drawing upon existing local knowledge and skills rather than dependence on British models or methods (see Chapter 3). Their 1930s ideal consisted of small-scale production based around self-sufficient village or family units rather than large-scale, urban factories. However, by the 1950s, Indian craft production was neither wholly traditional nor modern. Such sharp distinctions are easy to draw in retrospect, but the reality was complex. Many craft industries, for example, employed “small-scale production” whereby some mechanical means or modern methods were employed.33 Beyond production methods, the coexistence of modern design thinking and practices and traditional ones continued in postcolonial India. Vyas described “traditional design thinking” as: rooted in a concept of kalaa, which suggests a unity among all human arts, skills, sciences, and techniques. It is known that the last of the four Vedas, the Atharva, has as its more worldly, even scientific, appendage a treatise on sthapatya, meaning the science of construction. The treatise discusses developments of objects, built spaces, and images using different materials and methods. This is the very first and obvious source for kalaa. This concept of kalaa, with its sense of universality and integration, lasted until the European concepts of art and craft as two separate entities were brought to India when the British set up their arts and crafts schools complete with the ongoing debate on the “fine” arts and crafts, and the craft object vis-a-vis the machinemade object.34

The concept of kalaa implied a very different design thinking to that of colonial British design education or the practice of Le Corbusier and his team of modernist architects at Chandigarh. Although Drew, Fry, and Jeanneret made some efforts to address the local climate and basic needs, theirs was an imposition of design thinking that made no concession to concepts such as kalaa. The central practical recommendation of the Eames’ “India Report”—the establishment of a design training institution—came to fruition with the National Institute of Design (NID). Founded in Ahmedabad in 1961, the NID began with courses in industrial design and visual communication. The school’s curriculum drew upon the curricula established at the Bauhaus and Ulm, but situated the Eames’ philosophy of design as social problem-solving at its core. The NID

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was later joined by the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, which began specialist industrial design education in 1969. Together, these two institutions established the basis for Indian postcolonial design education and became hubs for innovative design practice and research. The NID’s “Centre for Bamboo Initiatives” (later the “Bamboo and Cane Development Institute”) is a good example. The center was led by designer, educator, and writer M.P. Ranjan, an NID alumnus who joined the faculty in 1972. Ranjan’s research into bamboo began in the 1970s; his “field work” in 1979 and 1980 was collated into a report, co-written with Nilam Iyer and Ghanshyam Pandya, Bamboo and Cane Crafts of Northeast India.35 It contains their research on traditional uses of bamboo by people in remote areas of India. As well as details about the material’s strength, flexibility, and sustainability, the research documented the skills and knowledge developed over centuries and passed down orally that enable bamboo harvesting, preparation, and working. In Northeast India, where bamboo grows readily, its various uses include structures such as architecture, suspension bridges, and fences, as well as furniture, containers, baskets, tools, toys, and hats. As designers (rather than anthropologists), the research team documented the technical possibilities and limitations of the material as well as its uses. However, the later purpose of the “Centre for Bamboo Initiatives” went beyond such documentation. Designers also proposed modifying traditional bamboo products for urban markets, increasing production with machinery, introducing new tools or techniques, or create new systems for quality control, distribution, and marketing. In this role as a mediator or enabler, the designer can, following the Eames’ suggestion, “help people solve their own problems.” Designs using bamboo produced for later exhibitions and publications at NID’s “Centre for Bamboo Initiatives” during the 1980s and 1990s included products designed specifically for industrial mass production such as standardized bamboo trusses for construction, furniture, and partitions. Here, Ranjan and his colleagues proposed bamboo as a low-cost and sustainable substitute for timber or plastic. The concept of industrial design implied by these practices is distinctive—after research into a particular material and its traditional uses, the designer might act as either a mediator between traditional, village-based craft practices and new methods, materials or markets, or propose contemporary applications for industrialized mass production. In this way, designers such as Ranjan helped create a design culture committed to addressing local problems and using indigenous skills, knowledge, and traditions in conjunction with modern science and technology.

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The Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development Design’s potential to address large-scale problems—poverty reduction, improving health and sanitation, providing basic needs such as food and shelter—was a central issue for international design organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. Such was the era’s optimism that designer, educator, and writer Gui Bonsiepe wrote in a 1973 report, “Development Through Design”: Industrial design should be used as a tool in the process of industrialisation of developing countries. As a matter of fact, industrial design constitutes an indispensable instrument for endeavours towards development.36

Bonsiepe’s idea of industrial design as a tool of development rested on the assumption of technological and economic dependence. That is, Europe, the United States and Japan created innovative technologies and industries and the rest of the world followed and imitated. The place of design—particularly industrial design—within such a global scheme was the subject of debate by professionals and critics. The most prominent legacy of this debate was the Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development, a document presented at the UNIDO-ICSID conference in 1979. Although aimed at a general “Third World,” it remained particularly pertinent in many Asian countries. Beginning in the 1960s, various well-intentioned European and American designers and intellectuals sought solutions to improve the quality of people’s lives in developing nations. British economist E.F. Schumacher, for example, popularized the concept of “intermediate technology” (also referred to as “appropriate technology”).37 This entailed designing products or finding solutions that were cheaper and simpler than industrially manufactured ones (created by using less expensive tools, materials, or infrastructure, for example). As a design strategy, “appropriate technology” was usually implemented by engineers who conceived new products with little knowledge of the economic, social, or cultural context for which they were designing.38 Designer Victor Papanek’s 1971 book, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, dealt more specifically with a number of uncomfortable issues for designers. Building on earlier critiques of consumerism such as Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers, Papanek famously described design in the book’s preface as a “dangerous” profession: “By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute

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the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed.”39 Translated into various languages almost immediately, Design for the Real World became an instant classic in design literature and the first text to specifically question the designer’s social and moral responsibilities.40 Papanek’s other major criticism was professional designers’ ignorance of issues in developing countries. He railed against the idea that design was an activity by and for people in highly industrialized nations that had little impact beyond their borders. Papanek had traveled widely in the previous decade and he included in his book ideas for low-cost products and alternative technologies designed specifically for people in developing countries. His “tin can” radio for Indonesia, for example, a used metal food can powered by a candle, used locally available, inexpensive materials. Papanek questioned design’s role in nations where the pressing needs are not consumer electronics or automobiles but adequate food, shelter, health, and educational facilities. In contrast, Bonsiepe characterized the global situation in the 1970s in terms of “enormous inequalities in the distribution of wealth, caused by and—what is even worse—perpetuated through a system of unequal exchange or ‘value transfer’ from peripheral to central economies.”41 Bonsiepe’s “diffusionist” thesis characterized European and North American nations as technologically progressive and innovative and the remaining nations as passive recipients of this technology. From a Latin American perspective, he argued, imported notions of design perpetuated “both cultural and technological dependence and the tendency to invest in projects with a fast return” or those associated with glamorous, affluent lifestyles. Industrial design in dependent countries, argued Bonsiepe, should produce outcomes that “can contribute to the satisfaction of local needs preferably with local materials and locally developed technology.” The problem of how designers might engage with the developing world was addressed with some urgency by international design organizations such as ICSID.42 Founded in 1957 as a result of previous meetings of national industrial design councils, ICSID began with representation from ten countries. This soon increased and regular congresses held every two years during the 1960s and 1970s made it a genuinely global body concerned with professional design activities, education, and policy advice for national governments. Working groups devoted specifically to the issue of design in developing countries began in the late 1960s and participants included Papanek, Bonsiepe, Nathan Shapira (based in Nigeria), Jorg Glasenapp (a German designer with experience lecturing and advising in Asia), and James Warren (a Canadian designer who worked as a design professor at Lahore’s National College of Arts).

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During the early 1970s, ICSID organized a series of international congresses on design and development and, in 1977, signed a memorandum of understanding with UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization). The culmination of these efforts was “The Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development: Major Recommendations for the Promotion of Industrial Design for Development.” Launched in 1979 at India’s National Institute of Design, “The Ahmedabad Declaration” aimed “to accelerate . . . industrial design activities in developing countries in order to satisfy the urgent needs in this field.”43 By making recommendations on national policies, government support, international cooperation, and access to information and training, its signatories—ICSID and UNIDO—hoped to raise design’s profile in the developing world. The Ahmedabad Declaration’s “Plan of Action” included proposals such as the establishment of national design centers for training and promotion, links between these centers, local industries and governments, and the establishment of professional organizations. It further proposed “the creation of a national design consciousness” in developing countries, through promotional activities, design awards, competitions, exhibitions, documentation, education, and training. There followed recommendations for design policy, action by industry, design education, and cooperation between international organizations. The Declaration noted “design in the developing world must be committed to a search for local answers to local needs, utilizing indigenous skills, materials and traditions while absorbing the extraordinary power that science and technology can make available to it.”44 However, the authors put their faith in technology transfer and national policy frameworks rather than alternative technologies or drawing upon indigenous cultures and knowledge.45 The Ahmedabad Declaration had little practical impact. Although some designers continued to advocate for design’s role in development, efforts on an international level faded in the 1980s.46 Ultimately, for Western designers, the production of material objects for the very poor was not a market worth considering.47 In a review of the issues raised by the Ahmedabad Declaration, Sulfikar Amir argued that Bonsiepe’s perspective—a Marxist-inspired framework of technological dependence—remained fundamentally at odds with Papanek’s community-based design approach. Regardless of their differences, Amir concluded that over the following decades, designers’ interventions in problems in the developing world were minimal. Design as advocated by both Bonsiepe and Papanek, he argued, failed as it “lacked political dimensions.”48 Government policies in developing countries during the 1970s generally overlooked indigenous people, local traditions, and human-centered design.

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The situation of India during this period is a telling example. While Nehru prioritized industrialization as a means to raise living standards, his daughter Indira Gandhi, elected prime minister in 1966, prioritized basic needs such as food, education, and health. Importantly, Gandhi returned the focus to agriculture, implementing the so-called Green Revolution in the 1970s in order to make India self-sufficient in grain. Meanwhile, high tariffs on imported goods meant access to many foreign technologies were not available in India. It was not until the liberalization policies (including the removal of tariffs and the deregulation of national industries) beginning in 1991 that India opened up to foreign businesses and an influx of new technologies. Singanapalli Balaram, coordinator of the UNIDO-ICSID meeting in 1979, noted in Thinking Design that India was still a predominantly rural population and professional design tended to be an urban phenomenon. Industrial design in India, popularly understood as a value-adding activity for commodities (particularly new technologies), centered on middle-class desires rather than needs of the poor majority of the population. The gap between the rural poor and the educated urban India, he argued, meant that traditional materials, skills, and knowledge remained little understood by urban, educated designers. Thus, like Ranjan, Balaram proposed rural design projects in collaboration with non-governmental organizations that could bridge this gap. Balaram proposed strategies such as the “invisible design” of services for Indian villages. His “barefoot designers,” for example, modeled after Mao’s “barefoot doctors,” could train rural villagers in design skills and knowledge that they could apply to local materials, traditions, and processes.49 He envisages the designer’s role as one extending beyond creating discrete products to a documenter, trainer, community facilitator, or activist. Balaram’s “invisible design” is a social intervention that “puts an emphasis on basic human needs rather than on materialistic concerns such as utility and function.”50 Projects included improvements in low-cost transportation such as redesigning a bullock cart or modifying a bicycle to carry a greater load, fuel-efficient stoves or solar-powered lanterns. An additional design role, he notes, is as an intermediary, marketing and distributing existing craft production for urban markets. This requires reconsidering design in poor communities—rather than an external activity of outsider professionals, building design capabilities within villages is the goal. Ashoke Chatterjee, Executive Director of NID in 1979, reviewed the impact of the Eames’ India Report and the Ahmedabad Declaration in India, noting that the latter “remained largely a statement of intent, and less one of achievement.”51 By the 1980s, with increasing foreign imports and investment in India, design became central to economic growth, although it was primarily associated with

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styling and a glamorous, affluent lifestyle. Formerly, government policy was the primary force driving social and cultural change in India, whereas by the early twenty-first century, Chatterjee argued, designers need to advocate for design’s role in basic needs such as health, education, and sustainability. A key first step, he argued, is acknowledging previously successful design for development projects, “documented to demonstrate the design process as a proven strategy for poverty alleviation.” Unfortunately, there has been little such documentation. For other developing countries in Asia, industrial design received no public recognition or government support until relatively recently. In 1975, for example, the Indonesian government invited Austrian designer Carl Aubock, a former president of ICSID, to review design possibilities. His subsequent report, which recommended the establishment of an Indonesian design center, was not taken up (the Indonesian Design Center was finally established in 1996). Ultimately, for the decades from the 1950s to the 1980s, design was perceived by many as a professional activity imported from developed countries. In developing countries, dependent on foreign technology and imported products, there seemed little room for local industrial design cultures.52 For the most part, design activities were confined to restyling, packaging, and advertising foreign products to appeal to local tastes.

Design without industrialization? Unlike in Japan, Indian designers did not design innovative technological appliances for global consumers in the second half of the twentieth century. However, the particular circumstances of India caused designers to rethink design’s purpose and possibilities. Ranjan, for example, noted engineering’s emphasis on “the technical competence of both the product and the offering.” Yet for design, he argued, “the intention is not only to make the product better, but in some case, to replace the product altogether. For the offering may not be a technical solution, it may be a social solution.”53 Understood simply as a service industry to industrial mass manufacturing, design’s function is not only limited, but is ultimately complicit in planned obsolescence and unsustainable lifestyles.

Chapter 8 The Design Professional

In the decades following the Second World War, design’s professional status rose in many Asian countries. Training institutions, professional organizations, publications, and the possibility of a design career emerged. It is almost impossible to survey the myriad individuals engaged in various design disciplines across Asia from the 1950s to the 1990s, so this chapter focuses on three influential practitioners. Encompassing product design, architecture, interior, and graphic design, the careers of Kenji Ekuan, Minnette De Silva, and Kan Tai-Keung developed in very different contexts. As design professionals in post-war Japan, postcolonial Sri Lanka, and colonial Hong Kong respectively, all three established both local and global reputations. Importantly, some of their designs—Ekuan’s Kikkoman soy sauce bottle, De Silva’s “tropical” modernist architecture, and Kan’s Bank of China logo, for example—remain recognizable today, decades after they were designed.

Part I: Kenji Ekuan On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing over 100,000 people and almost completely destroying the city. Hiroshima was Kenji Ekuan’s family home town, and his father and sister died as a result of the bomb. He originally intended to follow his father and become a Buddhist priest, but, after witnessing the devastation in Japan, Ekuan “decided to be a maker of things.”1 Still training to be a priest, he enrolled in the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1950 and later became a founding partner in what became one of Japan’s leading design consultancies. In 1954, Ekuan gave up his position as a priest to become a professional designer. Over the next four decades, he designed numerous products, from a soy sauce bottle to a high-speed train. The 1950s were a formative decade for industrial design in Japan. The Japan Industrial Designers Association was established in 1952 and Japanese

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designers began to participate in international conferences and exhibitions. The best-known designers of the pre-war generation—Isamu Kenmochi, Kappei Toyoguchi, Sori Yanagi, and Riki Watanabe—established global reputations after the war, primarily for their furniture design. All had absorbed European modernist ideas, yet also drew upon Japanese craft traditions in their iconic chairs— Watanabe’s String Chair, 1952, Yanagi’s Butterfly Stool, 1954, Kenmochi’s Rattan Lounge Chair, 1960, and Toyoguchi’s Spoke Chair, 1963. Although modern furniture—and the chair in particular—remained an important symbol of modernity in Japan, the rise of high-tech industries stimulated new possibilities for industrial design.2 Kenji Ekuan belonged to a new generation of designers. Together with three former students of the Tokyo School of Arts, he founded GK Industrial Design Associates in 1952. Comprised of Ekuan, Shinji Iwasaki, Kenichi Shibata, and Harutsugu Ito, they chose the name GK for “Group of Koike,” after their former teacher Iwataro Koike. As we saw in Chapter 7, large Japanese corporations began employing in-house designers in the 1950s, so an independent consultancy such as GK was rare. However, due to considerable efforts by both government and corporations to free Japanese products from their reputation as inferior, cheap, and imitative, design was becoming a viable profession. Ekuan studied abroad on a Japanese government scholarship at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1957. In a later interview, Ekuan noted the consultancy’s international outlook during this period, “we sent our members to America and Germany to study advanced industrial-design theory and technology.”3 GK’s early clients included an ongoing relationship with Yamaha, for whom they designed an upright piano, the S1B, in 1953; an audio tuner in 1954; and the YD-1 motorcycle in 1956. The latter, designed by Shinji Iwasaki, proved to be a popular sports motorcycle. Designed for racing, the YD-1 was compact, lightweight, and—unlike previous Japanese motorcycles—not a direct imitation of a European or American model. Over the next fifty years, GK designed numerous motorcycles (including the classic V-MAX), scooters, and snowmobiles for Yamaha.4 Based on a philosophy of establishing a harmonious interaction between a machine and its human rider, GK eventually established GK Dynamics in 1989 to specialize in vehicular design. The best-known early GK design attributed to Ekuan is the Kikkoman soy sauce bottle (Plate 6). Designed in 1960, the distinctive glass bottle with the red plastic cap first rolled off production lines in 1961. Since then, over 300 million have been used in restaurants and homes around the world. Composed of only two materials, the transparent glass allows for clear expression of its contents

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while the bright red plastic cap provides a visual contrast. The bottle’s distinctive form functions as both a container and as packaging, with the company logo and informational text printed directly onto the glass. Designed to fit comfortably into one hand, Ekuan designed the form with great attention to detail. In an interview, he explained that “the dispenser should be easy to use but allow for an elegant motion of the hand.”5 His design process included creating over 100 prototypes and considerable work designing the dripless pourer, based on an inverted teapot spout. While the glass and red plastic were clearly modern materials, the Kikkoman bottle’s form recalls a traditional ceramic sake bottle. And, noted Ekuan, while soy sauce is a traditional, agricultural product, many aspects of its production became mechanized in the early twentieth century.6 Despite this, the maturation of soy sauce remains a slow process (and Ekuan used this as a metaphor to explain his design process). The Kikkoman bottle’s other innovation was a new system of distribution. In 1960s Japan, soy sauce did not come in glass bottles. Instead, it was transferred from large storage containers to small ceramic ones for use on a dinner table or in a restaurant. Ekuan’s new bottle was designed to go straight from the store shelves onto the table, simplifying this process.

Metabolism At the 1960 Tokyo World Design Conference, a recently formed group of young architects launched their manifesto, “Metabolism: The Proposals for New Urbanism.” The group included architects Kisho Kurokawa, Kiyonari Kikutake, Masato Otaka, and Fumihiko Maki, critic Noboru Kawazoe, and the lone industrial designer Kenji Ekuan.7 The group centered around architect Kenzo Tange, who before the war worked with leading modernists Junzo Sakakura and Kunio Maekawa before achieving fame with his 1955 Hiroshima Peace Memorial (and his later centerpieces for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the Yoyogi Gymnasia). During the 1960s, the Metabolists gained a reputation for their utopian designs for future cities driven by new technology. Rather than the pre-war modernist emphasis on machine metaphors, the Metabolists envisaged cities as living organisms, constantly in metamorphosis. Kawazoe recalled that he chose the name because “metabolism, as the organic function of material and energy exchange between living organisms and the exterior world, is the essential process of life.”8 In the manifesto, he wrote: We regard human society as a vital process—a continuous development from atom to nebula. The reason why we use such a biological word, metabolism,

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is that we believe design and technology should be a denotation of human society. We are not going to accept metabolism as a natural historical process, but try to encourage active metabolic development of our society through our proposals.9

Inspired by new biological discoveries, communication technologies, space exploration, robotics, and computing, the Metabolists proposed technologically inspired “plug-in” cities. These comprised flexible megastructures whose uniform frameworks contained self-contained living units or “capsules.” Ekuan’s association with such ideas began when he attended a two-month seminar in 1955 led by German architect Konrad Wachsmann, who at that time was teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Wachsmann’s seminar focused on prefabrication. Of the twenty-one participants, Ekuan was the only industrial designer but made clear connections between an architecture driven by industrial processes and the emerging profession of industrial design. Combining prefabrication with flexibility, the Metabolists later proposed capsule structures for housing that were interchangeable, mobile, and dynamic. Each building contained a central service core (for access, plumbing, and electricity) and detachable capsules that could be altered according to individual needs. And, although the design of such buildings is usually associated with Kurokawa (particularly his famed 1972 Nagakin Capsule Tower), Ekuan also designed various prototypes for prefabricated capsule housing in the 1960s.10 However, the Metabolist vision remained largely speculative during the 1960s, comprising plans, prototypes, and writings rather than built structures. But the 1970 Osaka Expo provided a unique opportunity. Along with other Metabolists, organizer Kenzo Tange selected Ekuan to be part of the master planning committee for the Expo. His inclusion (the other members were twelve architects) confirmed a role for industrial design beyond creating discrete consumer products. Instead, Ekuan and GK Design collaborated with architects and urbanists to create futuristic living environments for the Expo. Ekuan worked with Kurokawa, for example, to create the Takara Beautilion, a modular steel frame with plug-in capsules. The prefabricated capsules, which included built-in furniture and fixtures, were designed to be attached and reattached, suggesting a mobile vision of future living. For Expo 1970, Ekuan’s GK Design Group also designed street furniture, lighting, phone boxes, electric cars, a monorail system, and a wayfinding system. In such projects, prefabrication and industrial mass production were applied to various elements of the urban environment. In 1975, GK established specialized branches for product design, architecture, and graphics, and their

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work included designing bus shelters, post boxes, and telephone booths in Japan. As a design consultancy, the GK Design Group grew in the 1980s with offices abroad, in Amsterdam, Los Angeles, and Shanghai. As Chairman, Ekuan oversaw the global network, known as the GK Design Group, until his death in 2015.

A Design Philosophy As well as being a designer, Ekuan was also an important advocate and theorist. In 1975, he became the first Japanese president of ICSID, the leading world body for industrial design professionals. The society’s first president from Asia, Ekuan was a leading figure not only for Japanese design but for an increasingly global profession, evidenced by his participation in congresses and seminars around the world. But his most important legacy may be his design philosophy, outlined in a collection of essays, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox (originally published in Japanese in 1980, translated into English in 1998).11 In it, he attempts “to grasp the broad array of Japanese ways of making things, the etiquette of production, and ways of solving problems.”12 Ekuan attributes Japan’s modern design sensibility to “limited natural and spatial resources,”13 encapsulated in the design of the Japanese lunchbox. Originally designed for theater meals in the Edo period, the lunchbox, or makunouchi bento (literally “intermission lunch”) is at once a traditional and a mass-produced modern product. The Japanese lunchbox, argues Ekuan, is a container carefully designed to hold a variety of diverse food. Compact, portable and ordered, a lunchbox, Ekuan contends, involves “converting space into a tool.”14 Although functional, the lunchbox’s internal divisions also exhibit the poetic beauty of colors, textures, and forms of contrasting foods. Ekuan extracts ten design principles from the Japanese lunchbox: Beauty of Form, Functional Multiplicity, Equipment Exciting Creativity, Prototype, Unification in Diversity, All-Inclusive Enhancement, Profusion of Enjoyment, Ultimately Adaptability, Waste-Avoiding Culture, and Generosity. Beyond the single-minded pursuit of function as the earlier generation of modernists and engineers, Ekuan emphasizes the lunchbox’s lessons on flexibility and adaptability (reminiscent of Metabolist ideals), sustainability, and pleasure.15 In his holistic consideration of a traditional, everyday product, Ekuan’s analysis of the Japanese lunchbox is similar to the Eames’ analysis of the Indian lota. Both attempt to extract principles for modern design from an object designed over generations. Applied to modern industrial products, Ekuan argues that the lunchbox teaches designers how to consider tension and unity between elements.

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Arranging various foods in a compact yet aesthetic manner is thus analogous to compressing various buttons, switches, and controls into a compact electronic device such as a calculator, camera, or even Sony’s Walkman.16 His lunchbox principles also include lessons about how components interact with one another (Unification in Diversity) in a compact arrangement. “Comparing Japanese-made compact cars with their American counterparts,” Ekuan writes, “we find that the Japanese vehicle has a greedy assortment of elements compactly arranged within, making it a brilliant example of the lunchbox structure.”17 Even with a standardized form, Ekuan notes that the lunchbox is also subject to innovation in its variety of foods (All-Inclusive Diversity), typically small pieces that are easy to organize and easy to consume. The lunchbox’s lesson for massproduced objects lies in this concept of diversity: “when the sameness of mass production is cause for universal concern, the lunchbox mass-production style replete with diversity shows uniformity need not dominate.”18 He finally notes that the possibility of diversity creates pleasure—such that not only the consumption of lunch but the production of lunch might be pleasurable. Ekuan’s design philosophy is infused with Buddhist and Shinto ideas.19 Ekuan also draws upon the traditional tea ceremony, Japanese gardens, and calligraphy, for example, extracting from them principles applicable to designing high-tech consumer goods. A pocket calculator of the 1960s, for example, characterized by its thinness, lightness, compactness, and aesthetic beauty, he argues, is “the first artefact in a long time bearing a genuine relationship to the tea ceremony utensils of the past.”20 Japanese designers, suggests Ekuan, drew upon such unique sensibilities to create multifunctional, compact yet aesthetically pleasing electronic consumer products. Ekuan sums up the continuity between traditional Japanese ideals and modern design as: “The tendency to simplify and economize; the importance of system as a way of problem solving; and a thoroughgoing spirit of service.”21 Interestingly, in the lunchbox essays, he sees as much continuity with Japanese traditional crafts and objects as adoption of European or American design ideas. Describing a Japanese motorcycle, for example, Ekuan points out “the three elements of the Japanese production ethic—intensification, purification, and dynamism—that have now attained recognition throughout the world.”22 This dynamism brought Ekuan’s GK Design Group to design Japanese highspeed trains, including the E3 series Akita “Komachi” Shinkansen, or “bullet train” for the East Japan railway company in 1997. In keeping with the Japanese adoption of high-tech transportation and communication systems, the first highspeed rail line opened in 1964 in time for the Olympics, running at speeds over 200 km per hour. Ekuan’s trains on the “mini-Shinkansen” line from Tokyo to

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Arita reached a maximum speed of 275 km per hour. Efficient, dynamic, and compact, Ekuan’s stylized bullet train exterior exudes speed and an image of a technologically driven Japan.

Part II: Minnette De Silva In mid-twentieth-century Asia, design as a profession—that is, the profession of envisaging, planning, and creating modern things—was an overwhelmingly male domain. Despite this, scholars are slowly beginning to recognize, recover, and document the roles females played in commissioning, consuming, and designing modern things.23 The brief account of the career of Sri Lankan architect Minnette De Silva that follows illustrates not only how a practitioner balanced modernity and tradition in a newly independent colony in the decades after the Second World War, but also how gender affected professional practice and its historical reception. Although less well known than her celebrated compatriot Geoffrey Bawa, De Silva’s career preceded Bawa’s and her “tropical modernism” was a precursor to later developments. Combining Sri Lanka’s rich traditional architecture and crafts with modernist ideas, materials, and techniques, De Silva’s 1950s architecture also coincided with the broader transition between colonialism and independence across much of Asia.24 De Silva was born into a distinguished family in 1918, and grew up in Kandy, the island’s traditional center of political power and culture. Her father, George De Silva, was a lawyer and political leader who was later Minister for Health in Sri Lanka’s first independent parliament. He was President of the Ceylon National Congress, a parallel organization to the Indian National Congress that campaigned for “universal franchise” and led the anti-colonial movement in Ceylon.25 Her mother, Agnes Nell, campaigned for women’s suffrage and education, and against traditional arranged marriages and the dowry system. Her mother was also a supporter of local crafts and Kandy was central to Ceylon’s traditional weaving, stone-carving, metal, and ceramics villages. As progressive intellectuals, De Silva’s parents allowed their two daughters, Minette and Anil, to pursue their own interests. Anil chose art history and journalism, and Minette chose architecture—extremely unusual occupations for women at this time. After schooling in Kandy and Brighton, England, De Silva’s professional career began in 1938 when she became an apprentice architect at Mistri and Bhedwar, a Bombay architectural firm.26 In Bombay, De Silva also studied at a private architectural school led by G.B. Mhatre, an exponent of the so-called Bombay Deco style of the 1930s. Adapted from European Art Deco sources, Bombay Deco was exemplified by the city’s new high-rise apartments and

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cinemas. Although she was the only female student at Mhatre’s school, De Silva was not the first female architectural student in India. Perin Jamshetji Mistri and Pravina Mehta, the first women educated as architectural professionals in India, studied at Bombay’s J.J. School of Art. Mistri graduated in 1936 and was the first woman member of the Indian Institute of Architects. She began her career within her father’s firm, Mistri and Bhedwar, where De Silva also worked for a time.27 In the 1930s, Bombay was a cosmopolitan, modern city, and one of the few Indian cities with patrons willing to commission modern architecture.28 The city was also the center of the architectural profession in India, home to the J.J. School of Art, the first architectural school in South Asia.29 In the early twentieth century, architectural education in India was entirely in English and based largely on nineteenth-century English pedagogical models. Despite an emphasis on students using traditional forms at schools such as the J.J. School of Art, the teaching of Vaastu shastras was completely neglected.30 Instead, Indian tradition was still associated with ornamental windows and doors, latticed screens, overhanging eaves, internal courtyards, patterns, and decorations rather than social, cultural, religious, or other understandings of the built environment. In Bombay, De Silva’s architectural studies included drawing trips to complete measured drawings of Mughal architecture in Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) as well as to see Edwin Lutyens’ New Delhi, which was at that time was still under construction.31 After gaining entry to the more prestigious Government School of Architecture in 1940, De Silva was expelled for participation in a student strike over Gandhi’s arrest during the “Quit India” movement.32 In 1942, with war in the Indian Ocean after the fall of Singapore, she returned to Ceylon, but soon returned to India, where she worked for Otto Koenigsberger on the design of Jamshedpur, a planned city for the Tata steelworks in Bangalore.33 In 1945, De Silva and her sister Anil helped found MARG, the Modern Architectural Research Group, a group of Bombay-based architects, artists, and critics devoted to modernist ideas. The first issue of the group’s magazine, MARG, published in 1946, contained their manifesto, “Architecture and You.” In it, the group outlined their ideas in typically modernist statements such as: “ARCHITECTURE IS EVOLUTIONARY. IT IS THE SYNTHESIS OF A STRUCTURAL SCIENCE AND AN EXACT ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL NEEDS. . .,” “A STRUCTURE GROWS OUT OF FUNCTION,” and “MODERN SCIENCE AND THE MACHINE SPEAK A COMMON LANGUAGE, WHICH, IN BREAKING DOWN THE OLD REGIONAL AND SOCIAL BARRIERS, GIVES AN EXPRESSION OF LIFE COMMON TO ALL THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD.”34 While functionalism and universality connected the MARG

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members with international architectural concerns, there were few opportunities to implement such ideals in colonial India. Even before the first issue of MARG’s magazine appeared, De Silva headed for London to study at the Architectural Association. She took the opportunity to network with leading modernists, including a visit to Le Corbusier in Paris, meeting with English modernists such as Francis Skinner, Denys Lasdum, and Lindsay Drake, and attending the 1946 CIAM conference in Bridgewater. In an official photo of the CIAM congress members, De Silva sits next to Walter Gropius. Conspicuously dressed in a sari, De Silva was not only the youngest but the only Asian delegate at this important meeting of architectural modernists.35 After qualification in England, she became the first Asian woman to be elected as a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. De Silva returned to Sri Lanka in 1950 and, while her connections and ideas situated her at the vanguard of international modernism, there were few professional opportunities in Sri Lanka. For centuries, the island was part of trading networks between India and Southeast Asia. From the sixteenth century, Portuguese and Dutch traders established forts on the island but did not conquer it. In 1815, the British defeated the last independent Sinhalese kingdom of Kandy and unified the island as the colony of Ceylon. As in colonial India (see Chapter 3), the Public Works Department, comprising mainly British engineers, built European-style public buildings in Ceylon in the late nineteenth century. Colonial Ceylon’s few professional architects were British and designed in either the latest British styles or versions of the Anglo-Indian bungalow. However, vernacular styles, particularly for homes and temples, continued throughout the colonial period. Ceylon gained independence in 1948, although ongoing tension between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamil population defined the new nation’s first sixty years. Although the three decades after independence were characterized by a growing population and increased urbanization in Colombo, there were few professional architects, no formal associations, and no formal education (typically, engineers and draftsmen completed much of the ongoing PWD work). This was the context to which De Silva returned in 1950. She recalled: Ceylon, like much of the East, emerged after the Second World War from a feudal-cum-Victorian past and was exposed to new technological influences from the West. A veneer of modernism was acquired at second hand, ill-digested and bearing no relationship to Ceylon’s traditions or to the region. No attempt was made to synthesize the modern and the traditional. It is essential for us to absorb what we absolutely need from the modern West, and learn to keep the best of our own traditional forms.36

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Although the cultural context made modernist practice challenging, for a female professional, the situation facing De Silva proved even more daunting: After returning to Ceylon the problems of being the first and the only woman architect there became apparent to me. I worked independently, not with a male partner or an established firm. I had to conquer the distrust of contractors, business firms, the government and architectural patrons, for until my appearance on the scene it had been a totally male dominated world.37

As she established a practice and began to gain commissions in the early 1950s, De Silva trained her own draftsmen as there was no one in Kandy with training in modernist architecture. Her first commission was a house in the hills outside Kandy for family friends, Algy and Letty Karunaratne. Completed in 1951, the split-level house on a sloping site appeared to be carved from the hillside. De Silva’s spatial design was unusual, with the bedrooms on the first-floor entrance level and living spaces located below, opening onto the garden. Its construction was modern, and included concrete columns and glass blocks walls juxtaposed with local stone, bricks, and timber. In her autobiography, De Silva described the Karunaratne House as “my first attempt to mix old and new.”38 Responding to the local tropical climate, she included wide sheltering verandas and sliding glass doors to create indoor-outdoor spaces. Responding to the local culture, De Silva incorporated local crafts into the interior such as weaving, cast terracotta decorative tiles, and feature murals by modern artist George Keyt.39 But, in keeping with her modernist ideals, De Silva’s interior also included a modern “pantry-kitchen” with new appliances. Locals considered the house’s angular masses, cantilevered form, and use of concrete particularly radical. Client Letty Karunaratne wrote in a letter to the architect that every day “it’s a case of my listening to sarcastic remarks or jokes about our house, from practically every friend or relation I meet.”40 While the client came to appreciate the finished house, De Silva’s design ideas clearly met with local resistance. For De Silva, professional life in 1950s Kandy proved difficult, and she completed many plans, of which only a few resulted in buildings. She briefly studied weaving and designed textiles based on traditional Kandyan patterns for modern clothing, mats, and upholstery, though without commercial success.41 In 1956, with more architectural commissions to fulfil, she employed a young English architect, Michael Blee, then in 1958 a young Danish architect, Ulrik Plesner, who left to work with Geoffrey Bawa in Colombo. De Silva’s next major commission, a house for family friends in Colombo, the Ian Pieris House (1952–56), developed many of the ideas of her Karunaratne

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House. Built on pilotis, the Pieris House featured free-flowing interiors, concrete sunbreakers, and a similar mix of modern and traditional materials and techniques. In the mid-1950s, De Silva also produced numerous studies for low-cost housing, designed for small sites and utilizing local materials and local labor.42 These studies included bamboo framing, mud and rammed earth and other indigenous building traditions in order to devise a design “suitable as a type house for housing schemes.”43 Although visionary in her thinking, none of these schemes were ever built. However, De Silva’s interest in mass housing culminated in the Watapuluwa Housing Scheme, 1958, commissioned by a group of professionals from Kandy. For this project, De Silva created a questionnaire for clients in order to personalize the mass scheme—including questions about car use, preference of building materials, religion, cooking methods, and recreational and children’s requirements.44 She then developed five different housing types for different budgets and requirements and designed the master plan for the community. However, of the 250 houses that were eventually built, very few of her designs were used. De Silva designed another prototype for modern living, the Senanayake Flats in Colombo, 1954–57, comprising two blocks of three-story, concrete apartments. Rather than villa- or bungalow-style living, De Silva’s modern, low-rise apartments suggested a greater urban density. The Senanayake Flats’ cubic, unadorned forms contained deep balconies and a roof terrace, an interior courtyard, and open staircases between stories for ventilation. For critic De Voys, De Silva designed rooms “as verandahs with folding-door courtyards on the ground floor, and those on the upper floors forming roof gardens,” an ideal that maintained a sense of privacy while still opening up the interiors to the outside.45 In the interiors, De Silva paid particular attention to the spatial experience, utilizing spiral staircases and altering ceiling heights, devices that also aided ventilation and circulation. During the 1950s, although De Silva completed the Senanayake Flats and houses for private clients, she designed many more plans for other types of buildings that never materialized. She also attended CIAM meetings, traveled extensively, and maintained a regular correspondence with Le Corbusier. Her autobiography—the main source of information on her professional life—ends in the early 1960s—and, although the final page suggests she intended another volume, she passed away in 1998 before finishing it.46 Certainly, her professional career declined in the 1960s with no evidence of any completed work for over a decade. In 1975, she took up a position teaching the history of architecture at the University of Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, she studied vernacular architecture and planned a comprehensive history of Asian architecture that never eventuated.47

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In 1980, she returned to Kandy and tried to revive her practice. This proved unsuccessful and the only building of note she completed was an extension to the Kandy Arts Centre in 1982. Sited on a hill overlooking a lake in Kandy, she intended to create “a strong symbiotic relationship of architecture and entertainment”48 through combining contemporary design with traditional pavilions, open courts, and gateways. Sadly, De Silva died in relatively obscurity and poverty. Very few of her built projects survive today and her legacy was almost forgotten. Despite her innovative practice in the 1950s, De Silva’s career stalled just as her compatriot Geoffrey Bawa’s took off (he returned to Colombo in 1957 after study at London’s Architectural Association). Bawa’s reputation as Sri Lanka’s most famous modernist—drawn upon his work in the 1960s and 1970s— coincided with a reassessment of modernist architecture.49 The universalist ideal, functionalism, and the promise of new technologies were increasingly questioned in the light of various cultural, climatic, and popular responses to modernism. From Fry and Drew’s “Tropical Modernism” to Kenneth Frampton’s “Critical Regionalism,” various architects and critics advocated a modernism that responded to local contexts and vernacular traditions.50 Unfortunately, within these reassessments, although Bawa’s name was often cited, De Silva’s was ignored. Her Karunaratne House, described by her in MARG as “an experiment in modern regional architecture in the tropics,” could have fitted within the broader revision of modernism just as well as Bawa’s later projects.51 The intersection of European modernist ideals, colonial legacies, and vernacular traditions in the decades following the Second World War represented a critical point in postcolonial Asian design. Unlike Corbusier’s approach in Chandigarh (as we saw in Chapter 6), De Silva’s approach was subtle, adapting modernism to vernacular ideas. But her career also introduces the role of gender into a consideration of modern Asian design and its history. For a woman in 1950s Sri Lanka, social and cultural expectations of gender and family roles made pursuing a professional design career difficult.52 Despite these difficulties, De Silva produced innovative work, merging the modern and traditional in a way that was developed further by later practitioners in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in post-colonial Asia.

Part III: Kan Tai-Keung Traditionally known as a colonial port rather than a manufacturing hub or design center, Hong Kong had a small commercial art scene prior to the Second World War. This included the well-known practitioner Guan Huinong (Kwan Wai

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Nung), and the colonial city also spawned the Sincere and Wing On department stores in the early twentieth century (see Chapter 5). The city’s limited local manufacturing, including toys, textiles, and plastic flowers, was developed in the decades after the war. With a predominantly Chinese population ruled by a British administration, Hong Kong’s culture was often characterized in terms of “East meets West,” a phrase used to describe the city as a meeting place of Chinese and Western culture. However, graphic designer Kan Tai-Keung developed an alternative Hong Kong graphic language. Born in Guangdong Province, Kan moved to Hong Kong in 1957 and worked as an apprentice tailor. In 1966, he commenced his design education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong under the painter and designer Wucius Wong, and began studying Chinese ink painting under Lü Shoukun (Lui Show-Kwan) the following year. Kan’s professional design career started as art director at the Tamaya Department Store in 1967 and he founded his own graphic design consultancy, Graphic Atelier, in 1968. During this period, he also continued painting, settling on Chinese ink painting as his primary medium. Kan’s early work was marked by an interest in psychedelia, Pop Art, Op Art, and modern Japanese design. His client base was primarily local businesses such as Joyce Ma’s fashion boutique, for example, for whom he designed a logo and shopping bag. No Chinese text appeared on the shopping bag, only the English name “Joyce Boutique” below the logo, a “j” in a simple sans-serif font. The Shanghai-born Ma, the boutique’s owner, was one of the first entrepreneurs to bring European high fashion to Hong Kong. There was nothing conspicuously “Chinese” about Kan’s design, appropriately enough for a boutique which functioned as a local conduit for European fashion. In 1976, he co-founded SS Design and Production, which became Kan Tai-Keung and Associates in 1988 (later Kan and Lau Design Consultants). One of Kan’s most successful and enduring logos was for the Bank of China in 1981 (Figure 8.1). Comprised of a red circle with a square in the middle, the logo references an ancient Chinese coin. Vertical lines above and below the square suggest the Chinese character zhong (middle), a shortened version of the characters for China, zhong guo. In an interview, Kan said of the logo: It is displayed in over ten thousand locations across the country, in streets and alleys in Hong Kong, and in branch offices in other countries. The logo has won a lot of praise, and some people consider it to be the best company logo in China in recent times. It has also won many awards in international circles, including the American CA award, which chooses three hundred odd winners from over tens of thousands of entries.53

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Figure 8.1  Bank of China Hong Kong, logo designed by Kan Tai-Keung, 1981. Image credit: Kirsten Day.

Kan’s logo marked the Chinese state-controlled bank’s entrance into global finance. Rather than yellow stars on a red background or hammers and sickles, the traditional Chinese coin and reference to the character zhong appeared safer than visual references to communism. In choosing Kan to design mainland China’s most important financial logo, the Chinese government entrusted its image-making to a Hong Kong-based designer with no obvious ties to the party-state. Kan continued to work with the Bank during the 1980s and 1990s. His 1989 Annual Report for the Bank of China, for instance, took the Chinese coin motif a step further, using a real coin tied vertically with a red string onto the cover. Then, in 1992, Kan reworked the Bank of China’s brand to include a calligraphic rendering of Zhongguo Yinhang (Bank of China) with the English words below. Again, emphasizing Chinese tradition, the calligraphy was not in simplified characters (the official script of the People’s Republic of China), but traditional characters, the script most commonly used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Commentary in design magazines on Kan’s work often described his designs as a synthesis of East and West, with both terms defined in essentialist terms. That is, each side takes on a set of techniques, attributes, and temperament: the East is equated with tradition, intuition, craft techniques, tranquility, spirituality,

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harmony, and the feminine; the West with modernity, reason, high technology, dynamism, geometry, and the masculine. Klaus Klemp in Novum, for example, wrote that Kan’s “[Corporate Imaging] projects, books and packaging designs have the natural charm of Asian ornament and European objectivity.”54 Similarly, Rynn Williams in Graphis wrote: “In today’s Hong Kong, East meets West, the abacus meets the computer chip. Tai-Keung tries to sensitively merge these two traditions.”55 Although this essentialized and reductive reading has an obvious appeal, his design language is subtler. Kan’s poster for Graphis (1993) exemplifies his refined visual language based on traditional Chinese art, presented in a prominent global context. A black ink brushstroke in a semicircle joins a black ink stone to make a capital “G” on a white background. Here, Chinese traditional culture is modernized by Kan as the calligraphic brushstroke and traditional writing tool float in a white void. Kan’s use of ink painting, calligraphy, and traditional folk imagery such as paper cuts in the 1980s and 1990s was not unique to Hong Kong, but part of a broader nostalgia for tradition in greater China.56 Two significant events had a lasting impact on the city’s design culture in the 1980s: China’s Open Door Policy and the Sino-British Joint Declaration. In 1978, Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy began China’s gradual change from a state-planned to a market-driven and global economy, especially in the new Special Economic Zones, such as Shenzhen, immediately adjacent to Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s industrial manufacturing, built up in the decades following the Second World War, shrank dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s as Hong Kong-based industries moved their production facilities across the border into Guangdong Province. As production decreased, Hong Kong increasingly specialized in financial, logistic, and other advanced services, including design. The other significant event, the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, set a path for the city’s handover from British colonial to Chinese administration. The countdown to what was an unknown change produced considerable anxiety as well as renewed interest in local identity, history, and culture. Although always a predominantly Chinese population composed mainly of refugees and migrants, colonial Hong Kong had developed a unique culture comprising southern Chinese, British, American, and Japanese influences. However, with the handover in 1997, Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region of China: paradoxically within and yet still outside mainland China. The city’s changing status created new opportunities for Hong Kong designers. Firstly, Hong Kong-based corporations launching products and services in China used local design consultants. Secondly, international corporations with

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production facilities in China used Hong Kong expertise to design new products or modify existing ones for the mainland market. Thirdly, Chinese manufacturers launching products abroad used Hong Kong designers’ knowledge of overseas markets in product development and branding. As well as mediating between the emerging Chinese market and the rest of the world, Hong Kong also became a regional design hub in the 1990s, exporting services to Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Kan’s current business partner and fellow designer, Freeman Lau, identified three major clients for Hong Kong designers in the late 1980s and 1990s: First there are the Hong Kong business people who are investing in China and want to launch their products there. They need good designers and, as their own base is in Hong Kong, it is convenient for them to use local consultancies. Second are the international brand names that have joint-venture production facilities in China. They are either launching new products or they need to modify existing ones for the China market, for example, by adding Chinese names. Local designers do not come up to their standards, so they, too, go for Hong Kong consultancies, where they usually have their regional headquarters anyway. Thirdly, Chinese manufacturers are growing very fast. In order to fight competition, as well as launch overseas, they want to improve their packaging. They usually have large budgets and they also prefer Hong Kong designers.57

If the final client type is illustrated by Kan’s corporate imaging for the Bank of China, two brief examples will serve to illustrate the first and second. As a mediator for Western brands looking to improve their market share in China, Kan’s 1993 packaging design for M&M’s shows just how subtle design can be. His repackaging of the chocolates for a Chinese market consisted, not in changing the logo or even including any Chinese text, but simply packaging them in metal tins rather than plastic bags. The more expensive-looking and larger packaging made the American chocolates more acceptable as Chinese holiday gifts, conforming to existing designs for such gifts. Kan’s partner, Lau, explained: We kept its overall corporate identity but gave it a festive feeling more suitable for the Chinese, who give the products as gifts. We have helped them double sales for M&M’s and triple sales of Maltesers.58

If this is an international brand repackaged to achieve instant familiarity as “gift” objects among Chinese consumers, the obverse is illustrated in Kan’s redesign of the logo, leather patch, and hanging tags for the locally made Lawman jeans. The entirely English hanging tags read “World Class Design”

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and “Nice Style,” providing no evidence of their Chinese origin. Kan said of this project: “We made it more American. That’s what we tried to drive at since Americans are known for manufacturing the best jeans.”59 In a sense, his design consultancy moved between “East” and “West,” but in very particular ways. The American chocolates acquire an aura of Chinese festivity, combined with the novelty of being a Western product, while Lawman jeans acquire an American identity, including a name that evokes images of the Old West. Kan’s creation of a more personal and coherent design language evolved through the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in the form of posters for design or art exhibitions, lectures, or poster exhibitions as well as special features for magazines, as distinct from his packaging, logo design, or visual art work. The client-driven aspect of commercial design projects often makes it difficult to identify key traits of an individual style. In contrast, posters have traditionally functioned as an experimental device used by graphic designers for the exploration and development of ideas and forms, as well as vehicles to highlight elements of a designer’s “signature” style. Since the late nineteenth century there has been a tradition of international poster exhibitions and competitions, and both national and international professional design associations hold regular awards for poster design.60 In Kan’s posters, Hong Kong appears faceless—almost no people inhabit their spaces. He avoids putting a face to the city, perhaps partly in recognition of its colonial status or multicultural mix, but at the same time posing the problem of the elusive nature of its identity. His later visual language avoids clichés such as junks on the harbor so as to develop a local style. But, at the same time, Kan draws heavily from visual elements of Euro-American modernism, Japanese modernism, and traditional Chinese culture, constructing from these an identity for late twentieth-century Hong Kong. Commissioned by a variety of clients, the posters have several elements in common: balanced compositions with the informational text relatively small and unobtrusive; clear, sharp color; a preference for black and red on a white background; and the inclusion of three main elements: the floating space, the artifact, and the brushstroke. A typical example, Exhibition of 13 Hong Kong Famous Artists, Nagoya (1989), comprises a central red spot of ink, above which there floats a black inkstone with a black brushstroke over its top (Plate 7). Below the red spot, a Chinese ink brush rises vertically from the bottom of the page. Gray text runs down the right side of the page and two small sponsors’ logos sit in the bottom-left corner. Kan’s brushstroke through the inkstone makes the character zhong (middle), suggesting China (zhong guo), while the red spot on white suggests the rising sun of the Japanese flag, linking his design to the

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cultural exchange of the exhibition (Hong Kong/Chinese art going to Japan). As in most of Kan’s poster work, the austere typeface and subtle text allow the image to dominate. The sharp, full color realism of Chinese brush and inkstone photographs, combined with the fluid brushstroke on a white background, are key characteristics of his signature style.61 The distinctive sense of depth in the poster is another key characteristic of Kan’s poster design, related to his interest in traditional Chinese ink painting. His landscape paintings feature similar floating spaces of blank paper, creating an indeterminate space around misty mountains. Photographed with absolute clarity and sharp focus, Kan’s artifacts—inkstones, bamboo brushes, Mahjong tiles, stone paperweights, chopsticks, bowls, aged writing materials—float isolated in a virtual space. Abstracted from their usual contexts, they do not function as simple narrative elements. So, while Kan’s artifacts are obviously taken from traditional culture (often specifically related to writing, painting, or design), they are not symbols of specific Chinese attributes, but abstracted essences. Interestingly, he does not use brushstrokes or calligraphy for textual information, preferring modern typography both in English and Chinese. This highlights the brushstrokes as rhythmic figures and emphasizes the effect of the manual on a digital whole, as manual marks intrude on both the motionless virtual space and the geometric composition of objects and text. The Chinese calligraphic source of these brushstrokes is perhaps not their only possible origin. Hong Kong’s New Ink Painters of the late 1960s came to abstraction as much through European gestural abstraction and American Abstract Expressionism as it did through Chinese tradition.62 Kan’s poster work certainly reveals a debt to New Ink Painting: he trained under Wucius Wong and exhibited with the One Art Group, as well as designing posters for their exhibitions. However, Japanese designer Kohei Sugiura relates his posters to a metaphysical or spiritual realm: In Kan’s work these reduced, primordial forms imply the unseen spirit of nature. They transform themselves into living beings ready to break into movement. The colors and symbols of Kan’s work clearly spring from Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism.63

Sugiura linked Kan with the three major East Asian religious traditions, suggesting that his isolated objects and rhythmic brushstrokes carry with them the potential for taking flight, pregnant with possibilities for becoming other than what they are. Following this, Kan’s posters belong to a developing visual language of Greater China (including the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan). Kan’s historical

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Chinese artifacts are fragmented, superficial, and artificial—their traditional contexts are long gone. The work therefore problematizes the binary term “authentic/inauthentic” in relation to tradition, for his is a neotraditional practice in which Chinese cultural artifacts and practices are recontextualized in a modern framework. Politically, Kan’s work did not raise the marginal or vernacular in defiance of British colonial rule but instead abstracted elements of Chinese cultural identity. Without a direct sense of a lived tradition or history, Kan’s abstracted Chinese tradition sits easily within modernist compositions. His sharply focused artifacts assume the surface of something old and venerable, even spiritual, but without specifically referencing Hong Kong or its colonial situation. Kan and other Hong Kong designers of his generation, such as Alan Chan, laid the foundations of a contemporary Hong Kong-Chinese design language in the late 1970s, a language that developed in Kan’s poster designs of the 1980s and 1990s and which continues to develop in the later generation of Freeman Lau, Tommy Li, and Stanley Wong. Kan’s strategy for negotiating a floating territory has been to create spaces in which the fluidity of ink moves between the solidity of sticks and stones and the indeterminacy of the void. Characterized by an interplay between the solid and the fluid, his virtual world is alive with the flows and rhythms of nature, bridging the gap between his design work and art practice. Interestingly, while “Chineseness” is evoked in Kan’s work through historical references and objects, there are virtually no images of contemporary Hong Kong or modern urban life. Nor are there any direct references to colonization or to specifically local traditions. Instead, a more general Chineseness coincides with the dominant mainland narrative of 5000 years of unbroken culture. In an interview on poster design, Kan suggested that the first Chinese posters were New Year’s posters, then advertising posters, and finally the “political poster of the 50s and 60s was a dominant style and derived from folk art.”64 Here, he outlines an unbroken tradition of Chinese poster design spanning feudal, republican, and communist China, with his own work situated at the end. Chineseness in Hong Kong is problematized by the fact that its population comprises Southern, Cantonese-speaking Chinese and Shanghainese, not Mandarin-speaking Northerners. Ethnically, Hong Kong is thus distinct from the center of mainland power, Beijing, but also from Mandarin-speaking Taiwan. Interestingly, Kan’s visual language transcends these ethnic debates precisely in its abstracted Chineseness. Kan’s career from the late 1960s to the 1990s may be seen as a narrative of progressive Sinicization. His early interests in Western art and design were

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gradually displaced by Chinese tradition. This parallels the mainland interest in reviving Chinese history. Liu Qingfeng has written on the changes and reforms in mainland China in the 1990s, from which a new type of intellectual culture centered around Chinese tradition and Confucianism developed.65 Kan’s 1970s promotional material for Graphic Atelier was in the then-fashionable psychedelic style, while his 1985 logo design for Kan Tai-Keung and Associates was derived from a Chinese symbol (and also from the pieces of Go). Indeed, his work has attained authority, not only in Hong Kong, but also in Taiwan and on the mainland. Design historian Wendy Suiyi Wong argues: In the early 1990s, the outstanding representative designers in mainland China and Taiwan noticeably followed the style of Kan Tai-Keung and Alan Chan. By that time, Kan and Chan were well established as the masters of Chinese graphic design within Greater China circles. Kan, in particular, played an active role in promoting his work in both Taiwan and China, and frequently was invited to give lectures, donate his works to institutions, judge competitions, and participate in shows and solo exhibitions on the mainland.66

Kan’s becoming more overtly “Chinese” in work and style was roughly parallel to Hong Kong’s own increasing Sinicization in the lead up to 1997. Spanning Hong Kong’s colonial and post-colonial eras, Kan’s career as a professional designer illustrates the complexity of modern Asian design from a producer’s perspective. It is no less complex from consumer’s perspective, which we will consider in the final chapter.

Chapter 9 Globalization and Consuming Asian Design

In the 1980s, 1990s, and early twenty-first century, sustained economic growth and a rapid expansion of consumerism changed many Asian cultures. The Asian economic recession that affected most of Southeast Asia and Korea from 1997 to 1999 slowed this, but the global flows of goods, people, and ideas continued to accelerate. On the one hand, globalization seemed to have a homogenizing effect—from processed foods to popular films, computer software to fashion, architecture to electronic devices—different places around the world were beginning to look more and more similar. On the other, a renewed interest in cultural, regional, and national differences saw designers and consumers alike elevate the local, the vernacular, and the traditional in order to differentiate themselves. To address these issues in an Asian context, this chapter considers the rebranding of two banks in Hong Kong and the emergence of Asian lifestyle brands, exemplified by MUJI.

Part I: Rebranding banks in Hong Kong In the 1980s, the global expansion of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and the Bank of China required a new image that would not only distinguish each from their global competitors, but also distance each from their respective histories. Their new corporate logos and Hong Kong headquarters exemplify the close link between two-dimensional and three-dimensional design in the service of corporate branding. The new identity programs reveal not only these banks’ global aspirations but also their respective positions in relation to the looming deadline of the British colony’s 1997 return to China. Hong Kong was the neutral territory within which the two corporations metamorphosed, its local culture suppressed by graphic designers, architects, and clients who utilized the language of abstraction and high technology. However, both rebranding programs were also a product of their local context, and situated Hong Kong as a regional design hub.

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The graphic makeover Founded in 1865 by a consortium of mainly British traders, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (HSBC) was both colonial and global at birth. With its headquarters in Hong Kong, a Shanghai branch for Northern China, a Yokohama branch, and a London branch, it grew within trade networks fostered by British colonialism in Asia. Although not established by the British government, it soon became banker for the Hong Kong colonial administration. As Asian trade expanded in the late nineteenth century, agents in various Asian cities became separate branches, so by the turn of the century there were branches in Singapore, Calcutta, Bombay, Colombo, Manila, and Batavia, as well as in San Francisco, New York, Lyons, and Hamburg. The bank proved a successful colonial enterprise, continuing to grow in the twentieth century, particularly after the Second World War, with extension into India and Southeast Asia. A more aggressive policy of expansion began in the 1970s, and HSBC acquired foreign subsidiaries with their own identities and specializations, a trend which continued into the next decade. In 1980, HSBC’s takeover of the New York-based Marine Midland Bank emphasized the bank’s shift from an Asian-based to a dispersed, global institution. However, as this brief paragraph from The Times in 1981 illustrates, the corporation still retained a distinctly colonial identity: The HK and Shanghai Banking Corporation is one of the great institutions of British commonwealth and colonial history. In its present manifestation, it is one of the great banking empires of the modern commonwealth world. Based in Hong Kong, it is in most senses still a very British enterprise.1

At this time, the bank’s visual image was also colonial. Its nineteenth-century company crest, disseminated on banknotes and official correspondence, looked more like a royal seal than the logo of a modern financial corporation. The top part of the crest featured the British Royal coat of arms, and the lower part featured an image of a British clipper and a Chinese junk in a harbor, with some small figures on shore in the foreground, all framed by ornate foliage. The two ships and the figures evidently engaged in trade depicted the bank’s activities in a specifically Hong Kong colonial context as the premier financier for trade between Britain and China. In 1983, the bank commissioned Hong Kong designer Henry Steiner to design a new corporate identity. Born in Austria and educated in the United States, Steiner arrived in Hong Kong in 1961 to work on The Asia Magazine before founding his own design consultancy in 1964.2 Steiner’s consultancy

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specialized in corporate branding and logos for prominent colonial enterprises such as Hutchison Whampoa, Jardine Matheson, and Lane Crawford, and for American-based corporations such as Hilton and IBM. For the new HSBC logo, Steiner created an abstract red and white logo and a trademark. The logo, a minimal hexagram composed of red and white triangles derived from the company’s old flag (a version of the Scottish Saint Andrew’s flag), created a new identity for the increasingly global corporation (Plate 8). The shift from a distinctly colonial crest to an abstract logo appeared as seamless as the company’s own shift from financier of the Britain–China trade to global financial giant. The shortened name, “HSBC,” also signaled a shift away from its Asian colonial roots to the neutrality of an abstract wordmark. In rebranding this way, the bank followed what was a global standard by this time, as North American banks began to change their complex heraldic marks to simple abstract logos from the 1960s. “In the United States,” writes brand consultant Wally Olins, “major banking institutions were advised by their design consultants to discard eagles, lions, tigers and similar ferocious fauna in favour of simplified versions of currently fashionable and expensive works of art. Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarély, Max Escher and others became the inspiration for much of the US banking symbolism that emerged in the 1960s.”3 In an Asian context, the new logo signaled the bank’s alignment with global standards and distanced it from its local roots in Hong Kong. However, modernist design’s abstraction is accompanied by an ambiguity that offers numerous possible interpretations beyond those of the designer and client. In a 2000 edition of the British journal Design Week, for example, a showcase of international identity design featured Steiner’s HSBC logo. Designer John Powner nominated it as an outstanding logo but interpreted it in local terms. “Henry Steiner’s clever symbol,” Powner wrote, “is a folded-out traditional Chinese purse, in the shape of an H—a wonderful reductive and appropriate idea.”4 Thus, in this somewhat subversive reading, the company’s colonial flag metamorphoses into an abstracted Chinese purse, perhaps appropriate, given the changing makeup of the bank’s board of directors.5 One of the HSBC’s major rivals in the China trade was the mainland-based Bank of China (BOC). Established in 1912 in Shanghai, the BOC operated throughout the Maoist years as the specialized foreign trading bank of communist China. With the opening of China to foreign trade in the late 1970s, the BOC needed a new identity to present to the world. In addition to growing during this time, the bank also became more than just a foreign trading bank, moving into commercial banking and, later, insurance and other financial services. As Hong Kong had traditionally functioned as a mediator between China and the

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rest of the world, it was the natural place for the redesign of the bank’s identity. In 1981, the BOC commissioned Kan Tai-Keung to redesign the bank’s graphic image in a way that would conform to global standards as well as signal its Chinese identity. Kan’s BOC logo—discussed in Chapter 8—comprised a simple red circle with a square in the middle that referred to an old Chinese coin while still adhering to international modernism’s abstract style. In choosing a Hong Kong designer for the mainland’s most important financial logo, the Chinese government appears to have made a political decision to entrust its image-making to a designer of international renown but one with no obvious ties to the party state. This suggests a degree of cross-border fluidity in 1981 not normally associated with Hong Kong–China relations until much later. Here, the role of Hong Kong designers such as Kan in shaping a new image for Chinese institutions such as the BOC is notable.6 Infinitely reproducible and instantly recognizable, both the HSBC and the BOC logos lost their specific geographical connections. Both feigned neutrality and displaced the complexity of colonial British as well as Chinese history with the safety of abstraction. Olins argues that multinational banking institutions tend to favor modernist identity programs and that: “although their products and services may be different from those of their competitors, they aren’t necessarily that different; and it might be the case that the apparent differences between themselves and others in the market reside principally in the way they use their identities.”7 Despite their abstraction, both the logos are encoded with compressed historical narratives, however generalized—Kan’s Chinese coin suggests a legacy of Chinese commerce while Steiner’s link to a Scottish flag suggests a colonial history. Importantly, both corporations employed Hong Kong designers for their redesign, marking the city not only as an important financial center but also as a culturally fluid design center in which new identities can be created. Cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas described the city during the 1980s and 1990s as a neutral cultural space, receptive to a wide variety of styles and influences, an “open city” whose “extreme receptivity is unusual and could be related as much to its ‘floating’ identity as to its growing affluence and accelerated development.”8 He further argued that this is symptomatic of an identity in flux, as cultural memory was erased by the city’s constant program of building and rebuilding. However, Abbas concludes that the apparent neutrality of Hong Kong culture actually serves the interests of global capitalism, as seen in the examples of the two banks’ rebranding program.

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The architectural makeover The countdown to the end of the British colony officially began with the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. Despite their multinational dispersal and attempts at graphic abstraction, Hong Kong’s two most important financial institutions found themselves on opposite sides of the ensuing power struggle. At the same time as their graphic identity was being redesigned, the two banks were staking out physical space in the city by planning monolithic new headquarters. In the 1980s, Hong Kong’s skyscrapers were bland and functional and the two new bank buildings became the first city’s first distinctive architectural icons (Figure 9.1). Indeed, the buildings themselves functioned as three-dimensional logos, reproduced on postcards, advertising material and on the banknotes of the respective banks. From a limited competition of seven firms, British architect Norman Foster’s studio won the 1979 contract to build the new HSBC headquarters (henceforth called the Hongkong Bank). As well as stamping a visible symbol of power and stability on the city’s urban fabric, the new headquarters also symbolized the bank’s post-war global expansion and acquisition, a policy that was gaining pace in the 1970s and 1980s as the bank shifted from a colonial Asian-based bank to a global financial giant. Sociologist Saskia Sassen argues that global cities are production centers for advanced industries, and the decision by one of the world’s premier financial institutions to base itself in Hong Kong (rather than London, for example) proves the significance of this increasingly important global city in the 1980s.9 The new Hongkong Bank was to replace the existing 1935 bank on the same site, a stepped Art Deco tower (the tallest in Asia at the time) with the latest technology of its time, including air conditioning and high-speed elevators. The architect of the bank’s 1935 incarnation was instructed by the bank’s directors to “build the best bank in the world”10 and Foster’s client had the same attitude fifty years later. “Led by chairman Michael Sandberg,” the bank’s board “kept asking Foster for the ‘best building’ possible, implying that cost was of little concern, and it had to represent power, stability, and technical proficiency—the presumed image of the bank for the next 50 years.”11 With a cost estimated to be around $650 million, Foster’s Hongkong Bank was widely publicized as the most expensive building ever erected upon its completion in 1986.12 As well as being unique in its Hong Kong context, Foster’s building proved to be the landmark his client was looking for—an imposing monument to technology, exuding efficiency, stability, and power. Rising a total of 180 meters with fortyseven stories at the highest point, it was constructed from eight great “masts” that hold stacks of internal floors suspended bridge-like from huge trusses. Viewed

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from the Star Ferry terminal (North axis), the bank is an imposing rectangle of steel beams and glass, while from the side (East–West axis), the structural masts are apparent in the three distinct bays of differing heights. While structural steel has been left exposed on the outside of the building, giving it the appearance of a skyscraper turned inside-out, the interior is filled with glass, both allowing natural light in and exposing the banks’ interior workings to the outside world. Foster’s materials clearly connote high technology and expensive production, while the exposed systems of masts, trusses, and cross-braces provide a visual link to industrial architecture and engineering, such as bridges, oil refineries, and aircraft hangers. With its interior mechanics revealed and flexible interior spaces, Foster’s bank is a metaphor for efficiency and functionality. Even the flat, grey color alludes to ultra-functional industry, although it is often described as “battleship grey,” and this color, combined with the service cranes on top of the building that critic Charles Jencks described as looking “like anti-aircraft guns atop a battleship,”13 constitutes an unintended allusion to Britain’s “gunboat diplomacy” on which the colony was founded. Unlike a conventional skyscraper, the bank has no central core (which typically contains lifts, ducts, and utilities such as toilets). Instead, the interior floors “hang” from the masts, allowing for a ten-story central atrium above the main banking hall. The atrium is topped by a computer-controlled, mirrored “sunscoop” that scatters light into the banking hall below, an effect that has earned the building the title of “cathedral of commerce.” The public banking hall is just above street level and is accessible via escalators, while management levels are located on the floors above the banking hall and executive offices on the top floors, with a combination of lifts and escalators providing access to these floors. Foster was keen to promote flexibility within the interior, dividing the building vertically into “villages” or organizational units, while moveable walls and floor units were designed with future changes in mind. Transparency is a key design motif. The large walls of glass allow spectacular views for most of the bank’s workers but also allow the public to see in. Transparency extends to the interior office design where there is no separation of managers and workers on each floor. Although this was intended to effect a liberation from traditional workplace divisions,14 it also reflected a new “culture of surveillance.”15 Such flexibility is also a manifestation of the effects of global capitalism and the need to respond quickly to fluctuations in global conditions. For the public passing by at street level, this dynamic effect is highlighted by the free-flowing concourse area with little division between the bank’s interior and its exterior. The open public plaza at the bottom of the building ensures a fluid movement from adjacent streets to the banking hall concourse via escalators.

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Owing to the short timescale and busy central site, the Hongkong Bank began as a collection of prefabricated pieces manufactured elsewhere and assembled on site. To create the unique pieces, the architect consulted with designers and manufacturers outside corporate architecture’s usual realm, including bridge construction engineers and members of the Concorde design team. Each component was tailor-made for the project using new flexible manufacturing machines such as computer-controlled robots. The example Foster himself cites is the “sanitary modules” which constitute the bathroom facilities for each floor. These were custom-made on a specially constructed production line in Japan, where they were fitted out to the last detail before being shipped to Hong Kong and slotted into place on site. The flexibility, prefabrication, and relationship to mass production also reflect the impact of Japanese Metabolism (see Chapter 7) on the project. However, Jencks points out that despite all the standardized components and processes of mass production used, the bank itself is a singular and very expensive work of art. He refers to “hand-crafting High-Tech,” a process whereby components are individually custom-made for the building, which is a unique work of art in itself—a monumental three-dimensional logo designed to be reproduced and disseminated as a symbol of the bank’s identity. Jencks wrote: “The client for the Bank put it to me simply when I raised the issue of the high cost of $640 million: ‘We were buying a work of art, and it works’.”16 Despite its aura of functionality and machine aesthetics, the bank itself is regarded by its highest executives as a singular work of art. Thus, while providing a recognizable identity for the bank’s global ambitions, the building itself is a unique object of high commercial and symbolic value, constituting what Olins summarizes as “a masterpiece of contemporary architecture, [that] remains—paradoxically—a traditional piece of symbolism.”17 Like Steiner’s logo, there was little in the way of local references in Foster’s design: no references to traditional Chinese, Hong Kong vernacular, or even Chinese modern design. Jencks noted that Foster, when interviewed, often mentioned local design but did not utilize any aspect of it: “in spite of many expressed intentions of capturing the spirit of Hong Kong—he spoke of its ‘riot of colours, signage, calligraphy and graphics’—the results are more in the Silver Aesthetic of the airport lounge than the vernacular of Cantonese commerce.”18 Similarly, critic Kenneth Frampton described Foster’s design as Productivism: “virtually indistinguishable, as a ‘modernist’ position, from the view which holds that an authentic modern architecture can and should be nothing more than elegant engineering, or certainly a product of industrial design on a giant scale.”19 However, acknowledging local tradition, Foster’s design process included regular feng shui consultations, which

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resulted in the “correct” positioning of the escalators, furniture, and repositioning of the bronze entrance lions which were recycled from the 1935 building. As the Hongkong Bank’s plans became known, it was clear that the neighboring BOC building would be dwarfed by Foster’s high-tech skyscraper and the BOC board was quick to respond (Figure 9.1). In 1982, negotiations

Figure 9.1  The Bank of China (left) and Hongkong Bank (right). Image: Kirsten Day.

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began with the Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei to design a new building on a site two blocks from the Hongkong Bank. Besides the obvious rivalry, the BOC building, as the international financial face of communist China, was to be doubly symbolic: first, a symbol of China’s re-emergence into international finance, and second, a symbolic stamp of ownership on Hong Kong as the countdown to the handover had begun. Pei was well known as an American architect, having left China at the age of seventeen to study architecture in the United States and remaining to establish a practice there. Interestingly, Pei chose not to include any overt local or Chinese references in his BOC building. For the BOC’s new three-dimensional logo, Pei created an asymmetrical skyscraper comprising four triangular shafts rising vertically out of a cube, encased in a reflective glass skin. With its sculptural form, the building lacked the front, back, and sides of a conventional skyscraper. Completed in 1990, it stood at seventy-two stories and 367 meters tall, twice the height of Foster’s Hongkong Bank. Pei’s BOC building was the tallest building in Asia and the fifth tallest in the world (at that time), and, with a budget of only $130 million, it was much cheaper than its colonial rival. The BOC was constructed at the intersection of busy roads and flyovers, not readily accessible by pedestrians and somewhat isolated at the edge of the financial district. That this was the only available site in the Central Business District may be seen as an exercise of power by Hong Kong’s colonial government, who were fearful of the potential changes that the 1997 handover could bring.20 Despite its site, the building’s physical appearance, height, and mirrored surface drew attention to the disjunction between itself and the surrounding city. A monumental granite base and Pei’s solid and conventional entrance contrasted Foster’s transparent façade. Like Foster’s Hongkong Bank, the BOC has a skylight above the banking hall but the hall itself is solidly enclosed in dark granite. While it is difficult to grasp volumes in the Hongkong Bank’s “dematerialized” interior, the BOC’s interior appears impenetrable both from the outside and from within, even the lobby is clad in grey and white granite with a marble floor. Despite intentions, the base of the building and its interior can be seen, in this regard, to reflect the Chinese leadership’s inflexibility and lack of transparency while maintaining traditional hierarchies that Foster tried to eliminate with transparency and flexibility. While Pei makes a minor acknowledgement to Chinese tradition by including a modern Chinese-style garden at the building’s base, neither Pei nor his client had any time for local feng shui experts who were highly critical of the building. The geomancers’ criticisms began with the broadcast masts, which were interpreted as vertical chopsticks in a bowl (a symbol of death), two dangerous needles, and

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as antennas of a praying mantis set to prey on the other city buildings; while the building as a whole was described as a giant knife cutting into its neighbors.21 Its location on the site of a former torture house during the Japanese occupation also added to the case of bad feng shui, resulting in the local perception of “a kind of demonic architecture which aroused great anxiety among its neighbours and the general public concerning the imminent reunification with China.”22 Meanwhile, the usually anti-symbolic Pei referred to “a Chinese proverb that uses the tapered bamboo stalk as a symbol: its sectional trunk, propelled higher and higher by each growth, is a metaphor for taking measured steps in a quest for strength and excellence.”23 Despite Foster’s consultations with a geomancer, some of the feng shui charges laid against the BOC apply equally to the Hongkong Bank. Both, for example, block the harbor views of many official buildings behind them, and the geomancers strangely failed to comment on the gun-like cranes on top of the Hongkong Bank. Tellingly, the new Macau BOC building, designed by Remo Riva on a central site in Macau in 1991, was no less a feng shui offender than its Hong Kong cousin. Despite the architect’s similar flouting of feng shui guidelines, the building did not attract any controversy.24 Why the strong reaction against the new BOC building as an “outside” force but not against the Hongkong Bank, which easily could have been read in the same way? With the handover rapidly approaching, there were several possibilities. First, the Hong Kong population’s fear of possible changes under Chinese rule, especially to rights they had become accustomed to under British colonial rule; second, many Hong Kongers (or their parents) had fled communism for the colony’s relative freedom; and third, the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 was seen as a warning of what might lie in store for Hong Kong residents post-1997. The BOC building was a visible symbol of the forthcoming change in status, an abstract sculpture capable of embodying fears about the handover. Both Pei’s and Foster’s buildings are resolutely abstract, anti-historical, and self-consciously global in ambition, even as the two narratives of Hong Kong history are played out in their name. But despite the many modernist characteristics of both buildings, such as the emphasis on abstraction, technology, and cultural neutrality, they can also be read as manifestations of global postmodernism. One of the fundamentals of postmodern architecture, according to Fredric Jameson, is that buildings function as highly visible and photogenic symbols rather than as anonymous functional workplaces.25 Following the banks, a variety of novel designs sprang up on Hong Kong island, and in hindsight these two buildings represent a new phase in the visual symbolism of architecture as corporate icon. In this light, the graphic and architectural rebranding of the two banks operate in tandem as powerful symbols by which both corporations sought to erase (at

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least partially) the origins of their power—the colonial HSBC and the communist BOC were neutralized by abstract logos and architecture. Their rebranding process was a critical part of the banks’ expansion into the global market where specific historical and cultural allusions must be kept to a minimum so as to appeal to the broadest possible consumer base. In this version of globalization, local references and histories can be alienating; thus both banks resorted to the safety of abstraction, high technology, and the future, erasing the cultural specificity of the past and present in their wake. Despite the abstraction of their respective logos and flagship buildings, they cannot seem to shake off totally their respective legacies.26 As abstract as they are, the bank buildings themselves became embodiments of Hong Kong’s two major historical narratives—on the one hand, the self-made capitalist paradise nurtured by British colonialism represented by Foster’s transparent, flexible machine and Steiner’s abstract logo, and, on the other, the resurgent Chinese empire claiming back what was taken by force in the nineteenth century, represented by Pei’s solid sculptural monolith and Kan’s abstracted Chinese coin. Sandwiched between these two narratives, Hong Kong itself emerged as a design center capable of producing global corporate identities as well as a neutral space for staging their complexities and ambiguities.

Part II: Asian lifestyle brands As we saw in Chapter 7, Japanese design culture developed rapidly in the post-war era, fueled by increasing domestic consumption and exports. From the late 1950s, former luxuries such as washing machines, electric cookers, and automobiles, and new products such as televisions, came to be seen as necessities. Accelerated economic growth through the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a high living standard (at least until the 1990 crash). Japanese consumers gained a reputation for an obsession with the latest high-tech products, fashion labels, and designer brands. Against this background, an almost generic, “no-brand” brand developed a domestic, and later a global, following. MUJI began in 1980 as a modest line of forty essential food products for the Seiyu supermarket chain. The minimal labels and packaging met with initial success. In 1983, MUJI opened an independent store in Tokyo with a much larger range of household products, including stationery and clothes. The name was derived from Mujirushi Ryohin, “no-label quality goods,” and MUJI’s functional, modest products offered an alternative—and a provocative challenge—to the “designer” logos, labels, and fashion of the 1980s. Rather than distinctive forms, vibrant colors or eye-catching packaging, MUJI’s products were spare and unassuming. So too was their advertising, packaging, and store interiors.

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The concept was the brainchild of graphic designer Ikko Tanaka, curator and copywriter Kazuko Koike, and interior designer Takashi Sugimoto. From its inception, Koike wrote, MUJI was driven by a desire “to demonstrate the aesthetics of a whole lifestyle” rather than create iconic products by signature designers.27 Plain cotton T-shirts without logos or labels, unbleached paper notebooks, plain porcelain dishes—MUJI promised simple, quality products and efficient use of materials. A cross-disciplinary design approach was also central to the brand’s strategy. MUJI employed graphic designers, interior designers, product designers, and copywriters, who all contributed to its coherent identity. Its founders came with considerable experience, and it is worth briefly sketching their backgrounds to understand how MUJI created a holistic approach. Tanaka was a co-founder of the Nippon Design Centre in 1959, a group of graphic designers, copywriters, and photographers aiming to raise the quality of advertising in Japan. Large corporations, including Toyota, Nikon, Asahi, and Toshiba, invested in the studio, whose designers also included Yusaku Kamekura and Hiromu Hara. In 1963, Tanaka founded his own design studio and created the renowned graphics program for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. His posters, books, magazine covers, logos, and brochures through the 1960s and 1970s were marked by the impact of international modernism in their clear communication and minimalism. Yet Tanaka often condensed references to Noh or Kabuki theater, Ukiyo-e prints, or traditional calligraphy as abstract forms within his compositions. Tanaka was responsible for the overall appearance and consistency of MUJI’s early graphics, signage, labels, packaging, and advertisements.28 His MUJI advertisements of the 1980s were relatively plain yet marked by a playful sense of humor: simple text and line drawings for newspaper advertisements, for example, featured red text on a brown background. Tanaka’s MUJI logo was an exercise in design minimalism, a bold red sans-serif English word mark, “MUJI,” with four characters below, Mujirushi Ryohin. The advertisements and logo mirrored the spare, utilitarian character of MUJI’s products. MUJI’s interior designer, Takashi Sugimoto, founded the design consultancy Super Potato in 1971. An initial interest in European design, particularly the 1960s radical Italian design of Super Studio, was tempered by Sugimoto’s interest in the Japanese tea ceremony. Sparse and functional yet rustic and refined, the tea ceremony’s utensils, spaces, and ritual movements were all carefully considered as a coherent whole.29 Drawing upon this ideal, Sugimoto’s Super Potato designed sparse interiors characterized by natural, weathered materials— timber, bamboo, stone—as stage sets for contemporary rituals (Figure 9.2). This ideal was reflected in Sugimoto’s design for the early MUJI stores. Thick timber shelving, wicker baskets, minimal cardboard labels, and neat stacks of

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Figure 9.2  MUJI Shanghai Huaihai 755 store, 2016. Getty images/Credit: Zhang Peng/Editorial #: 522832354/Collection: LightRocket.

merchandise projected an image of simplicity and restraint. The neutral colors— typically brown, beige, black, and white—created a modest harmony. Sugimoto’s use of recycled materials and varied textures—rough stone columns, recycled timber planks, recycled metal bins (as containers for products), exposed brick tiles, and timber floors—gave the interiors a rustic feel, like a rural marketplace. Free from colorful advertisements, signage or labels, a MUJI store was a comparatively serene, harmonious environment. For Sugimoto, an ideal interior should be “yukkuri ninshiki shiteiku mono, ‘something that is slowly perceived’.”30 Kazuko Koike, the third designer responsible for creating MUJI’s holistic aesthetic, was an established curator and writer. She founded Kitchen, an art and design studio, in 1976, then co-founded Sagacho Exhibit Space, an alternative contemporary art space in an abandoned Tokyo rice factory. In 1978, she was author of a seminal publication on one of Japan’s rising stars of fashion design, Issey Miyake. As MUJI’s first copywriter, she coined the brand’s early copy for newspaper and poster advertisements. Phrases such as “Lower priced for a reason,” “Nature, Naturally, MUJI,” and “Colours as they are” appeared in MUJI advertisements, and reinforced the themes of quality products at a reasonable price, the raw aesthetic, and a connection to sustainability.31 Despite their notable backgrounds, MUJI’s designers were anonymous from a consumer perspective. Instead, the focus remained on the products and the

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brand’s ideals. Industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa, who designed kitchen appliances, a wall-mounted CD player, a suitcase, and ballet shoes for MUJI, described the brand’s design philosophy in this way: product design is not a medium for emphasizing the individuality or lifestyles of the designers or end users. A MUJI product takes an inevitable form, perfected through professional devotion to making tools for living. Its shape is determined by its purpose, and by continuous refinement over a long period of time.32

MUJI products were designed to be functional and affordable, made possible by simplifying the production process. Furniture in raw timber and neutral colors, for example, reinforced the idea of purity and refinement. Minimal store graphics and signage, minimal packaging, and the use of plain brown paper wrapping reinforced the idea of eliminating waste. A MUJI product’s generic nature suggested consumption was an ethical act, provoking consumers to think about needs rather than desires, while at the same time its holistic displays encourage consumption of a complete MUJI “set” of products. Art Director Kenya Hara described the holistic MUJI design approach as: the architecture of the mind—that is, information that enters the mind immediately through the senses of sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste. There is one other thing that accumulates within the mind as well: memory. These are the ingredients, and they enter from outside and through the existing senses. When a new sensation enters the mind, a memory is made. This is how information architecture is constructed.33

Engaging with a consumer’s senses and memory, MUJI’s consistent aesthetic operates across disciplines such that each contributes to the overall affect.

A global brand By 1991, MUJI had over 200 stores in Japan and began its global expansion with the opening of a London store. By the early 2000s, MUJI had established a cult following in Europe and the United States with dozens of stores in major cities. Although considered everyday in a Japanese context, outside of Japan, MUJI corresponded to existing ideas about “traditional Japan” and its values of simplicity, modesty, and serenity. As Koike explains: The nature of the MUJI concept—its simplicity, an unadorned integrity, and the way a MUJI product blends into a living space without asserting itself—all of these qualities are common in traditional Japanese architectural space.34

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However, at the beginning of MUJI’s global expansion, science fiction writer William Gibson understood MUJI’s imagery as essentially imaginary. MUJI, he wrote in 1991, “calls up a wonderful Japan that doesn’t really exist. A Japan of the mind, where even toenail-clippers and plastic coat-hangers possess a Zen purity: functional, minimal, reasonably priced. I would very much like to visit the Japan that Muji evokes.”35 For a highly urbanized, technologically advanced consumer, MUJI’s image of traditional Japanese values could be seen as a means of escape, nostalgia, or a desire for a simpler life. In 2001, as MUJI’s global expansion was gathering pace, Ikko Tanaka stood down as MUJI’s art director. His replacement, Keyna Hara, began a new era in the brand’s development. Hara’s advertisements featured photographs of single bowls, chairs, tables, or products, sharply focused against a neutral grey background, or in empty rooms, emphasizing their spare, minimal qualities. They featured no text apart from the MUJI logo discreetly in the corner. Hara argued that MUJI’s graphic identity was one founded on “emptiness” into which consumers can project their own ideas: “Some think of MUJI as an urban refinement, while others think it’s about ecology. Some see MUJI as an affordable brand. Others think of it as a reflection of Zen ideology.”36 Hara’s advertisements also featured empty landscapes, rarely urban scenes, and never colorful scenes of technologically advanced Tokyo. A 2005 series, “Tea House” comprising posters and a newspaper advertisement, for example, featured a series of photographs of a traditional Japanese tea house. Specifically, the sixteenth-century tea house was within Kyoto’s Jisho-ji Pavilion, and is considered one of the earliest tea rooms.37 The black-and-white photographs, without any copy, emphasize the play of light, shadows, and materials of the tea room, which is empty but for a white MUJI tea bowl on the floor. Without resorting to words, Hara’s image imbues a simple, mass-produced porcelain bowl with all the qualities associated with a traditional tea room. Drawing upon Japanese traditions, MUJI’s imagery also appeals directly to global consumers’ ideas about Japan. As the overt brand consciousness of the 1980s and 1990s receded, MUJI’s imagery could thus appeal to middle-class consumers outside of Japan who aspired to a lifestyle that appeared modest, ordered, and humble. Interestingly, MUJI’s distinction in the United States was initially among connoisseurs of good design (its first appearance was in the MoMA giftshop), presumably drawn to the products’ traditional Japanese qualities. MUJI’s advertisements certainly highlighted the brand’s aura, as each product was isolated against a neutral background, so that even a T-shirt or cup attained a rarefied aesthetic value. Interestingly, Koike questioned the possibility of “fake” MUJI products, on the grounds that “the strong feeling you sense when holding a

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MUJI product in your hand does not emanate solely from its extremely simplified form. There is a philosophy reflected in all of MUJI’s products, communication, and design: a single, consistent ideology in seemingly simple and low-cost products. This cannot be copied easily.”38 Given an indistinguishable MUJI fake would be easy to manufacture, MUJI, ironically for a “non-brand,” relies heavily on advertising imagery and marketing in order to maintain its brand’s aura.

Designing Lifestyles Often referred to as “the Japanese IKEA,” the similarities between IKEA and MUJI are worth consideration in order to understand how such brands operate in a global context. By far the older brand, IKEA began as a Swedish mail order company in 1943, and slowly began to specialize in furniture, opening its first store in 1953. While IKEA had a few decades’ head start, both IKEA and MUJI accelerated their global expansion through the 1990s and 2000s. The retail offerings of both companies could hardly be described as minimalist: as at 2017, IKEA’s range includes over 12,000 products, while MUJI’s includes over 7000 products. Despite this difference, IKEA continues its focus on domestic furniture and products. Although marketed and understood as Japanese and Swedish respectively, the design of many of MUJI and IKEA products appear remarkably similar— functional, simple, honest, and ornament-free “tools for living.”39 However, the marketing and consumption of the two brands emphasize their essential differences through reference to widely held stereotypes of Swedish and Japanese design. Mundane objects are imbued with the humane spirit of Scandinavian modernism or the Zen-like purity and humility of traditional Japan. The distinctive lifestyle marketing employed by both IKEA and MUJI has its roots in 1960s lifestyle brands such as Terrance Conran’s Habitat. Launched in London in 1964, Habitat framed individual products within a coherent ensemble, or “total design,” that extended from its retail stores to its advertising and catalogues.40 Stimulated by a desirable lifestyle rather than individual products, the “Habitat Man” of the 1960s understood consumption as a pleasurable activity rather than a rational decision-making process: “For Habitat Man the shop is not a schoolroom but a theatre, a place where fantasies are played out and identities taken on and discarded with each new set of commodities.”41 This theatrical framing of a desirable lifestyle within a coherent ensemble was successfully adopted by both IKEA and MUJI, although in slightly different ways. Through their emphasis on reductive forms, honest design that clearly expresses a useful function, and restrained decoration, neither brand emphasizes

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the talents of any individual designer. Instead, both rely on the intangible aura of national design genius and idealized traditions. For non-Swedish and non-Japanese consumers, traditional Japan and Sweden are constantly evoked in nostalgic, largely imaginary visions of their respective cultures. Everyday objects are veiled with not only the authority of Swedish and Japanese design traditions, but also the values associated with progressive Swedish social democracy and the humble simplicity of traditional Japanese culture. But MUJI’s “total design” is possibly even more holistic than IKEA’s, due to a close collaboration between product, communication, and interior design. In addition to the products, advertisements, and catalogues, MUJI’s global stores confirm the brand’s aesthetic ideal through their raw materials, minimalist aesthetic and meticulous ordering. Maintaining both a distinctive, designer aura and an everyday, useful one has been the delicate balancing act of MUJI’s designers across various disciplines. As Holloway and Hones argue: “essential to the presentation and identification of the Muji brand is the existence of a set of display spaces that share a unified aesthetic, in which the border between the shop-floor space and catalogue space is relatively unmarked.”42 Like Habitat’s 1960s designer lifestyle, MUJI’s twenty-first-century designer lifestyle is expressed via a seamless aesthetic experience. IKEA maintains a similar seamless aesthetic across its products, advertisements, and catalogues, but its retail experience diverges from MUJI’s. IKEA’s global stores are not simply furniture showrooms, but have become complete destinations, including a restaurant and childcare facilities. While a MUJI store emphasizes the compact, organized aspect of a minimalist lifestyle, IKEA’s larger stores house a more expansive variety of domestic tableaux populated by IKEA’s equipment for living. However, in Japan, MUJI have extended their lifestyle experience beyond retail stores by creating a prefabricated MUJI House, a MUJI campground (for a MUJI vacation experience), and a limited edition MUJI automobile (a collaboration with Nissan). Even more than IKEA, the holistic nature of MUJI’s lifestyle design goes beyond products or images, encouraging consumers to buy into an ethical stance and an experience. Although MUJI promote their elimination of waste and sustainable principles, it is difficult for consumers to find out about MUJI’s production or distribution systems other than the facts that they do source materials globally and at least some of their products (particularly the clothing) are manufactured in China. Like IKEA, MUJI promote their products as “sustainable” but it is impossible for consumers to know where their materials are sourced, or where and under what conditions their products are manufactured. For both brands, the image of a sustainable corporation and of sustainable products may be ultimately

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more important than explaining contemporary systems of production and consumption. This emphasis on image is crucial to both IKEA and MUJI, and is certainly important in suppressing further thought about the origins of their products and the purpose of their designer experiences. The systems and processes at work behind the scenes remain obscured by the disciplining action of aesthetic ordering.43 Despite their differences, IKEA and MUJI are founded on images of an ideal life of unified perfection, a coherent lifestyle that functions to allay contemporary anxieties surrounding order, cleanliness, and purity. The globalized modern design of IKEA and MUJI also highlights a disturbing distain for local culture, history, and individual creativity. Certainly outside of Japan, MUJI products became a badge of distinction for a cosmopolitan middle class whose taste for modernist minimalism was imbued with a moral, even spiritual, value. Architect Tadao Ando stated: “MUJI’s succinct design reveals a Japanese aesthetic, which values sustaining simplicity by completely discarding all worthless decoration.”44 MUJI consistently confirms an image of traditional Japanese design and culture as saturated with a Zen spirit of serenity and purity. Lastly, and somewhat unusually for a global brand, MUJI have engaged in user-generated designs for new products. In the early twenty-first century, MUJI began crowdsourcing product ideas, with the first, Floor Sofa, going into production in 2002. The Floor Sofa was a large cushion (without legs) that adjusts to an individual’s body shape. After early success with user-generated designs, MUJI developed a more systematic approach. Via their website, consumers were invited to participate in designing new products based on themes proposed by MUJI’s in-house design team. Users then comment on the ideas and develop them further until one chosen to go into production by MUJI. Active involvement by a community of consumers in designing products— or at least generating ideas—seems to challenge the role of the designer. In fact, in a study of MUJI’s user-generated versus their designer-generated furniture, researchers concluded “that user-generated products systematically and substantially outperform their designer-generated counterparts in terms of key market performance metrics.”45 However, they also noted that designers’ technical, material, and production knowledge was essential in the process; thus they were unlikely to be completely displaced by user-generated designing. The unified aesthetic also needs careful management from within to ensure coherence and consistency, but MUJI’s design model certainly appears to be challenging stereotypes about design.

Conclusion

In 2008, China’s news media officially acknowledged the phenomenon known as Shanzhai.1 Translated as “mountain stronghold,” Shanzhai conjured up images of bandits outside of official authority, but quickly became shorthand for “fake” or “imitation” products and the culture that spawned them.2 In Shenzhen and surrounding cities around the Pearl River Delta, tiny Shanzhai workshops with specialization in manufacturing, design, software, and electronic engineering were producing imitations of Apple, Nokia, and Motorola mobile phones and other electronic devices. With little financial capital, Shanzhai workshops utilized local expertise, machinery, and lax intellectual property laws to produce imitations of the latest phones, digital devices, and watches. Importantly, these replicas were sold at a fraction of the cost of the “real” brands, leading some commentators to refer to Shanzhai as “working class ICT.”3 As one of China’s original Special Economic Zones, Shenzhen was the experimental ground of the Chinese Communist Party’s integration into global capitalism. Beginning in the 1980s, Shenzhen’s many official factories manufactured high-tech products and fashion designed in Europe, the United States, or Japan. As well as official production, a local culture of copying expensive foreign brands, including “designer” fashion and DVD, CD, and MP3 players, began at this time. But the burgeoning Shanzhai culture changed around 2006 due to two factors: the availability of a Taiwanese-designed chipset that simplified the production of digital electronics, and distribution via the internet. Mobile phones—particularly smartphones—became the most popular and infamous model of Shanzhai. By 2008, China produced over 60 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion mobile phones per year.4 Shadowing this “official” production, Shanzhai producers began to modify the design of foreign brands to suit local conditions and new markets. This included, for example, designing phones with longer-life batteries, larger buttons, enhanced speakers, better cameras, dual operating systems,

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or dual SIM card slots. Shanzhai designers could mix and match features from phones designed by Nokia, Samsung, or Apple to create an “enhanced” version that sold for less than half the price. Importantly, some Shanzhai phones were not simply imitations but improvements upon the original designs. In 2009, more than 200,000 people in the Pearl River Delta were producing millions of Shanzhai phones, and supplying 20–30 percent of the Chinese market.5 With internet distribution, production increased as Shanzhai phones were exported to Africa and South America. A few notable features of the recent Shanzhai phenomenon are worth further reflection. First, while China is still regarded by many as the world’s “factory,” Shanzhai suggests a rapidly growing culture of innovation. Furthermore, the hacker culture of Shanzhai produced design innovation “from a community, not an individual,” without any recognition of professional designers.6 Its production model, comprising thousands of small factories operating with the government’s “tacit consent,” was at once particular to its Shenzhen locality but also global in its sources and distribution.7 Finally, the “bandit” character of Shanzhai design and production flouted global intellectual property regulations, state certification, and tax laws, as well as environmental and safety standards. In some ways, Shanzhai returns us to the beginning of Modern Asian Design. Reversing the flows in which British imitation of Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles helped fuel an industrial revolution in Britain, Shanzhai might help fuel a digital revolution in twenty-first-century China. The question of how a product such as a Shanzhai phone constitutes “modern Asian design” also leads us back to issues that arose in previous chapters. On the surface, a Shanzhai imitation is indistinguishable from an Apple phone that was designed in California. Indeed, its production methods and materials are the same. However, the circumstances under which each was conceived, mediated, distributed, and consumed distinguish the two. In this case, a design historical search for the cultural identity—Chinese or American—of each phone or its designer seems futile.

Design history and modern Asian design While Shanzhai raises numerous issues for contemporary designers, the historical material of Modern Asian Design raises at least five major issues for design historians. The first underlying and nagging issue that kept returning to me while thinking through this material was a question: is design history inherently Eurocentric? If it is, modern Asian design must necessarily follow developments in Europe and the United States. Thus, Shanzhai, for example, is exemplary of China’s lack of a design culture—Asians are condemned to imitate, as they are incapable

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of “original” or innovative design. I hope, if nothing else, that this book proved this perspective to be false. Better still, I hope Modern Asian Design has some impact in displacing Europe and the United States from design history’s center. The second issue is that humans have inhabited a connected globe for centuries, certainly since before the advent of modernity. Thus, to understand modern design, a global perspective is essential. From the mid-nineteenth century, the accelerating flows of objects, people, and ideas around the planet was a defining feature of modern life. The natural recourse to national boundaries—as in “British design” or “Indian design”—is not only limiting but exacerbates a search for national traditions, characteristics, or traits. To attain a truly global dimension, design history needs new models of the complex flows that contribute to the creation, distribution, mediation, and consumption of designed objects and systems. The “paths” to modernity charted in this book are one possibility for a comprehensive, yet inclusive, new historical model. Related to this global dimension, the third issue is the impact of colonialism. From the mid-nineteenth century to at least the 1950s, colonialism was a significant force in shaping life in Asia, Africa, and South America. It was also a crucial force in shaping European industrialization.8 For design historians, serious consideration of colonialism requires rethinking the foundations of both non-European design and European design. On the one hand, this entails critically addressing the transfer of technologies, techniques, and systems to the colonies as well as their impact on existing traditions and conditions. On the other hand, it entails critically addressing the transfer of aesthetics, materials, labor, and processes from the colonies and their impact on design and industrialization in Europe. The fourth issue, stemming from the global and colonial perspectives, is a better understanding of the nuances of modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In many examples in this book, design in Asia was characterized by its hybrid nature—modern products manufactured using traditional methods, for example, or traditional products manufactured using modern materials—or any of the many permutations between the simplistic terms “modern” and “traditional.” Again, this entails moving beyond European modernism as a central focus of design history and redefining “modern design.” The fifth issue involves expanding design history’s scope of inquiry. Many of the cases in this book required thinking beyond individuals to consider how workshops, corporations, or communities designed products and systems. As we saw in numerous examples, design is rarely an individual activity. In terms of transformations brought about by modern design in Asia, questions such as how modern products changed traditional practices or how they were modified

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or adapted to local contexts seem more pertinent than documenting the name of a designer or a date when they were first manufactured. However, a single study cannot comprehensively account for the totality of modern design in Asia, and many countries and cultures are completely absent from Modern Asian Design. Another regrettable absence is the scant documentation of women, particularly as producers of designed objects. These absences are important, and the limited collection of case studies of this book are intended to provide an overview or guide rather than a complete account of the field. I intended the “pathways to modernity” model as open enough such that future scholars might add additional detail in order to achieve a more comprehensive picture of modern Asian design. Finally, in Europe and the United States, Asian culture is still associated with tradition, and still perceived as the opposite of modern, “Western” culture. Asian objects that became canonical in museums such the V&A or MoMA, for example, are not necessarily the ones that had a significant impact on everyday life, but those that expressed certain ideals and confirmed existing stereotypes.9 I hope that the many modern and hybrid objects, buildings, systems, and designers discussed in this book can further a re-evaluation of what constitutes the history of Asian design.

Notes

Introduction 1. Anil Sood, Ashok Sharma, and Harinder S. Kohli, Asia 2050: Realizing the Asian Century, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2011, p. 21. Chapter 1 charts the steady rise of Asian economies to 28 percent of global GDP in 2010. 2. Wang Hui provides a good summary of both the historical use and current debates around this term in Wang Hui, “The Idea of Asia and Its Ambiguities,” Journal of Asian Studies, 69:4, 2010, pp. 985–989. 3. In this sense, “Asian,” if it has any meaning, emerges from European colonialization. However, by the early twentieth century, Asian intellectuals such as Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, Japanese art historian Okakura Tenshin, and Chinese political leader Sun Yat-Sen were involved in attempts to define an Asian collective identity or set of values opposed to European ones. 4. Here, I am following historian C.A. Bayly’s strategy in The Birth of the Modern World, a history that “relativizes the ‘revolution of modernity’ by showing that many different agencies and ideologies across the world empowered it in different ways and at different times. Thus old-style Chinese family firms were as important as the gentlemanly capitalists of Hamburg or New York in bringing about the expansion of world trade in the China seas and Southeast Asia.” C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, p. 12. 5. My doctorate, completed in 2003, focused on design in Hong Kong and I continued a focus on Asian design in research and teaching material that formed the basis for this book. I am aware of and acknowledge up front the limitations of conducting such research from the perspective of an academic on the margins of Asia. 6. See D.J. Huppatz, “Globalizing Design History and Global Design History,” Journal of Design History, 28:2, 2015, pp. 182–202. 7. On this wider range of interests and approaches, see, for example, Grace LeesMaffei, “The Production-Consumption-Mediation Paradigm,” Journal of Design History, 22:4, 2009, pp. 351–376. 8. Various scholars have made this point. See, for example, Clive Dilnot, “The State of Design History, Part I,” Design Issues, 1:1, 1984, esp. pp. 14–17; Tony Fry, Design History Australia, Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1988; and Denise Whitehouse, “The State of Design History as a Discipline,” in Hazel Clark and David Brody, eds., Design Studies: A Reader, Oxford: Berg, 2009.

214 Notes

9. On “diffusionism,” J.M. Blaut explains: “Europe eternally advances, progresses, modernizes. The rest of the world advances more sluggishly, or stagnates: it is ‘traditional society.’” J.M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History, New York: Guilford Press, 1993, p. 1. For the relationship to design and its history, see Huppatz, “Globalizing Design History and Global Design History.” 10. Beginning in Barcelona in 1999, the biannual International Conference on Design History and Design Studies has uncovered a wealth of local and regional design histories that challenge the long-accepted European canon. 11. Anna Calvera, “Local, Regional, National, Global and Feedback,” Journal of Design History, 18:4, 2005, p. 372. 12. Victor Margolin, World History of Design, Volumes 1 and 2, London: Bloomsbury, 2015; Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber, eds., History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400–2000, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013. 13. Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello, and Sarah Teasley, “Introduction: Towards Global Design History,” in Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley, eds., Global Design History, London and New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 2. 14. Yuko Kikuchi and Yunah Lee, “Transnational Modern Design Histories in East Asia: An Introduction,” Journal of Design History, 27:4, 2014, pp. 323–334. 15. “Scandinavian design” has long been a convenient regional grouping. For recent scholarship and problems with this grouping, see Kjetil Fallan, ed., Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories, Oxford: Berg, 2012. On the limitations of nation-based design history, see D.J. Huppatz, “Introduction: Reframing Australian Design History,” Journal of Design History, 27:2, 2014, pp. 205–223. 16. An early design historical overview in English was Penny Sparke, Modern Japanese Design, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1987. 17. Yuko Kikuchi, Yunah Lee and Wendy S. Wong, “Design Histories and Design Studies in East Asia: Conclusion,” Journal of Design History, 25:1, 2012, p. 99. 18. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things; Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. 19. See, for example, Victor Buchli, ed., The Material Culture Reader, Oxford: Berg, 2010; and Anne Gerritson and Giorgio Riello, eds., Writing Material Culture History, London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 20. See Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991; Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368–1644, London: Reaktion Books, 2007; Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce

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and Culture in Ming China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 21. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 22. Kjetil Fallan, Design History: Understanding Theory and Method, Oxford: Berg, 2010, viii. 23. For a good overview, see Anne Gerritson and Giorgio Riello, “Introduction: The Global Lives of Things, Material Culture in the First Global Age,” in Gerritsen and Riello, eds., The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, New York: Routledge, 2015.

Chapter 1 1. Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010, p. 49. 2. François Xavier d’Entrecolles, “Letter to Father Orry, Procurer of the Chinese and Indian Missions, Raozhou, 1st of September, 1712,” trans. by Jan-Erik Nilsson, online: http://gotheborg.com/letters/letters_first.shtml (accessed December 17, 2016). 3. Anne Gerritsen, “Ceramics for Local and Global Markets: Jingdezhen’s Agora of Technologies,” in Dagmar Schafer, ed., Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012, p. 180. 4. Michael Dillon, “Transport and Marketing in the Development of the Jingdezhen Porcelain Industry during the Ming and Qing Dynasties,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 35:3, 1992, pp. 278–290. 5. See Finlay, The Pilgrim Art, pp. 26–32. 6. Chu Yen in Tang Ying’s Twenty Illustrations of the Manufacture of Porcelain. Imperial superintendent at Jingdezhen from 1728 to 1756, Tang Ying was well known for his painting, poetry, calligraphy, and porcelain. For disputes over the authorship of this document, see Percival David, “The T’ao Shuo and ‘The Illustrations of Pottery Manufacture,’” Artibus Asiae,1949, 12:3, pp. 165–183. 7. Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 1. 8. Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, p. 85. 9. Fang Zhuofen, Hu Tiewen, Jian Rui, and Fang Xing, “The Porcelain Industry of Jingdezhen,” Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming, eds., Chinese Capitalism, 1522–1840 Basingstoke, Hampshire: MacMillan, 2000, pp. 322–323. 10. It was similar to France’s royal manufactories at this time. Thanks to Kjetil Fallan for pointing out this comparison. 11. Finlay, The Pilgrim Art, p. 23. 12. Quoted in Rose Kerr, “Asia in Europe: Porcelain and Enamel for the West,” in Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, eds., Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe,

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1500–1800, London: V&A Publications, 2004, p. 231. The original is titled Jingdezhen Taolu (an account of ceramic production at Jingdezhen, 1815). Interestingly, European and other foreign commissions had little impact on local design and consumption. 13. He Li, Chinese Ceramics: The New Standard Guide, London: Thames and Hudson, 1996, p. 264. 14. Historian Rose Kerr writes, “Some porcelain designers worked in the Imperial Household Department while others were court painting craftsmen. Samples were made, inspected and approved, and then were put into mass production.” From Rose Kerr, ed., Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China, Volume 5, “Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part XII: Ceramic Technology,” written by Rose Kerr and Nigel Wood with Ts’ai Mei-Fen and Zhang Fukang, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 207. This is the most comprehensive volume (over 900 pages) on ceramic technology in China. 15. For detailed information on orders, samples, and drawings provided by VOC agents, see C.J.A. Jörg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982, pp. 94–112. 16. Tros lived in Canton from 1784. See Jörg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade, p. 111. 17. Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368–1644, London: Reaktion Books, 2007, p. 82. 18. Only recently, a “material culture” approach to porcelain has emerged. Rather than cataloguing styles, establishing authenticity or precise dates, the new approach examines what porcelain meant in various contexts and how it was used. See Finlay’s article, “The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History,” Journal of World History, 9:2, 1998, pp. 141–187, and the University of Warwick research project, “Global Jingdezhen: Local Manufactures and Early Modern Global Connections,” some articles from which were collected in a special edition of Journal of World History, 23:1, 2012. 19. For details, see C.J.A. Jörg, The Geldermalsen: History and Porcelain, Groningen: Kemper, 1986. 20. Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, p. 94. 21. Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, p. 97. 22. Finlay, The Pilgrim Art, p. 168. Interestingly, porcelain accounted for only 5 percent of VOC shipments, but generated large profits. 23. Finlay, The Pilgrim Art, p. 60. 24. See, for example, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, London: Europa, 1982. 25. Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, “Spaces of Global Interactions: The Material Landscapes of Global History,” in Anne Gerritson and Giorgio Riello, eds., Writing Material Culture History, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, p. 112. 26. Stacey Sloboda defines Chinoiserie as “a fashion strongly associated with a taste for imported goods, which intermingled popular Chinese and European iconography

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into a style that . . . signified the collusion of economic and aesthetic interests in the increasingly international, commercial culture of eighteenth-century Britain.” Stacey Sloboda, Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014, p. 2. 27. It even included an accompanying (but invented) Chinese “legend.” For a detailed analysis of the literature of the Willow Pattern in nineteenth-century Britain, see Patricia O’Hara, “‘The Willow Pattern That We Knew’: The Victorian Literature of Blue Willow,” Victorian Studies, 1993, pp. 421–442. 28. Glenn Adamson, “Rethinking the Arcanum: Porcelain, Secrecy, and the EighteenthCentury Culture of Invention,” in Alden Cavanaugh and Michael E. Yonan, eds., The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010, p. 9. 29. Finlay, The Pilgrim Art, p. 182. 30. See Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds, New York: Norton and Co., 1998. 31. This is a translation of the Chinese phrase jia hui yuanren fuyu siyi. John Lee, “Trade and Economy in Preindustrial East Asia, c.1500–1800: East Asia in the Age of Global Integration,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 58:1, 1999, pp. 16–17. 32. These last two points are from John Lee, “Trade and Economy in Preindustrial East Asia, c.1500–1800,” pp. 2–26. In this attitude to foreign trade, the Qing emperors were similar to the Tokugawa in Japan in restricting trade to a single port. 33. Jörg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade, p. 112. 34. According to Fang Zhuofen, Hu Tiewen, Jian Rui, and Fang Xing, “The Porcelain Industry of Jingdezhen,” pp. 308–326. Fang Zhuofen, Hu Tiewen, Jian Rui, and Fang Xing, “After the Opium War,” they write, “the importation of foreign porcelain had little effect on the industry. Jingdezhen declined to some extent, but capitalist relations increased. Kiln owners began to hire labour directly and their enterprises took on the character of manufactories,” p. 421. 35. For more detail on this era, see Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, esp. chapter 1: “India in the Indian Ocean Trade, Circa 1500,” pp. 8–22. 36. John Guy, Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East, London: Thames and Hudson, 1998, p. 7. 37. Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India, pp. 91–93. West Africa, where Europeans traded textiles for slaves, was another new market. 38. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, “Introduction,” in How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009, p. 6. 39. For more detail on the technology, see Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Cotton Textiles in the Indian Subcontinent, 1200–1800,” in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 17–41. 40. Rosemary Crill, Chintz: Indian Textiles for the West, London: V&A Publishing, 2008, pp. 12–13.

218 Notes

41. Georges Roques, “Printing on Cotton at Ahmedabad, India in 1678,” trans. by Paul R. Schwartz, Ahmedabad: Calico Museum of Textiles, Museum Monograph No. 1, 1969, p. 6. 42. K.N. Chaudhuri, “The Structure of the Indian Textile Industry,” in Tirthankar Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce: Textiles in Colonial India, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1996, p. 59. 43. For more detailed figures, see Anthony Reid, “Southeast Asian Consumption of Indian and British Cotton Cloth, 1600–1850,” in Tirthankar and Riello, eds., How India Clothed the World, pp. 36–37. Guy also makes this point in Guy, Woven Cargoes, p. 68. 44. Reid, “Southeast Asian Consumption of Indian and British Cotton Cloth, 1600–1850,” p. 33. 45. Pedro Machado, “Cloths of a New Fashion: Indian Ocean Networks of Exchange and Cloth Zones of Contact in Africa and India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Roy Tirthankar and Giorgio Riello, eds., How India Clothed the World, p. 68. 46. For details on the various legislations against Indian textiles, see Beverly Lemire, “Fashioning Cottons: Asian Trade, Domestic Industry and Consumer Demand, 1660–1780,” in Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil, eds., The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge, 2010, p. 202. 47. John Guy, “‘One Thing Leads to Another’: Indian Textiles and the Early Globalization of Style,” in Amelia Peck, ed., Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500– 1800, New York: The Metropolitan Museum, 2013, p. 27. 48. John Styles, “Fashion, Textiles and the Origins of the Industrial Revolution,” The East Asian Journal of British History, 5, 2016, p. 188. 49. Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750, London: Thames and Hudson, 1985, pp. 44–47. 50. See Reid, “Southeast Asian Consumption of Indian and British Cotton Cloth, 1600– 1850,” pp. 45–46. 51. See Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Trade and Poverty: When the Third World Fell Behind,” in Riello and Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World, pp. 98–99. Rather than textiles, opium, raw cotton, raw silk, and tea became India’s major exports. 52. See Prasannan Parthasarathi and Ian Wendt, “Decline in Three Keys: Indian Cotton Manufacturing from the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Riello and Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World, pp. 397–407. 53. Mahatma Gandhi quoted Lisa Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007, p. 1. This is explored further in Chapter 3. 54. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. 55. The most prominent theorists are Kenneth Pomeranz, Prasannan Parthasarathi, and Gunther Frank. The key texts are: Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 2000; Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley: University of

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California Press, 1998; Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 56. Adapted from Paul Bairoch, “International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980,” Journal of European Economic History, 11:1 & 2, 1982, Table 10, Relative Shares of Different Countries and Regions in Total World Manufacturing Output, p. 296. 57. See, for example, Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings on the Rise of the West, trans. Stephen Kalberg, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 and Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 58. Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not, pp. 10–13. 59. Karl Marx, for example, wrote in 1853 that India “has remained unaltered since its remotest antiquity.” Marx, “The British Rule in India,” New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853. 60. Maxine Berg, “Useful Knowledge, ‘Industrial Enlightenment,’ and the Place of India,” Journal of Global History, 8:1, 2013, p. 118. See also Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain, 2nd edition, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 76–88. 61. See Riello, “The Indian Apprenticeship: The Trade of Indian Textiles and the Making of European Cottons,” in Giorgio Riello, Tirthankar Roy, Om Prakash and Kaoru Sugihara,eds., How India Clothed the World, pp. 307–346. 62. Giorgio Riello, “Asian knowledge . . .,” Journal of Global History, 5:1, 2010, p. 27. 63. See Beverley Lemire and Giorgio Riello, “East and West: Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Social History, 41:4, 2008, pp. 887–916. 64. See the concise summary of the “Modern Movement” in Paul Greenhalgh, “Introduction,” in Paul Greenhalgh, ed., Modernism in Design, London: Reaktion Books, 1990, pp. 1–25.

Chapter 2 1. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan: From the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 5. This is an excellent overview of the history of technology in Japan. 2. Lee, “Trade and Economy in Preindustrial East Asia, c.1500–c.1800,” p. 7. The Dutch, for example, were allowed to reside only on a tiny island in Nagasaki harbor. 3. See Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan, especially chapter 1, “The Level of Physical Well-Being in Tokugawa Japan,” pp. 1–24. She notes that comparative studies are only estimates, given the relative differences and the lack of quantitative data from Japan. Morris-Suzuki adds that the Tokugawa period was “a period of quite rapid development and diffusion of techniques within Japan’s main craft industries.” Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan, p. 5. Edo was a metropolis of over one million people—large by world standards—and Osaka comprised half a million people.

220 Notes

4. For a good biographical account of the new emperor and the changes in Japan, see Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 5. See Doshin Sato, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State, trans. by Hiroshi Nara, Los Angeles: Getty Institute, 2011, pp. 48–50, on the shifts in the administration of this policy, including details on the persons and ministries involved. 6. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “The Invention and Reinvention of ‘Japanese Culture,’” The Journal of Asian Studies, 54:3, 1995, p. 762. 7. See Russell Meade, “Translating Technology in Japan’s Meiji Enlightenment, 1870– 1879,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society, 9, 2015, pp. 253–274. 8. Much of the information on Japanese railways is adopted from Dan Free, Early Japanese Railways, 1853–1914: Engineering Triumphs That Transformed MeijiEra Japan, North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2008. In England, steam power engines, initially used for mining, were applied to commercial and passenger use when the 1830 railway line from Liverpool to Manchester began. 9. Free, Early Japanese Railways, p. 101. 10. Free, Early Japanese Railways, p. 132. 11. See Steven J. Ericson, “Taming the Iron Horse: Western Locomotive Makers and Technology Transfer in Japan, 1870–1914,” in Gail Lee Bernstein, Andrew Gordon and Kate Wildman Nakai, eds., Public Spheres, Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600–1950, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 185–217. 12. Even in Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century, locomotives were not mass-produced but customized versions of standard designs. Constant technological improvement and fluctuating demand meant they were only ever produced in small batches. Ericson, “Taming the Iron Horse,” p. 214. 13. This new nationalization was a process forcibly imposed on minorities such as people of the Ryūkyū archipelago (with traditional ties to both China and Japan) and the Ainu people of Hokkaidō and the northern islands. See Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. 14. Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan, p. 73. 15. Dallas Finn, Meiji Revisited: The Sites of Victorian Japan, New York: Weatherhill, 1995, p. 46. 16. Yoshinori Amagai, “The Kobu Bijutsu Gakko and the Beginning of Design Education in Modern Japan,” Design Issues, 19:2, 2003, p. 43. 17. Sato, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State, p. 118. Other new terms also came into use such as sōshoku for “decoration.” 18. Fujita Haruhiko, “Notomi Kaijiro: An Industrial Art Pioneer and the First Design Educator of Modern Japan,” Design Issues, 17:2, 2001, pp. 17–31. 19. Quoted in Haruhiko, “Notomi Kaijiro. . .,” p. 28. 20. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan, pp. 22–23. 21. See Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan, chapter 3.

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22. For more details on these changes, see Tajiki, “Meiji Crafts, Section one,” in Uteno Naoteru, ed., Japanese Arts and Crafts in the Meiji Era, English adaption by Richard Lane, Tokyo: Pan-Pacific Press, 1958 pp. 107–138. 23. Nakagawa Sensaku, “Meiji Crafts, Section two,” in Naoteru, ed., Japanese Arts and Crafts in the Meiji Era, p. 151. 24. Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan, p. 101. 25. Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan, p. 103. 26. Wagener lived and worked in Japan from 1868 to his death in 1892. 27. Figures taken from Sato, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State, p. 115. It is worth noting that accessible public transport contributed to the growth in visitor numbers over this period. 28. Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan, p. 90. 29. Eiichi Tosaki, “Prelude to the Birth of Wayo-Secchu (Japanese Hybrid Style) in Japanese Early Modern Architecture,” Fabrications, 13:2, 2004, p. 13. 30. Jonathan M. Reynolds, “The Formation of a Japanese Architecture Profession,” in Melinda Takeuchi, ed., The Artist as Professional in Japan, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004, p. 184. See also Ariyuki Kondo, “Creativity within a Geographical-National Framework: From Modern Japanese Design to Pevsner’s Art Geography,” in Kjetil Fallan and Grace Lees-Maffei, eds., Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016, pp. 93–107. 31. A good account of Meiji architecture is Finn, Meiji Revisited, 1995. 32. Biographical information from: Ian Ruxton, “Tatsuno Kingo (1854–1919): ‘A Leading Architect’ of the Meiji Era,” in Hugh Cortazzi, ed., Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, London: Japan Society, 2010, pp. 443–455. His European trip was in 1882–83. Interestingly, Ariyuki Kondo notes “what most captured Tatsuno’s attention while he was studying in Britain seems to have been the issue of national style.” Kondo goes on to discuss the issues of national style in Tatsuno’s later architecture in Japan. See Kondo, “Creativity within a Geographical-National Framework,” p. 96. 33. In domestic interiors, Wayo-Secchu “refers to the unintentional result in which two disparate systems operate in tandem.” Tosaki, “Prelude to the Birth of Wayo-Secchu (Japanese Hybrid Style) in Japanese Early Modern Architecture,” p. 7. 34. Jukichi Inoue, Home Life in Tokyo, Tokyo: Tokyo Printing Company, 1910, pp. 41–42. 35. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan, p. 25. 36. It was not until six years later, in 1888, that Chulalongkorn officially began using the Gregorian calendar. 37. Chulalongkorn, in Bangkok Centennial, Bangkok, Siam, 1882, p. 32. This centennial commemorative pamphlet, a collection of proclamations, speeches, and newspaper notices translated into English, is available online: https://archive.org/details/ bangkokcentennia00cent (accessed December 17, 2016). A few years prior to the National Exhibition, the king sent a Siamese exhibit to the 1876 American Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.

222 Notes

38. The best accounts of the architecture of Chulalongkorn’s reign are Pirasri Povatong, “Building Siwilai: Transformation of Architecture and Architectural Practice in Siam during the Reign of Rama V, 1868–1910,” PhD Thesis, University of Michigan, Department of Architecture, 2011; and Koompong Noobanjong, “Power, Identity, and the Rise of Modern Architecture: From Siam to Thailand,” PhD Thesis, University of Colorado, Denver, Design and Planning, 2003. 39. See Koompong Noobanjong’s detailed analysis in “Tales from the Throne Hall: The Chakri Maha Prasat Unveiled,” Journal of Industrial Education (journal in Thai, article in English), pp. 37–44. 40. The Argus, Melbourne, Tuesday April 11, 1882, p. 5 (a report from their London correspondent). 41. “Mr Bock” (presumably explorer Carl Bock), a visitor to the palace, quoted in George B. Bacon, ed., Siam, the Land of the White Elephant: As It Was and Is, New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1893, p. 282. 42. Chulalongkorn studied with Anna Harriette Leonowens, the English governess whose account The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) was later fictionalized in Margaret Landon’s best-seller Anna and the King of Siam (1944) and made into the popular Rogers and Hammerstein musical The King and I (1951). 43. Michael Herzfeld, “The Conceptual Allure of the West: Dilemmas and Ambiguities of Crypto-Colonialism in Thailand,” in Rachel V. Harrison and Peter A. Jackson, eds., The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010, p. 173. See also Peter A. Jackson, “Autonomy and Subordination in Thai History: The Case for Semicolonial Analysis,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 8:2, 2007, pp. 329–348. 44. Maurizio Peleggi, Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002, p. 6. 45. See Thongchai Winichakul, “The Quest for “‘Siwilai’: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Thinking in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Siam,” Journal of Asian Studies, 59:3, 2000, pp. 528–549. 46. Peleggi, Lords of Things, p. 24. 47. Pattana Kitiarsa, “An Ambiguous Intimacy: Farang as Siamese Occidentialism,” In Harrison and Jackson, eds., The Ambiguous Allure of the West, p. 68. 48. Known collectively as the Chakri Reformation. See Peleggi, Lords of Things, and Harrison and Jackson, eds., The Ambiguous Allure of the West. 49. Chulalongkorn actively encouraged a personality cult around the monarch, see Peleggi, Lords of Things. 50. This reading is borrowed from an article by Noobanjong, “Tales from the Throne Hall,” p. 41. 51. The case of Japan is analyzed further in Chapter 3. 52. John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XVIII—Essays on Politics and Society Part I, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Alexander Brady,

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London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977, p. 120. Following in his father’s footsteps, Mill worked for the East India Company for over twenty years. 53. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 58. 54. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, Revised Edition, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000, p. 5. 55. See Brett Bowden, The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, especially chapter 3, “Civilization and the Idea of Progress,” pp. 47–75. 56. Peleggi, Lords of Things, p. 3. 57. Stefan Hell, “The Role of European Technology, Expertise and Early Development Aid in the Modernization of Thailand before the Second World War,” Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, 6:2, 2001, p. 159. 58. Hell, “The Role of European Technology, Expertise and Early Development Aid. . .,” p. 168. 59. John Clark and Elise K. Tipton, eds., Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, Canberra: Humanities Research Foundation, 2000, p. 7. 60. See Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan, pp. 121–122. Mitsubishi, writes Morris-Suzuki, had strong ties to Westinghouse, hence the adoption of American management practices. 61. Translation from Hiroshi Kashiwagi, “On Rationalization and the National Lifestyle,” in Clark and Tipton, eds., Being Modern in Japan, p. 66. 62. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan, Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. See also Sarah Teasley, “Home-Builder or Home-Maker? Reader Presence in Articles on Home-Building in Commercial Women’s Magazines in 1920s Japan,” Journal of Design History, 18:1, 2005, pp. 81–97. 63. Hiroshi Kashiwagi, “On Rationalization and the National Lifestyle,” p. 65. 64. Hiroshi Kashiwagi, “On Rationalization and the National Lifestyle,” p. 63. 65. Hiroshi Kashiwagi, “On Rationalization and the National Lifestyle,” p. 62. 66. Hiroshi Kashiwagi, “On Rationalization and the National Lifestyle,” pp. 70–71. 67. Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan, p. 131. 68. Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan, p. 130. 69. American military expert Lucien Zacaroff, quoted in Peter C. Smith, Mitsubishi Zero: Japan’s Legendary Fighter, Barnsley: Pen and Sword Books, 2014, p. vii. Smith’s book contains comprehensive documentation of the design and development of the Zero.

Chapter 3 1. However, Ian Derbyshire argues that there were some engineering innovations developed in colonial India due to adaption to Indian conditions. See Ian Derbyshire, “The Building of India’s Railways: The Application of Western Technology in the Colonial

224 Notes

Periphery 1850–1920,” in Roy Macleod and Deepak Kumar, eds., Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India, 1700–1947, London: Sage, 1995, pp. 177–215. See also the detailed analysis by Daniel Headrick in chapter 3 “The Railways of India,” in The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 49–96. 2. Arnold writes: “Between the 1850s and 1940s, more than 14,000 locomotives were sold to India compared with barely 700 made there.” David Arnold, The New Cambridge History of India: Volume III: Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 111. 3. Saroj Ghose, “Commercial Needs and Military Necessities: The Telegraph in India,” in Macleod and Kumar, eds., Technology and the Raj, pp. 153–176. 4. See Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. 5. Arnold, The New Cambridge History of India: Volume III, p. 109. In 1870, a submarine cable connected the colony directly to Britain, tying the colonizers and colonized even closer together. 6. John Hurd and Ian J. Kerr, India’s Railway History: A Research Handbook, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012, p. 12. 7. Arnold, The New Cambridge History of India: Volume III, p. 123. 8. For a good summary of the telegraph’s role in colonial India, see Daniel Headrick, “A Double-Edged Sword: Communications and Imperial Control in British India,” Historical Social Research, 35, 2010, pp. 51–65. 9. For example, Arnold writes that “more than 90 per cent of the textile machinery for cotton and jute mills imported into India between the 1850s and 1930s came from Britain, particularly from Lancashire.” Arnold, The New Cambridge History of India: Volume III, p. 93. 10. Satpal Sangwan, “The Sinking Ship: Colonial Policy and the Decline of Indian Shipping, 1735–1835,” in Macleod and Kumar, eds., Technology and the Raj, pp. 137–152. 11. See Sashikala Ananth, The Penguin Guide to Vaastu: The Classical Indian Science of Architecture and Design, London: Penguin, 1998, and Vibhuti Chakrabarti, Indian Architectural Theory: Contemporary Uses of Vastu Vidya, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1998. 12. Scriver in Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash, Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon, Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge, 2007. Much of the work of the PWD was done by engineers rather than professional architects. 13. See Thomas R. Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire: India, 1860– 1910,” in Forging the Raj: Essays on British India in the Heyday of Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 105–139. 14. Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire,” p. 107.

Notes 225

15. In 1870, for example, the Governor of Madras, Lord Napier, argued that the government ought “to consider whether the Mussulman form might not be adopted generally as the official style of architecture.” Napier, who commissioned various public buildings in the style in Madras, believed the Saracenic (or Mussulman) style originated in Roman architecture, making a tenuous connection to Europe. See Napier, “Modern Architecture in India,” The Builder, XXVIII, August 27, 1870. 16. Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire,” p. 120. 17. Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 66–77. 18. A.S. Bhalla, Monuments, Power and Poverty in India: From Ashoka to the Raj, London: I.B. Tauris, 2015, p. 151. Bhalla notes that most students to Mayo College brought servants with them and, given they would never need to work, much of the curriculum was given over to “gentlemanly” pursuits such as athletics, cricket, polo, horse-riding, shooting, and football. 19. Peter Scriver, “Stones and Texts: The Architectural Historiography of Colonial India and its Colonial-Modern Contexts,” in Scriver and Prakash, Colonial Modernities, p. 47. The combination of modern materials and construction methods while preserving traditional crafts is what Scrivener termed the “colonial-modern.” 20. See Ken Yeang, The Architecture of Malaysia, Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 1992, especially pp. 75–91 on the Moorish or Oriental style. 21. Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, p. 36. 22. Robin D. Jones, Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity Within the Indian Subcontinent, c.1800–1947, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007, p. 79. 23. See Jones, Interiors of Empire. 24. Jones, Interiors of Empire, p. 124. 25. King, The Bungalow, p. 57. 26. Jones, Interiors of Empire, p. 141. 27. See Preeti Chopra, Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 28. Abigail S. McGowan, “‘All That Is Rare, Characteristic or Beautiful’: Design and the Defense of Tradition in Colonial India, 1851–1903,” Journal of Material Culture, 10:3, 2005, p. 264. 29. McGowan, “All That Is Rare, Characteristic or Beautiful,” p. 266. 30. See Aviva Briefel, “On the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, and Brenda M. King, Silk and Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. 31. Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886, official catalog, William Clowes and Sons, London, 1886, p. 87.

226 Notes

32. Frank Cundall, Reminiscences of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London: William Clowes, 1886, pp. 28–29. 33. T.N. Mukharji, quoted in Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007, p. 68. 34. Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001, p. 160. 35. See Mathur, India by Design, chapter 2, “‘To Visit the Queen’: On Display at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886,” pp. 52–79. 36. Parsee entrepreneur Cowasjee Nanabhoy Davar’s Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company, for example, began production in 1856 with an English-designed mill and 17,000 spindles supplied by John Hetherington and Sons of Manchester. The company opened several more mills in Bombay in the late 1850s. See W.H. Chaloner, Industry and Innovation: Selected Essays, London: Frank Cass and Company, 1990, p. 113. 37. George Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, London: Chapman and Hall, 1884 edition, p. 146. 38. Mathur, India by Design, p. 32. 39. See Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient, London: Penguin, 1991. 40. Tim Barringer, “The South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Project,” in Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds., Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, London and New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 24. 41. It is worth noting that another of Cole’s friends was John Stuart Mill, an influential theorist of “civilization,” see Chapter 2. 42. Gottfried Semper, “Science, Industry and Art,” in Gottfried Semper: The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry F. Malgrave, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 134. 43. Stacey Sloboda, “The Grammar of Ornament: Cosmopolitanism and Reform in British Design,” Journal of Design History, 21:3, 2008, p. 225. 44. See Metcalf, chapter 5, “Arts, Crafts, and Empire,” pp. 141–175. The museum committee—including Jones, Cole, Redgrave and A.W.N. Pugin—believed that the formal qualities of Indian design “illustrate correct principles of ornament, [even if they] are of rude workmanship.” From Catalogue of the Articles, 1852, quoted in Barringer, “The South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Project,” p. 13. 45. Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility, New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 27. 46. Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty, p. 4. Ultimately, argues Dutta, “South Kensington . . . advocated a preservationist stance for the ‘traditional’ modes of production and the artifacts of India.” Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty, p. 25. 47. Naazish Ata-Ullah, “Stylistic Hybridity and Colonial Art and Design Education,” in Barringer and Flynn, eds., Colonialism and the Object, p. 71. Kipling’s son was the well-known writer Rudyard Kipling.

Notes 227

48. Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty, p. 31. 49. A prominent example was the Journal of Indian Art and Industry, published from 1884 to 1917. 50. McGowan, “All That Is Rare, Characteristic or Beautiful,” p. 280. 51. Pramatha Bose, Essays and Lectures on the Industrial Development of India and Other Indian Subjects, 1880–1906, Calcutta: W. Newman and Co., 1906, p. 25. 52. Mahatma Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. by Anthony J. Parel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 42. Considered his seminal work, Gandhi originally wrote Hind Swaraj in Gujarati in 1909 and translated it into English himself. 53. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, pp. 109–110. 54. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation, p. 1. 55. On the variations of khadi, see Abigail McGowan, “Khadi Curtains and Swadeshi Bed Covers: Textiles and the Changing Possibilities of Home in Western India, 1900– 1960,” Modern Asian Studies, 50:2, pp. 518–563. 56. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation, p. 34. It is worth noting that in his 1909 lecture quoted above, Bose noted the swadeshi movement as a possible connection in the development of modern Indian industries. We will return to these ideas in Chapter 7. 57. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation, p. 72. 58. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation, p. 155. 59. Although this changed over time with Japanese migration policies—particularly in Manchukuo after 1932—the emphasis shifted to an idea of a settler colony. 60. A good overview of Japanese colonial architecture and urbanism is Yasuhiko Nishizawa, “A Study of Japanese Colonial Architecture in East Asia,” in Izumi Kuroishi, ed., Constructing the Colonized Land: Entwined Perspectives of East Asia around World War Two, London and New York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 11–42. 61. Fu writes “Japanese architectural professionals treated Taiwan as an experimental frontier for Western historical styles and building techniques”—reinforced concrete, for example. Perhaps the greatest opportunity for colonial architects and urban planners was the design of a new capital, Xinjing, for Manchukuo in the 1930s. 62. Nagano, trained at the Imperial College in Tokyo, later became the chief architect of the Bank of Japan. 63. However, the exception was Manchukuo, where some prominent government buildings incorporated some Chinese elements—typically rooves—on their exterior, this might be due to Manchukuo’s different status as a “nation” constructed via some elements of local culture and traditions. However, Yasuhiko Nishizawa also notes that in the 1930s Japanese architects in Taiwan and Korea also adopted Chinese and Korean rooves. 64. Chao-Ching Fu, “Taiwaneseness in Japanese Period Architecture in Taiwan,” in Yuko Kikuchi, ed., Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007, p. 184.

228 Notes

65. Bill Sewell, “Beans to Banners: The Evolving Architecture of Prewar Changchun,” in Laura Victoir and Victor Zatsepine, eds., Harbin to Hanoi: The Colonial Built Environment in Asia, 1840 to 1940, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013, pp. 44–45. 66. Sewell, “Beans to Banners,” p. 48. See also David D. Buck, “Railway City and National Capital: Two Faces of the Modern in Changchun,” in Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000, pp. 65–89; and a good overview of Manchukuo, Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. 67. Ayako Hotta-Lister, The Japan-British Exhibition of 1910: Gateway to the Island Empire of the East, Richmond, Surrey: The Curzon Press, 1999, pp. 1–3. This is a comprehensive source on the exhibition. 68. Ayako Hotta-Lister and Ian Nish, eds., Commerce and Culture at the 1910 JapanBritish Exhibition: Centenary Perspectives, Brill, 2012, p. 2. It is important to note that on the British side, the exhibits were not organized or funded by the government but by entrepreneur Imre Kiralfy and by British industries—so it was not as consciously curated an image as the Japanese one. 69. During the exhibition, Korea’s status officially changed from a Japanese protectorate to a colony. 70. Hotta-Lister, The Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, p. 84. 71. Yuko Kikuchi, “Refracted Colonial Modernity: Vernacularism in the Development of Modern Taiwanese Crafts,” in Kikuchi, ed., Refracted Modernity, p. 217. 72. Yuko Kikuchi, “Refracted Colonial Modernity,” p. 196. 73. Hotta-Lister, The Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, p. 121. 74. Author unknown, “Japanese Architecture,” Illustrated Carpenter and Builder, July 1, 1910, in book, p. 99. 75. Hotta-Lister, The Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, pp. 131–134. The Japanese perceptions of embarrassment of the colonial peoples was perhaps also, notes Hotta-Lister, due to Japan’s less developed imperial sense—relatively new and a less developed sense of cultural hierarchy than in Europe—see Hotta-Lister, The Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, p. 192. 76. Percival Phillips, “Treasures of 1000 Years: Wonderful Scenes of Japan in London, First Day at the Bushido,” Daily Express, May 16, 1910. In Hirokichi Mutsu, ed., The British Press and the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, Melbourne: University of Melbourne Institute of Asian Languages and Societies, 2001, p. 67. This is a facsimile edition of the four-volume original compiled by Hirokichi Mutsu in 1910–11. It is important to note that the British section of the exhibition included an “Irish village” with performances of traditional music and dance. 77. Hong Kal, Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism: Spectacle, Politics and History, London and New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 16.

Notes 229

78. Kal, Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism, p. 25. 79. Kal, Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism, p. 31. 80. See Jordan Sand, “Tropical Living and Bodily Comportment in Colonial Asia,” Positions, 21:1, 2013, pp. 96–132. Sand notes examples in the South Sea Islands and in Manchukuo, where Western-style houses contained tatami-mat rooms (see p. 109). 81. In British India and other European colonies in tropical Asia, “reclining chairs” made out of bamboo, rattan or other lightweight tropical materials were designed for colonists. Such colonial recliners were designed for lounging in the tropical heat (more elaborate variations included elongated arm and foot rests). 82. Sand, “Tropical Living and Bodily Comportment in Colonial Asia,” p. 115. 83. Here, Homi Bhabha’s concept of the hybrid—beyond traditional/modern dichotomies and idea of continual translation, assimilation, appropriation, adaptation—is a useful one. See Homi Bhabha, “By Bread Alone: Signs of Violence in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, esp. pp. 206–208. 84. In Refracted Modernity, for example, Kikuchi argues that “local color” was a key issue in developing colonial visual culture in Taiwan—as in India, tradition was defined by the colonizers. 85. Tani Barlow’s “Colonial Modernity” is a useful framework here for understanding the interrelationships between colonialism and modernization during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Tani E. Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in Asia, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997, esp. pp. 1–20.

Chapter 4 1. Reynolds, “The Formation of a Japanese Architecture Profession,” p. 182. 2. Notably, in 1912, Tatsuno designed the Bank of Korea in Seoul. 3. Translation in Amanai Daiki, “The Founding of Bunriha Kenchiku Kai: ‘Art’ and ‘Expression’ in Early Japanese Architectural Circles, 1888–1920,” Aesthetics, 13, 2009 (The Japanese Society for Aesthetics), p. 239. 4. From Jonathan M. Reynolds, “The Bunriha and the Problem of ‘Tradition’ for Modernist Architecture in Japan, 1920–1928,” in Sharon Minichiello, ed., Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998, p. 229. 5. See Beatriz Colomina: “modern architecture becomes ‘modern’ not simply by using glass, steel or reinforced concrete, as is usually understood, but precisely by engaging with the new mechanical equipment of the mass media: photography, film, advertising, publicity, publications, and so on.” Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, p. 73. 6. See, for example, the English translation of Horiguchi Sutemi’s “‘Japanese Taste’ in Modern Architecture,” translated by Robin Thompson in Art in Translation, 4:4, 2012,

230 Notes

pp. 407–434. Original article published in 1932. Little remains of the actual buildings of 1920s Japanese modernism, books like Oshima’s (see footnote below) rely primarily on archival materials and photographs. 7. Ken Tadashi Oshima, International Architecture in Interwar Japan: Constructing Kokusai Kenchiku, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2009, p. 44. 8. Oshima, International Architecture in Interwar Japan, p. 185. It is worth noting here that one of European modernism’s most iconic structures, Mies Van Der Rohe’s “German Pavilion,” was also a temporary structure, created for the Barcelona Exhibition in 1929. 9. Oshima, International Architecture in Interwar Japan, p. 54. 10. As Oshima argues, “He would remain a modernist, using modern building materials and abstract geometric proportions, but his paradigm was now Katsura Villa, not the Parthenon.” Oshima, International Architecture in Interwar Japan, p. 62. 11. Oshima, International Architecture in Interwar Japan, p. 99. 12. Oshima, International Architecture in Interwar Japan, p. 102. 13. For a detailed account of Maekawa’s career, see Jonathan M. Reynolds, Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 14. Gennifer Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p. 68. Weisenfeld notes that the manifesto was “most likely written by Kinoshita Shūichirō,” p. 67. 15. Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931, pp. 66–67. 16. Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931, p. 86. 17. Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931, p. 168. 18. Connections to graphic design and consumer culture noted by Weisenfeld, pp. 188–215. Book covers of Yanase Masamu, for example, employed a wide range of avant-garde techniques from 1920 to 1923. 19. See Helena Čapková, “Transnational Networkers—Iwao and Michiko Yamawaki and the Formation of Japanese Modernist Design,” Journal of Design History, 27:4, 2014, pp. 370–385. Other Japanese students who attended the Bauhaus included Tamae

ōno (who also studied textiles in Berlin in 1932–33) and Takehiko Mizutani in the 1920s. 20. Iwao Yamawaki, “Reminiscences of Dessau,” Design Issues, 2:2, 1985, pp. 59–60. 21. See Helena Čapková, “Transnational Networkers.” 22. Julia F. Andrews, “Commercial Art and China’s Modernization,” in Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, eds., A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth Century China, New York: Guggenheim Publications, 1998, p. 188. 23. Daniel Sze-Hin Ho, Graphic Design in Republican Shanghai: A Preliminary Study, master’s thesis, Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University, Montreal, 2005, p. 86. He took this figure from a Chinese book on Qian. 24. Su-Hsing Lin, “Feng Zikai’s Art and the Kaiming Book Company: Art for the People in Early Twentieth Century China,” PhD Thesis, Ohio State University, History of Art, 2003, p. 306.

Notes 231

25. Lynn Pan, Shanghai Style: Art and Design Between the Wars, San Francisco: Long River Press, 2008, p. 116. 26. Li Shutong studied at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and returned to China in 1912. He became well known as a painter and also designed posters, graphics and advertising. See Suhsing Lin, “Li Shutong and the Evolution of Graphic Arts in China,” East Asia Journal, 2:1, 2007, pp. 87–103. 27. Wei Ren, The Writer’s Art: Tao Yuanqing and the Formation of Modern Chinese Design (1900–1930), PhD Thesis, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 2015, p. 70. 28. Wu Mengfei, “Tu’anjianghua [Lectures on tu’an].” Meiyu (Aesthetic Education), 3 (1920): 85–87. Translation from Ren, The Writer’s Art. 29. See Gloria Davies, Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence, Harvard University Press, 2013, especially chapter 5, pp. 228–281. 30. Davies, Lu Xun’s Revolution, p. 250. 31. Pan, Shanghai Style, pp. 36–37. 32. See Ren, The Writer’s Art. 33. Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger argue, “The rise of the book jacket as an object of graphic design in American coincided with the definition of the field of graphic design as a profession.” Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger, By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005, p. 20. 34. Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 63. 35. Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004. 36. Ling Shiao, “Culture, Commerce and Connections: The Inner Dynamics of New Culture Publishing in the Post-May Fourth Period,” in Christopher A. Reed and Cynthia Brokaw, eds., From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, Circa 1800 to 2008, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010, p. 233. 37. Ling Shiao, “Culture, Commerce and Connections,” p. 234. 38. Lee, Shanghai Modern, p. 44. 39. See Anna Jackson, “Imagining Japan: The Victorian Perception and Acquisition of Japanese Culture,” Journal of Design History, 5:4, 1992, pp. 245–256. 40. Christopher Dresser, Principles of Victorian Decorative Design, New York: Dover Publications, 1995, p. 161. 41. Wright’s relationship with Japan is documented in detail in Kevin Nute, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan: The Role of Traditional Japanese Art and Architecture in the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright, London: Chapman and Hall, 1993. 42. Nute, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, p. 40. 43. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943, p. 196. 44. This aligned with Wright’s later “organic architecture” in which all elements of the design “grow” from the inside out to incorporate interior design, furniture, fixtures,

232 Notes

and gardens into an integrated whole. Although modern, Wright also specifically relates his “organic” architecture to Japan too: “Japanese domestic architecture was truly organic architecture,” in Frank Lloyd Wright, An Organic Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy, The Sir George Watson Lectures of the Sulgrave Manor Board for 1939, London: Lund Humphries, 1970 (first published 1939), p. 11. 45. A concise account of the lengthy commissioning, design, and troubled construction process is in Kathryn Smith, “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Imperial Hotel: A Postscript,” The Art Bulletin, 67:2, 1985, pp. 296–310. 46. Frank Lloyd Wright, “The New Imperial Hotel,” originally published in Kagaku Chishiki, 1922, in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, Volume 1, 1894–1930, New York: Rizzoli, 1992, p. 162. 47. Wright, “The New Imperial Hotel,” p. 165. 48. Wright, “The New Imperial Hotel,” p. 165. 49. Louis Sullivan in Frank Lloyd Wright, The Complete 1925 “Wendingen” Series, New York: Dover, 1992, p. 131. 50. Frank Lloyd Wright, “The New Imperial Hotel, Tokio,” originally published in The Western Architect, April 1923, in Collected Writings, p. 176. 51. Antonin and Noémi P.Raymond, “On Japanese Residences,” in Antonin Raymond: His Work in Japan, 1920–1935, preface by Elie Faure and article by A & N Raymond, Tokyo: Johan Shoin, 1936, p. 17. 52. Antonin and Raymond “On Japanese Residences,” p. 17. 53. Antonin and Raymond “On Japanese Residences,” p. 19. “Kimon” refers to the “demon gate” of Japanese folklore, and can also refer to an ominous direction. 54. Kim Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007, p. 134. 55. Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, “Authentic Japanese Architecture after Bruno Taut: The Problem of Eclecticism,” Fabrications, 11:2, 2001, p. 4. 56. Bruno Taut, Houses and People of Japan, Tokyo: Sanseido, 1937, p. 293. 57. For more details, see Charlotte Perriand, A Life of Creation: An Autobiography, New York: Montacelli Press, 2003, pp. 154–162. 58. See also Charlotte Benton, “From Tubular Steel to Bamboo: Charlotte Perriand, the Migrating ‘Chaise-longue’ and Japan,” Journal of Design History, 11:1, 1998, pp. 31–58. 59. Perriand, A Life of Creation: An Autobiography, p. 148. 60. Perriand, A Life of Creation: An Autobiography, p. 149. 61. Manfred Speidel, “Bruno Taut and the Katsura Villa,” in Virginia Ponciroli, ed., Katsura Imperial Villa, Milan: Electa, 2004, p. 319. 62. Katsumi Masaru, translation from Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty, p. 134. 63. See Yuko Kikuchi, Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory, pp. 108–109. 64. See also Peter McNeil, “Myths of Modernism: Interior Design and the West, c.1920– 1940,” Journal of Design History, 5:4, 1992, pp. 281–294.

Notes 233

Chapter 5 1. Andrew Godley, “Selling the Sewing Machine Around the World: Singer’s International Marketing Strategies, 1850–1914,” Enterprise and Society, 7:2, 2006. 2. Godley, “Selling the Sewing Machine Around the World,” p. 15. Godley suggests that by the late 1870s, Singer possibly controlled as much as 80 percent of the sewing machine market outside of the United States. 3. See Mona Domash, American Commodities in an Age of Empire, London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 81–88. 4. Formal American colonialism began in the Pacific in 1898 with the colonization of the Philippines. 5. Domash analyzes the gender implications of Singer’s advertising. Civilization, she notes, implies specifically Western gender roles modeled on a patriarchal nuclear family. See chapter 3, “The ‘Great Civilizer’ and Equalizer: Gender Race and Civilization in Singer Advertising,” American Commodities in an Age of Empire, pp. 55–94. 6. David Arnold, “Global Goods and Local Usages: The Small World of the Indian Sewing Machine, 1875–1952,” Journal of Global History, 6, 2011, p. 410. Arnold includes detailed import figures. The Singer company operated at the intersection of British colonial markets and American commercial expansion—the earliest Singers were imported from the New Jersey factory, but particularly after 1885, when a Singer factory opened in Clydebank in Scotland, they were officially “British” imports (yet retained their American design). 7. Arnold, “Global Goods and Local Usages,” p. 413. 8. Mahatma Gandhi, “A Student’s Four Questions” by Mahadev Desai in The Gandhi Reader: A Sourcebook of His Life and Writings, ed. by Homer A. Jack, New York: Grove Press, 1956, p. 176. However, Gandhi’s account of the Singer’s origins, in which “Mr Singer saw his wife laboring over the tedious process of sewing with her own hands, and simply out of his love for her he devised the sewing machine, in order to save her from unnecessary labor” were romantic at best, naive at worst, given Mr. Singer’s notorious philandering. 9. Arnold, “Global Goods and Local Usages,” p. 427. 10. Nira Wickramasinghe, Metallic Modern: Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka, New York: Berghahn Books, 2014, p. 35. 11. Raquel A. G. Reyes, “Modernizing the Manileña: Technologies of Conspicuous Consumption for the Well-To-Do-Woman, circa 1880s–1930s,” Modern Asian Studies, 46:1, 2012, p. 195. 12. Jean Gelman Taylor, “The Sewing-Machine in Colonial-Era Photographs: A Record for Dutch Indonesia,” Modern Asian Studies, 46:1, 2012, p. 91. 13. Wickramasinghe, Metallic Modern, p. 29. 14. Andrew Gordon, Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011, p. 53.

234 Notes

15. Gordon, Fabricating Consumers, p. 83. 16. Gordon, Fabricating Consumers, p. 21. 17. It is also worth noting that for some, the new machine was a laborsaving or liberating economic device; for others—particularly women and the poor—it also represented a new regime of discipline in workhouses and schools. 18. For more on the literature of Chinese medicine and pharmaceutics, see Paul Unschuld, Medicine in China: Historical Artifacts and Images, Munich: Prestel, 2000, esp. pp. 19–41. 19. Emily Baum, “Health by the Bottle: The Dr William’s Medicine Company and the Commodification of Well-Being in Liangyou,” in Paul Pickowicz, Kuiyi Shen, and Yingjin Zhang, eds., Liangyou, Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926–1945, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013, p. 75. 20. Baum, “Health by the Bottle,” p. 72. 21. Baum, “Health by the Bottle,” p. 82. 22. For more information on Huang Chujiu, see “Advertising Dreams,” chapter 3 of Sherman Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. 23. Ellen Johnson Laing, Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in EarlyTwentieth Century Shanghai, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004, p. 203. The Zhiying Studio is the subject of chapter 9 of Laing’s book. 24. Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men, p. 58. 25. Nathan Sivin, Traditional Medicine in Contemporary China, Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1987, p. 195. 26. Sam King, Tiger Balm King: The Life and Times of Aw Boon Haw, Singapore: Times Editions, 1992, p. 27. 27. Sherman Cochran, “Intra-Asian Marketing: Aw Boon-haw’s Commercial Network, 1910–1937,” in S. Sugiyama and L. Grove, eds., Commercial Networks in Modern Asia, Surrey: Curzon, 2001, p. 171. 28. King, Tiger Balm King, 30. 29. King, Tiger Balm King, 138. 30. Unschuld, Medicine in China, p. 54. 31. Unschuld, Medicine in China, pp. 54–55. 32. Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men, p. 126. 33. Cochran, “Intra-Asian Marketing,” p. 175. 34. Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men, p. 121. 35. See Ellen Laing, Selling Happiness. 36. Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men, p. 3. 37. He traveled to the United States in 1881. See Elise K. Tipton, “The Department Store: Producing Modernity in Interwar Japan,” in Roy Starrs, ed., Rethinking Japanese Modernism, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011, p. 432.

Notes 235

38. However, a local precursor also existed in Japan in the form of emporiums or bazaars included in exhibitions with numerous stalls in a single large venue displaying goods with fixed prices. Brian Moeran, “The Birth of The Japanese Department Store,” in Kerrie L. MacPherson, ed., Asian Department Stores, London and New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 144. 39. This is the term used by Crossick and Jaumain in Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1999. 40. Tomoko Tamari, “Rise of the Department Store and the Aestheticization of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth Century Tokyo,” International Journal of Japanese Sociology, 15, 2006, pp. 99–118. 41. Moeran, “The Birth of The Japanese Department Store,” p. 154. 42. Moeran, “The Birth of The Japanese Department Store,” p. 142. 43. Tipton, “The Department Store,” p. 441. 44. Moeran, “The Birth of The Japanese Department Store,” p. 150. 45. Moeran, “The Birth of The Japanese Department Store,” p. 151. 46. Tipton, “The Department Store,” p. 444. 47. However, Tipton also notes that for Japanese women at this time, retail was seen less as a career and more a temporary stage between school and marriage. See Tipton, “The Department Store,” p. 445. 48. Jeesoon Hong, “Transcultural Politics of Department Stores: Colonialism and Mass Culture in East Asia, 1900–1945,” International Journal of Asian Studies, 13:2, 2016, pp. 123–150. 49. The early Whiteaway Laidlaw stores in India, particularly the Madras store, built in the 1890s, show the impact of the Indo-Saracenic style (see Chapter 3) on commercial architecture. However, their later stores are less eclectic, generally following the architectural fashions of Britain such as the imposing headquarters in Calcutta, built in 1905, which is now known as the Metropolitan Building. The firm, also known as “Right-Away and Paid-For” because of its cash only policy, continued in Asia until the world war when it closed down its India stores, although some branches continued operating until the 1960s. 50. Wellington K.K. Chan, “Personal Styles, Cultural Values and Management: The Sincere and Wing On Companies in Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1900–1941,” in MacPherson, ed., Asian Department Stores, p. 67. 51. Chan, “Personal Styles, Cultural Values and Management,” p. 69. 52. See Yen Ching-hwang, “Wing On and the Kwok Brothers: A Case Study of Pre-War Overseas Chinese Entrepreneurs,” in MacPherson, ed., Asian Department Stores, pp. 47–65. 53. Chan, “Personal Styles, Cultural Values and Management,” p. 88. 54. Kerrie L. MacPherson, “Introduction: Asia’s Universal Providers,” in MacPherson, ed., Asian Department Stores, p. 15.

236 Notes

Chapter 6 1. Nehru quoted in Ravi Kalia, Chandigarh: In Search of Identity, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987, p. 21. 2. It is also worth noting here parallels with the modernization by the Japanese Meiji regime in Chapter 2. 3. Although there were at this time professional architects in India, it was not until the late 1950s that architectural schools in India included town planning departments. Annapura Shaw, “Town Planning in Postcolonial India, 1947–1965,” Urban Geography, 30:8, 2009, p. 862. 4. This is from a letter Mayer wrote to Nehru in 1950. Quoted in Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity, London: Taylor and Francis, 2010, p. 211. The “Indian feel” Mayer mentions is not evident in his plan. 5. For details on the Mayer plan, see Kalia, Chandigarh: In Search of Identity, pp. 45–69. 6. The contribution of Fry and Drew is summarized in Iain Jackson and Jessica Holland, The Architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew: Twentieth Century Architecture, Pioneer Modernism and the Tropics, Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014, chapter 6, “Chandigarh and the Tropics Revisited,” pp. 215–259. 7. Some of these Indian architects had studied abroad. Urmila Chowdhary, for example, one of India’s first female architects, earned a degree at the University of Sydney (she later became director of the School of Architecture, Delhi), also Aditya Prakash, who started on the project fresh from the London Polytechnic (he had also studied art at the Glasgow School of Art). 8. Birdwood quoted in Robert Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker and Imperial Delhi, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981, p. 90. However, it is worth noting that New Delhi continues as seat of government in India today—the colonial center became the new nation’s administrative center. 9. Vikramaditya Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002, pp. 65–68. 10. The endpoint of this reverence for the modernist master is the recent auction sales of desks, chairs, anything portable and identifiably designed by Corbusier and Jeanerret. See Eric Touchaleaume and Gerald Moreau, Le Corbusier Pierre Jeanneret: The Indian Adventure, Paris: Galerie 54, 2010, an incredibly detailed documentation of Chandigarh’s portable objects intended to authenticate them for auction. 11. Kalia, Chandigarh: In Search of Identity, p. 112. Corbusier also designed an unbuilt Governor’s Residence. 12. See, for example, the detailed diagrams analyzing Corbusier’s geometrical order in the Chandigarh Capitol in Klaus-Peter Gast, Le Corbusier: Paris—Chandigarh, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2000, pp. 101–161. 13. Jackson and Holland, The Architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, p. 223. 14. See the extensive catalog of Chandigarh’s furniture, Touchaleaume and Moreau, Le Corbusier Pierre Jeanneret, 2010.

Notes 237

15. Iain Jackson, “Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew’s Early Housing and Neighbourhood Planning in Sector-22, Chandigarh,” Planning Perspectives, 28:1, 2013, p. 11. 16. Marc Cluet, “Punjab’s New Capital City Chandigarh,” in Thierry Di Constanzo and Guillaume Ducoeur, eds., Decolonization and the Struggle for National Liberation in India (1909–1971): Historical, Political, Economic, Religious and Architectural Aspects, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014, p. 204. 17. Kalia, Chandigarh: In Search of Identity, p. 125. 18. See, for example, Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, 4th edition, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014, ebook. In “The Planning of Chandigarh,” Hall describes Chandigarh as “a latter-day New Delhi.” 19. Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier, p. 7. 20. G.H.R. Tillotson, The Tradition of Indian Architecture: Continuity, Controversy and Change since 1850, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 135. For Prakash, “Modernization, thus, was a mimicry of the colonial project, of the aims and aspirations of colonization, imitated and re-legitimized by the English-educated, Indian elite,” Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier, p. 11. 21. Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier, p. 152. 22. Kalia, Chandigarh: In Search of Identity, especially pp. 147–149. 23. See Iain Jackson, “Politicised Territory: Nek Chand’s Rock Garden in Chandigarh,” Global Built Environment Review, 2:2, 2007, pp. 51–68. 24. Charles Correa, “Chandigarh: The View from Benares,” Le Corbusier Archive, vol. XXII, New York: Garland Publishing, 1983. 25. Shaw, “Town Planning in Postcolonial India, 1947–1965,” p. 874. 26. See Rachel Lee and Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Marg Magazine: A Tryst with Architectural Modernity: Modern Architecture as Seen from an Independent India,” ABE Journal [online], no. 1, 2012, viewed September 2, 2016. Online: http://abe. revues.org/623. Based in Bombay, the group included founding editor Mulk Raj Anand and architect Otto Koenigsberger. 27. Ravi Kalia, “Modernism, Modernization and Post-Colonial India: A Reflective Essay,” Planning Perspectives, 21, 2006, pp. 133–156. German modernist Otto Koenigsberger and Indian-born Julius Vaz planned Bhubaneswar; Gandhinagar was planned by H.K. Mewada (who had worked in Chandigarh), with architectural contributions by Doshi. See Ravi Kalia, Bhubaneswar: From a Temple Town to a Capital City, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994, and Ravi Kalia, Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Doshi apprenticed with Corbusier in Paris from 1951 to 1954, worked on Chandigarh, and went on to become one of India’s best-known modern architects. 28. A good comparison of Chandigarh, Brasilia and Islamabad is in Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity, London and New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 247–254.

238 Notes

29. Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 2nd edition, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1999, p. 517. 30. Spence, The Search for Modern China, p. 547. 31. Alan Lawrence, China Under Communism, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 50. 32. “Sweep Away All the Ox-Demon and Snake-Spirit,” Remin Ribao (People’s Daily), June 1, 1966, p. 1. Quoted in Jiehong Jiang, ed., Burden or Legacy: From the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007, p. 3. 33. Not surprisingly, the “golden age” of the department store (see Chapter 5), was over. 34. For a good overview of Chinese propaganda posters, see Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, eds., Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. The other major English reference is Stefan R. Landsberger, Chinese Propaganda Posters: From Revolution to Modernization, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995. 35. This is where design histories tend toward the narrative structures of American art historians in the 1960s, as a progression toward abstraction. The formalism, advocated by art critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, was, above all, against theatricality. 36. Mao Tse-Tung, “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Volume III, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967, p. 72. 37. Tse-Tung, “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” p. 82. 38. On the 1950s, see John Gittings, “Excess and Enthusiasm,” in Evans and Donald, eds., Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China, esp. pp. 29–31. 39. See Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao, Turbulent Decade, ed. and trans. by D.W.Y. Kwok, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996, pp. 89–90. 40. In “‘Comrade Sisters’: Gendered Bodies and Spaces,” Harriet Evans argues that, despite claims of gender neutrality, Cultural Revolutionary visual culture “featured women in conventionally masculine roles and appearance as militant fighters or political activists,” in Evans and Donald, eds., Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China, p. 64. 41. Wan Chaowen, quoted in Gittings, “Excess and Enthusiasm,” p. 31. 42. Gittings, pp. 32–33. Gittings notes a 1951 exhibition in Beijing of Soviet posters as particularly influential. 43. Geremie R. Barmé, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharp, 1996, p. 8. 44. Robert Benewick, “Icons of Power: Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution,” in Evans and Donald, eds., Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China, p. 125. 45. Benewick, “Icons of Power,” p. 131. Schrift estimates “between three and five billion badges were produced during the Cultural Revolution,” see Melissa Schrift, Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge: The Creation and Mass Consumption of a Personality Cult, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001, p. 71.

Notes 239

46. Schrift, Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge, p. 80. 47. Schrift, Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge, p. 68. 48. Schrift, Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge, p. 69. She estimates that “at least twenty thousand different organizations produced badges.” 49. David Leese, “A Single Spark: Origins and Spread of the Little Red Book in China,” in Alexander C. Cook, ed., Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 36. 50. These figures are from Leese, “A Single Spark,” pp. 23 and 30. 51. Leese, “A Single Spark,” p. 40. 52. Cook, ed., Mao’s Little Red Book, p. xiii. 53. Schrift, Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge, p. 6. 54. Chua Beng Huat, “Singapore’s Routes of Modernity,” Theory, Culture and Society, 23:2–3, 2006, p. 471. 55. Huat, “Singapore’s Routes of Modernity,” p. 470. 56. Belinda Yuen, “Urban Planning in Southeast Asia: Perspective from Singapore,” TPR, 82:2, 2011, p. 148. 57. See Yuen, “Urban Planning in Southeast Asia,” p. 152. 58. See Beng-Huat Chua, Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, especially chapter 4, “Modernism and the Vernacular,” pp. 55–66. 59. Tay Kheng Soon with Robbie Goh, “Reading the Southeast Asian City in the Context of Rapid Economic Growth,” in Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Robbie B.H. Goh, eds., Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text: Urban Landscapes, Cultural Documents and Interpretive Experiences, Singapore: World Scientific Publications, 2003, p. 14. 60. From the Singapore Government’s Housing and Development Board website: http:// www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/about-us/history (accessed December 2, 2016). 61. Lui, in Aline Kan Wong and Stephen Hua Kuo Yeh, Housing a Nation: 25 Years of Public Housing in Singapore, Singapore: Maruzen Asia, 1985, p. 8. 62. See C.J.W-L Wee, “The End of Disciplinary Modernisation? The Asian Economic Crisis and the Ongoing Reinvention of Singapore,” Third World Quarterly, 22:6, 2001, pp. 987–1002. 63. See Ting-Ting Zhang and William Tan, “The Good, the Bad and the Utilitarian: Singapore’s Schizophrenic Urbanism,” in Ilka and Andreas Ruby, eds., Urban Transformation, Berlin: Ruby Press, 2008, pp. 56–60 (this chapter includes images and cross sections of stack-up factories). 64. A good overview of such interventions is Chua, Political Legitimacy and Housing, chapter 5, “Adjusting Religious Practices to Different House-Forms,” pp. 67–80. 65. Jane M. Jacobs and Stephen Cairns, “The Modern Touch: Interior Design and Modernisation in Post-Independence Singapore,” Environment and Planning A, 40:3, 2008, pp. 572–595. 66. Nathan Gardels, “The East Asian Way, with Airconditioning: An Interview with Lee Kuan Yew,” New Perspectives Quarterly, 26:4, 2009, online: http://www.digitalnpq.

240 Notes

org/archive/2009_fall_2010_winter/16_yew.html (accessed December 2, 2016). In 1999, reflecting on the twentieth century, the Wall Street Journal asked various global luminaries what the most influential invention of the millennium was. The most popular answers, the printing press, electricity, or the internal combustion engine, Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, said the air conditioner. It was the air conditioner, he argued, that allowed people in the hot, humid tropics to succeed. This anecdote sets the scene for Cherian George’s excellent sociopolitical analysis, Cherian George, Singapore: The Airconditioned Nation: Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, Singapore: Landmark Books, 2000. 67. See Yuen’s overview, “Urban Planning in Southeast Asia,” pp. 145–167. 68. See Belinda Yuen’s study, “Livability of Tall Residential Buildings,” in Belinda Yuen and Anthony G.O. Yeh, eds., High-Rise Living in Asian Cities, Dordrecht: Springer, 2011, pp. 129–147. 69. See Yuen and Yeh, eds., High-Rise Living in Asian Cities, 2011. This is useful particular for its comparative study of Hong Kong and Singapore. 70. Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, “Singapore Exports Its Government Expertise in Urban Planning,” New York Times, April 27, 2010. She notes not only Chinese but Rwandan and Brazilian officials seeking planning advice from Singapore.

Chapter 7 1. Simon Partner, Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 60. 2. See Nazli Choucri, Robert C. North, and Susumu Yamakage, The Challenge of Japan Before World War II and After: A Study of National Growth and Expansion, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, esp. pp. 232–237. 3. Penny Sparke, Japanese Design, London: Swallow Publishing, 1987, p. 45. 4. Sparke, Japanese Design, p. 44. See also Kathryn B. Hiesinger and Felice Fischer’s useful overview Japanese Design: A Survey Since 1950, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. 5. Nobuoki Ohtani, Suzanne Duke, and Shigenobu Ohtani, Japanese Design and Development, Aldershot, VT: Gower Publishing, 1997, p. 47. However, it is worth noting that this seemingly restrictive practice was usually tempered by encouragement to learn foreign markets and ideas. 6. A significant feature of the conference was the meetings of European and American with Japanese architects and designers. International delegates included Herbert Bayer, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Jean Prouve, Peter and Alison Smithson, Balkrishna Doshi, Saul Bass, Walter Landor, Tomas Maldonado, Otl Aicher, Paul Rudolph, and Louis Kahn. 7. As early as 1920, for example, Japan was a leading nation in per capita electrification. See: Partner, Assembled in Japan, p. 17.

Notes 241

8. Shunya Yoshimi, “‘Made in Japan’: The Cultural Politics of ‘Home Electrification’ in Postwar Japan,” Media, Culture and Society, 21:2, 1999, p. 154. 9. Time magazine, 79:8, February 23, 1962, p. 94. 10. Partner, Assembled in Japan, p. 161. For more on Matsushita’s advertising and marketing, see also Yoshimi, “Made in Japan,” esp. pp. 156–160. 11. The complete story is in Yoshiko Nakano, Where There Are Asians, There Are Rice Cookers: How ‘National’ Went Global Via Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. 12. Partner, Assembled in Japan, p. 206. 13. Partner, Assembled in Japan, p. 208. 14. See Akio Morita, Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony, London: Collins, 1987, p. 129. 15. Yasuo Kuroki interviewed by Christopher MacManus, “Remembering One of Sony’s Greatest Designers: Yasuo Kuroki,” Sony Insider, March 23, 2009., online: http:// www.sonyinsider.com/2009/03/23/remembering-one-of-sonys-greatest-designers-yasuo-kuroki/ (accessed October 12, 2016). 16. Juliette Kristensen, “Sony Walkman, Japan,” in Grace Lees-Maffei, ed., Iconic Designs, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 226. 17. See Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda James, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, London: Sage, 1987, especially section 3, “Designing the Walkman,” pp. 61–74. 18. See Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan, pp. 221–222. 19. Se-jin Chang, Samsung vs. Sony: The Inside Story of the Electronics Giants’ Battle for Global Supremacy, Singapore: John Wiley and Sons (Asia), 2008, p. 78. 20. Youngjin Yoo and Kyungmook Kim, “How Samsung Became a Design Powerhouse,” Harvard Business Review, September 2015, online: https://hbr.org/2015/09/ how-samsung-became-a-design-powerhouse (accessed September 25, 2016). 21. Tony Mitchell, Samsung Electronics and the Struggle for Leadership of the Electronics Industry, Singapore: John Wiley and Sons (Asia), 2010, p. 157. 22. See David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, especially chapter 7 on “Flexible Mass Production.” 23. See Yasuhiro Monden, Toyota Production System: An Integrated Approach to Just-InTime, Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2012 (fourth edition). 24. Michael A. Cusumano, “Manufacturing Innovation: Lessons from the Japanese Auto Industry,” Sloan Management Review, 30:1, 1988, p. 38. 25. Japan Today, “Toyota Corolla: The World’s Most Popular Car,” September 6, 2013. 26. Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan, p. 244. 27. H. Kumar Vyas, “The Designer and the Socio-Technology of Small Production,” Journal of Design History, 4:3, 1991, p. 188. 28. See Farhan Sirajul Karim, “Modernity Transfers: The MoMA and postcolonial India,” in Duanfang Lu, ed., Third World Modernism, London and New York: Routledge, 2011, pp. 189–210.

242 Notes

29. Saloni Mathur, “Charles and Ray Eames in India,” Art Journal, Spring, 2011, pp. 43–44. 30. Charles and Ray Eames, “The India Report,” p. 6. 31. Unfortunately, as Saloni Mathur notes, the Eames’ failed to understand “the cultural association in the subcontinent of the lota with defecation, hygiene, and washing oneself.” Mathur, “Charles and Ray Eames in India,” p. 46. 32. See H. Kumar Vyas, “Design History: An Alternative Approach,” Design Issues, 22:4, 2006. 33. See Kumar Vyas, “The Designer and the Socio-Technology of Small Production,” pp. 187–210. 34. Kumar Vyas, “Design History: An Alternative Approach,” p. 28. 35. See M.P. Ranjan, Nilam Iyer, and Ghanshyam Pandya, Bamboo and Cane Crafts of Northeast India, Ahmedabad: NID Publications, 1986. Ranjan’s later research into traditional methods and materials included co-editing (with Aditi Ranjan) the encyclopedic Handmade in India. See Aditi Ranjan and M.P. Ranjan, eds., Handmade in India, Ahmedabad: National Institute of Design, 2007. 36. Gui Bonsiepe, “Development through Design,” working paper prepared for UNIDO, at the request of ICSID, April 18, 1973, page 9. Accessed at the University of Brighton Design Archives. 37. E.F. Schumacher originally referred to “intermediate technology” in Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, London: Blond and Briggs, 1973. 38. As George Day and Simon Croxton put it, “overemphasizing the technical side of the appropriate equation without fully understanding the social and economic constraints on the use of technology.” George Day and Simon Croxton, “Appropriate Technology, Participatory Technology Design, and the Environment,” Journal of Design History, 6:3, 1993, p. 180. 39. Papanek (1984, p. ix). A good critical overview of these issues is in H. Alpay Er, “Development Patterns of Industrial Design in the Third World: A Conceptual Model for Newly Industrialized Countries,” Journal of Design History, 10:3, 1997, pp. 293–307. 40. See Martha Fineder and Tom Geisler, “Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change,” Journal of Design History, 23:1, 2010, pp. 94–101. 41. Gui Bonsiepe, “Precariousness and Ambiguity: Industrial Design in Dependent Countries,” in J. Bicknell and L. McQuiston, eds., Design For Need: The Social Contribution of Design, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977, pp. 13–19. 42. The graphic design organization ICOGRADA had relatively less involvement with design for development, although in the early 1980s they organized a congress titled “Design and Development” in Mexico, established an African graphic design working group, and established collaborations with UNIDO and UNESCO. 43. The “Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development” was reproduced in Design Issues 25:4, 2009, pp. 64–79.

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44. The “Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development” was reproduced in Design Issues 25:4, 2009, pp. 64–79. 45. S. Balaram, “Design in India: The Importance of the Ahmedabad Declaration,” Design Issues, 25:4, 2009. 46. In 1983, Papanek was still advocating for “an international design school for peripheral countries” in his article, “For the Southern Half of the Globe,” Design Issues, 4:1, 1983, pp. 61–64. 47. See also Angharad Thomas, “Design, Poverty and Sustainable Development,” Design Issues, 22:4, 2006, pp. 54–65. 48. Sulfikar Amir, “Rethinking Design Policy in the Third World,” Design Issues, 20:4, 2004, p. 69. 49. See S. Balaram, “The Barefoot Designer: Design as a Service to Rural People,” chapter 9 of Thinking Design, New Delhi: Sage, 2010, pp. 155–167. 50. Balaram, Thinking Design, p. 205. 51. Ashoke Chatterjee, “Design in India: The Experience of Transition,” Design Issues, 21:4, 2005, p. 6. 52. See Sulfikar Amir, “Industrial Design in Indonesia: Education, Industry, and Policy,” Design Issues, 18:1, 2002, pp. 36–48. A similar story for Bangladesh is in Lisa S. Banu, “Defining the Design Deficit in Bangladesh,” Journal of Design History, 22:4, pp. 309–323. 53. Derek Lomas, “In Conversation: India’s Design Guru, M.P. Ranjan,” Shi Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics and Innovation, 1:2, 2015, p. 159.

Chapter 8 1. Kenji Ekuan in The New York Times, June 17, 2012. 2. Furniture is popular in design museums, hence the “iconic” status of these particular designed objects. 3. Kenji Ekuan, “Company History: GK Design Group,” in Hiesinger and Fischer, eds., Japanese Design: A Survey Since 1950, 1995. 4. In a 2015 article, “A Requiem for Kenji Ekuan and the Kando of GK Design,” former GK designer Michael Uhlarik noted that in 2014 Yamaha announced it was moving the design of its motorcycles in-house. See http://www.asphaltandrubber.com/oped/ kenji-ekuan-requiem/ (accessed November 26, 2016). 5. Kenji Ekuan, “Of Eggs and Packaging,” Design Management Journal, Fall 2002, p. 18. 6. Kenji Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998 (originally published in 1980 in Japanese). Trans. by Don Kenny, edited by David B. Stewart, p. 127. 7. Although not formerly a member, the group also included Arata Isozaki.

244 Notes

8. Zhongjie Lin, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement, London and New York: Taylor and Francis, 2010, p. 22. 9. Kawazoe, quoted in Lin, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement, p. 24. 10. Rem Koolhas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, eds., Project Japan: Metabolism Talks, Köln: Taschen, 2011, pp. 486–487. 11. Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox (note originally published in 1980 in Japanese). Trans. by Don Kenny, edited by David B. Stewart. His other publications—yet to be translated into English—include The Philosophy of Tools (1980), The Buddhist Altar and the Automobile (1986) and Soul and Material Things (1997). 12. Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, p. 92. 13. Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, p. 4. 14. Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, p. 35. 15. An interesting comparison with Ekuan’s ten principles are a similar ten principles of good design by Germany’s best-known product designer of the same period, Dieter Rams. 16. This is the basis of chapter 1, “Beauty Is Function,” in Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, pp. 13–21. 17. Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, p. 51. 18. Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, p. 61. 19. See, for example, Shinto-inspired statements such as “human nature would be threatened were we so single-minded that we had no place to welcome the myriad deities, enshrining them within our hearts,” Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, p. 19, and chapter 12, “Technology of Order: The Buddhist Home Altar and the Department Store,” pp. 116–123. 20. Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, p. 133. 21. Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, p. 169. 22. Ekuan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox, p. 137. 23. The difficulties in finding archival material, photographs, and existing buildings are noted Mary N. Woods, ed., Women Architects in India, London: Taylor and Francis, 2016, see pp. 17–18. 24. As we saw with the example of Chandigarh in Chapter 6. 25. In this section, I am using the term “Ceylon” to refer to the British colony and “Sri Lanka” to refer to the new nation that gained independence in 1948. 26. Minnette De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, Kandy: GEDSANDS, 1998, p. 59. 27. Woods, ed., Women Architects in India, p. 21. Although both De Silva and Mistri worked for the same firm and were moving in the same architectural circles in Bombay, there is no evidence of their relationship. 28. See Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, Bombay Deco, Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 2008. 29. Woods, ed., Women Architects in India, p. 8. In 1917, the Indian Institute of Architects formed in Bombay and their professional journal, the Journal of the Institute of Indian Architects began publishing in Bombay in 1934.

Notes 245

30. Woods, ed., Women Architects in India, p. 23. 31. De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 62. 32. De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 65. 33. She worked on this project for seven months in 1944. See De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 76. 34. No author, “Architecture and You,” MARG, 1:1, pp. 4–7. Quotes from pages 4, 5, and 7, respectively. 35. De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 100. 36. De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 28. 37. De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 114. 38. De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 125. 39. De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 134. 40. Letty Karunaratne, letter dated November 23, 1950, quoted in De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 125. However, she did come to love living in the house, according to letter by her daughter on p. 133. It survived until 2012, when it was demolished—as were many of her 1950s houses. 41. De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 163. 42. De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 190. 43. De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 198. 44. See De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 208 for a copy of a questionnaire. 45. Ashley De Vos on Minnette De Silva, in Brinda Somaya, ed., An Emancipated Place: The Proceedings of the Conference and Exhibition Held in Mumbai, February 2000: Women in Architecture, 2000 plus: A Conference on the Work of Women Architects: Focus South Asia, Mumbai: Hecar Foundation, 2000, p. 32. 46. De Silva, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, p. 345. The Coomaraswamy Twin Houses in Colombo, 1970, represents her final private house project (demolished in 1995). 47. Ashley De Vos on Minnette De Silva, in Somaya, ed., An Emancipated Place, p. 30. 48. Ashley De Vos on Minnette De Silva, in Somaya, ed., An Emancipated Place, p. 34. 49. The most comprehensive overview of Bawa’s career is David Robson, Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works, London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. 50. Kenneth Frampton, “Toward a Critical Regionalism: Six Points of an Architecture of Resistance,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983, pp. 16–30. This includes the generation of Indian architects following Chandigarh such as Doshi and Correa (see Chapter 6). 51. Minnette de Silva, “A House at Kandy, Ceylon,” Marg, 6:3, June 1953, p. 4. Unlike Bawa, who worked within an established practice in Colombo, De Silva’s practice in Kandy was isolated from potential clients and architectural networks, particularly those interested in modernist design. 52. Interestingly, Sri Lanka had the first female head of state in the modern era, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, first elected in 1960 (she served three terms as Prime Minister).

246 Notes

53. No author, “Fame at Thirty, Three Hundred Awards: Professional Designer Kan Tai-Keung,” Graphic Arts Association of Hong Kong Bulletin, online: http://www. gaahk.org.hk/eng/ebulletn/ebi00301.htm 54. Klaus Klemp, “Kan Tai-Keung,” Novum, 66, September 1995, p. 44. 55. Rynn Williams, “Kan Tai-Keung,” Graphis, 285, May 1993, p. 70. 56. For an extended discussion of nostalgia in Hong Kong design, see D.J. Huppatz, “Designer Nostalgia in Hong Kong,” Design Issues, 25:2, 2009, pp. 14–28. 57. Ann Williams, “Where East Meets West: Design Services,” Product Trends, Hong Kong Trade Development Council (September 1996), unpaginated, online: http:// www.tdctrade.com/prodmag/package/p9610e.htm#1 58. Ann Williams, “Where East Meets West: Design Services,” unpaginated. 59. Michael Kaplan, “Kan and Lau Design Consultants,” Communication Arts, 40:8, January–February 1999, p. 88. 60. In 1972, Kan was a founding member of the Hong Kong Designers Association. 61. For more detail on Kan’s poster designs, see D.J. Huppatz, “Simulation and Disappearance: The Posters of Kan Tai-Keung,” Third Text, 16:3, 2002, pp. 295–308. 62. The artists involved in the Tao Art Association (first exhibition 1968) and One Art Group (formed 1970) included Lü Shoukun, Irene Chou, and Wucius Wong. For a good overview of their work, see David Clarke, “Between East and West: Negotiations with Tradition and Modernity in Hong Kong Art,” Third Text, no. 28/29, Autumn 1994. 63. Kohei Sugiura, “Kan Tai-Keung: Tribute,” Graphis, no. 285, May 1993, p. 73. 64. H.J. Kristahn, “Perspectives of Chinese Poster-Art in Education and Employment: Interview Yu Bingnan and Kan Tai-Keung,” from the exhibition catalog, Mirror Image of the Public: The Avant-Garde Poster from China, Berlin: University of the Arts, 2001, 5, online: http://www.plakatkunst.hdk-berlin.de 65. Liu Qingfeng, “The Topography of Intellectual Culture in 1990s Mainland China: A Survey,” trans. Gloria Davies, in Gloria Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001, p. 50. 66. Wendy Suiyi Wong, “Detachment and Unification: A Chinese Graphic Design History in Greater China Since 1979,” Design Issues, 17:4, 2001, p. 60.

Chapter 9 1. Quoted in F.H.H. King, The Hongkong Bank in the Period of Development and Nationalism, 1941–1984: From Regional Bank to Multinational Group, Volume IV of The History of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 555. 2. See also D.J. Huppatz, “The Chameleon and the Pearl of the Orient,” Design Issues, 22:2, 2006, pp. 64–76. 3. Wally Olins, Corporate Identity: Making Business Strategy Visible through Design, London: Thames and Hudson, 1989, p. 59.

Notes 247

4. John Powner, “International Corporate Identity Insert,” Design Week (UK), 15:33, August 2000, between pp. 24–25. 5. By the early 1980s, the traditionally British-born and Oxbridge-educated Board of Directors contained at least three Chinese businessmen. The new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs—represented by Yue-Kong Pao, Li Kashing, and Hui Sai Fun— became permanent fixtures on the Board of the colony’s premier financial institution from this time. While only three in a Board of twenty, they represented the beginnings of a Chinese hold on the purse strings of an increasingly global corporation. 6. In an essay entitled “CCP Inc.,” Geremie Barmé links the development of party identity to the influence of the Kong-Tai commercial environment, with Hong Kong designers providing an appropriately international corporate image for state institutions. See: G.R. Barmé, In The Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 241. 7. Olins, Corporate Identity, p. 88. 8. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 80. 9. See Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money, New York: The New Press, 1998, pp. ix–xxiv; and Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, New York: Princeton University Press, 1991, esp. chapter 6, “Global: Postindustrial Production Sites,” pp. 127–170. 10. Chris Abel, “A Building for the Pacific Century,” in David Jenkins, ed., On Foster . . . Foster On, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2000, p. 134. 11. Charles Jencks, “The Battle of High-Tech Buildings: Great Buildings with Great Faults,” Architectural Design, 58:11/12, 1988, p. 29. 12. This followed a Hongkong Bank tradition, as Shirley Wong notes that the 1886 bank headquarters, like its two future incarnations, was the tallest building in Hong Kong at the time and had utilized expensive materials and decorations that “clearly indicated that cost was not to be considered.” Shirley Wong, “Colonialism, Power and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank,” in Iain Borden, ed., The Unknown City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, p. 164. 13. Jencks, “The Battle of High-Tech Buildings,” p. 21. 14. In her analysis of the bank’s 1886 headquarters, Shirley Wong notes the strict class consciousness evident in the interior design of the building—the power relations of the corporation were effected both vertically (Chinese servants in the basement, junior British staff on the ground floor, senior on the upper floors) and horizontally (the center of power located furthest from the main entrance at the back of the building), see Wong, “Colonialism, Power and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank,” p. 164. The Hong Kong-based architectural firm Palmer and Turner designed both the 1886 and 1935 versions of the bank. 15. Foster’s innovative interior can be seen as a physical manifestation of Michel Foucault’s shift from a modern “disciplinary society” to a postmodern “society of control.” For Foucault, disciplinary society, embodied by the enclosed environments

248 Notes

of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century institutions such as the hospital and the prison, maintained strict divisions both between workers and between institutions themselves. See Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, no. 59, Winter 1992, pp. 3–7. On the hospital and the prison, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan Sheridan, Pantheon, 1973; and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, Pantheon, 1977. 16. Jencks, “The Battle of High-Tech Buildings,” p. 25. 17. Olins, Corporate Identity, p. 64. 18. Jencks, “The Battle of High-Tech Buildings,” p. 31. 19. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd edition, London: Thames & Hudson, 1992, p. 302. For similar critique, see Diane Ghirardo’s discussion of both Foster’s Hongkong Bank and Richard Rogers’ Lloyd’s Headquarters in London (built at the same time), in Architecture after Modernism, London: Thames & Hudson, 1996, pp. 216–219. 20. Christine M.B. Cheng, “Resurgent Chinese Power in Postmodern Disguise: The New Bank of China Buildings in Hong Kong and Macau,” in G. Evans and M. Tam, eds., Hong Kong: The Anthropology of a Chinese Metropolis, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997, p. 107. 21. See Carter Wiseman, I.M. Pei: A Profile in American Architecture, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990, p. 291. Interestingly, Foster’s Hongkong Bank was also described by one critic as “crowned by mantis-like mobile cleaning cranes,” a reading which the geomancers of Hong Kong seem to have missed. See Kenneth Frampton, “On Norman Foster,” in Jenkins, ed., On Foster . . . Foster On, p. 396. 22. Cheng, “Resurgent Chinese Power in Postmodern Disguise,” p. 111. 23. Peter Blake, “Scaling New Heights,” Architectural Record, 179, January 1991, p. 80. 24. Cheng argues that this is due to the differing histories of the colonies (Macau was not taken by force) and the relatively smooth reunification talks between Portugal and China. See Cheng, “Resurgent Chinese Power in Postmodern Disguise,” pp. 112–113. For a detailed account of feng shui and its relationship to these two buildings, see Kirsten Day, “Fengshui: A Twenty-First Century Cultural Band Aid?” in Dolly Daou, D.J. Huppatz and Dinh Quoc Phuong, eds., Unbounded: On the Interior and Interiority, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015, pp. 45–63. 25. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 1991, p. 99. 26. This point was clearly illustrated by the November 2003 suicide bombing of a HSBC branch in Turkey. The bank was targeted as a specifically British, suggesting it was still widely known as a British bank. However, it is perhaps no coincidence that the HSBC moved its headquarters to a new Foster-designed building in London earlier in 2003. 27. Kazuko Koike, Naoto Fukasawa, Kenya Hara and Takashi Sugimoto, MUJI, New York: Rizzoli, 2010, p. 37.

Notes 249

28. In Designing Design, Kenya Hara includes a diagram mapping the options for simplifying MUJI packaging, Kenya Hara, Designing Design, Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2007, pp. 230–231. 29. Mira Locher, Super Potato Design: The Complete Works of Takashi Sugimoto: Japan’s Leading Interior Designer, North Clarendon: Tuttle Publishing, 2012, p. 16. 30. Locher, Super Potato Design, p. 20. 31. See Kazuko Koike, “A Life with MUJI,” lecture and transcript, online: http://www.muji. com/au/flagship/huahai755/archive/koike.html (accessed November 30, 2016). 32. Koike et al., MUJI, p. 82. 33. Blaine Erickson Brownell, Matter in the Floating World: Conversations with Leading Japanese Architects and Designers, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011, p. 88. 34. Koike et al., MUJI, p. 48. 35. William Gibson, “Modern Boys and Mobile Girls,” The Guardian, Sunday, April 1, 2001,

online:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/apr/01/sciencefictionfanta-

syandhorror.features (accessed November 28, 2016). 36. Koike et al., MUJI, p. 120. Hara also discusses emptiness in Hara, Designing Design, pp. 241–243. 37. See Hara, Designing Design, pp. 272–279. 38. Koike et al., MUJI, p. 152. 39. For more on IKEA, see Sara Kristoffersson, Design by IKEA: A Cultural History, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, and Ursula Lindqvist, “The Cultural Archive of the IKEA Store,” Space and Culture, 12:1, 2009, pp. 43–62. 40. See Ben Highmore, “Habitat’s Scenographic Imagination,” Journal of Design History, 30:1, 2017, pp. 33–49. 41. John Hewitt, “Good Design in the Market Place: The Rise of Habitat Man,” The Oxford Art Journal, 10:2, 1987, pp. 28–42. 42. Julian Holloway and Sheila Hones, “Muji, Materiality, and Mundane Geographies,” Environment and Planning, 39, 2007, p. 559. 43. Here, I am borrowing from and extending some of the arguments from Tod Hartman, “On the Ikeaization of France,” Public Culture 19:3, 2007, pp. 483–498. 44. Locher, Super Potato Design, p. 110. 45. Hidehiko Nishikawa, Martin Schreier, and Susumu Ogawa, “User-Generated versus Designer-Generated Products: A Performance Assessment at Muji,” International Journal of Research in Marketing, 30:2, 2013, p. 166.

Conclusion 1. Shanzhai referred to not only electronic products but also various other “imitations” from Shanzhai television shows to Shanzhai celebrities. Good overviews are Fan Yang, “From Bandit Cell Phones to Branding the Nation: Three Moments of

250 Notes

Shanzhai,” in Fan Yang, ed., Faked in China, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015, pp. 64–90, and Andrew Chubb, “China’s Shanzhai Culture: ‘Grabism’ and the politics of hybridity,” Journal of Contemporary China, 24:92, 2014, pp. 260–279. 2. In Chinese classical literature such as The Water Margin (also known as Outlaws of the Marsh), “Shanzhai” refers to the home of the bandits, and “more often than not, these outlaws are the Chinese equivalent of Robin Hood.” Yang, “From Bandit Cell Phones to Branding the Nation,” p. 64. 3. Cara Wallis and Jack Linchuan Qiu, “Shanzhaiji and the Transformation of the Local Mediascape in Shenzhen,” in Wanning Sun and Jenny Chio, eds., Mapping Media in China: Region, Province, Locality, Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2012, p. 110. 4. Sheng Zhu and Yongjiang Shi, “Shanzhai Manufacturing—An Alternative Innovation Phenomenon in China: Its Value Chain and Implications for Chinese Science and Technology Policies,” Journal of Science and Technology Policy in China, 1:1, 2010, p. 31. 5. Chubb, “China’s Shanzhai Culture,” p. 267. 6. Yang, “From Bandit Cell Phones to Branding the Nation,” p. 76. 7. Zhu and Shi, “Shanzhai Manufacturing—An Alternative Innovation Phenomenon in China,” p. 35. See also Silvia Lindtner, Anna Greenspan and David Li, “Shanzhai: China’s Collaborative Electronics-Design Ecosystem,” The Atlantic, May 18, 2014, online: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/chinas-mass-production-system/370898/ (accessed December 5, 2016). 8. As Tani Barlow put it, “colonialism and modernity are indivisible features of the history of industrial capitalism”—and, I would add, of design history. Tani E. Barlow, “On ‘Colonial Modernity,’” in Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in Asia, p. 1. 9. Sonya Lee, for example, described Asian objects whose “projected image of cohesion is tempered with traits of cultural essentialization, articulated through the selection of certain canonical object types to stand for the entire artistic legacy of a particular place or time.” Sonya S. Lee, “Introduction: Ideas of Asia in the Museum,” Journal of the History of Collections, 28:3, 2016, p. 359. A good short study of the institutional framing of China in Britain is Craig Clunas, “Oriental Antiquities/Far Eastern Art,” in Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in Asia, pp. 413–446.

Index

Aesthetic Movement 94 Ahmedabad 23, 70, 128, 163 Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design 165, 167–8 Ainu people 75–7 American. See also United States design 3, 9, 35, 41, 94–8, 106, 128, 152, 161, 172, 176, 187 designers 9, 39, 56, 81, 82, 92, 94–8, 128, 136, 150, 162, 165, 199 manufacturing 38, 52, 102, 155–6, 159 modernism 88, 95, 134, 136, 187 technology 40, 41, 94, 150, 152, 166 Amsterdam 16, 17, 18, 85, 175 Apple 1, 201, 209, 210 Arita 20, 40, 177 Art Deco 64, 117, 177, 195 artisan 23, 26, 27, 39–40, 65–7, 69, 92, 94, 104. See also craftsman Arts and Crafts Movement 31, 94 Augustus of Saxony 18, 19 Aw, Boon Haw 107, 111–15 Aw, Boon Par 107, 111–12 Bank of China (BOC) 10, 171, 183–4, 186, 191, 193–4, 198–201 Batavia (Jakarta) 18, 22, 47, 48, 192 Bauhaus 31, 84, 85, 88, 163 Bawa, Geoffrey 177, 180 Beardsley, Aubrey 56 Behrens, Peter 85 Bengal 22, 27 Bidwell, R.A.J. 63 Birdwood, George 67, 129 Bombay 58, 59, 60, 64, 67, 68, 70, 105, 17–78, 192 Bonsiepe, Gui 165–7 Borobudur 3–4 Böttger, Johann Friedrich 19 Breuer, Marcel 54 Bridgens, R.P. 82

British colonies 8, 26–7, 47–8, 51, 57–71, 72, 74, 76, 79, 102, 104–5, 111–14, 119, 121, 127, 129, 142–3, 161–3, 179, 183, 185, 189, 191–201 passim design 19, 38, 57–71 passim, 128, 133, 179, 210–11 designers 31, 41, 42, 57–65, 67–9, 179, 195–201 manufacturing 9, 27–9 technology 27, 38, 57–9 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom 58 Buddhism 3, 10, 37, 48, 49, 61, 84, 171, 176, 188 bungalow 63–4, 143, 179 Bunriha 83–7, 97 Burges, William 42, 44 Burma 47, 48, 71, 111–12, 113, 114, 127 Calcutta 58, 59, 60, 68, 70, 79, 192 calendar posters 110, 114, 137 Cambodia 24, 127 Canon 1, 150, 151 Canton (Guangzhou) 13, 14, 16–17, 18, 21 Ceylon 102, 105, 177–80. See also Sri Lanka Chakri Maha Prasat (Chakri Throne Hall) 45–50 passim Chandigarh 10, 127–34, 141, 142, 161–3, 182 Chatterjee, Ashoke 168–9 Chen, Zhifo 90, 92, 93, 94 China Cultural Revolution 134–41 Great Leap Forward 134–5, 137 Han Dynasty 89, 91 Maoist 10, 134–41 May Fourth Movement 93 Ming Dynasty 14, 15 People’s Republic 134–41

252 Index

Qing Dynasty 21, 92, 93 Republic 93, 110, 111, 113, 121 Chinese design 7, 13–21, 75, 88–94, 112–14, 134–41, 183–90, 197–201 designer 80, 88–94, 183–90, 197–201 emperor 17, 18, 21, 74 manufacturing 28–32, 134–41, 209–10 porcelain 7, 13–21, 28–32, 210 Choson Dynasty (Korea) 20, 78 Chulalongkorn, King (Rama V) 8, 35, 45, 47–51 CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) 129, 179, 181 Clarke, Caspar Purdon 67 Clunis, John 45–6 Cole, Henry 68 communism 139, 141, 185, 200 Conder, Josiah 42–4, 82 Confucian classics 36 Constructivism 89 consumerism 30, 31, 101, 107, 116, 119, 165, 191 consumers 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 24, 26, 32, 40, 52, 69, 101, 102–3, 107–13, 116, 118–19, 151, 153–5, 156, 159, 160, 169, 186, 191, 201, 204–8 African 22, 24 Middle Eastern 16, 18, 24 Southeast Asian 16, 24 Corbusier, Le 10, 31, 54, 84, 86, 99, 100, 128–33, 141–3, 163, 179, 181–2 Coromandel Coast 22, 23 Correa, Charles 133–4 craft 7, 9, 15, 39, 40–1, 48, 51, 59, 60, 64–7, 69, 75, 77, 88, 94, 98, 100, 103, 120, 134, 161–4, 168, 172, 176, 177, 180, 184, 197 craftsman 15, 39, 64–7, 69, 97. See also artisan Cundall, Frank 65 D’Entrecolles, François Xavier 13–15, 18, 19, 30 Dada 89 De Stijl 31, 88 decolonization 9, 143, 147 Delftware 19 department stores 9, 49, 79, 85, 99, 101, 114–23, 134, 183

Doshi, Balkrishna 133–4 Dresser, Christopher 9, 41, 94, 98 Drew, Jane 128–33, 163, 182 Dutch East India Company (VOC) 17, 18, 22 Dutch East Indies (colony) 48, 71, 105, 127 Dwiggins, William Addison 92 Dyer, Henry 39 Eames, Charles and Ray 162–4, 168, 175 Ekuan, Kenji 10, 150, 171–7 engineering 38, 41, 51, 60, 83, 84, 156, 157, 158, 169, 196–7, 209 English East India Company (EIC) 22, 23, 26, 27, 50, 57, 63, 68, 142 English “Garden City” 53, 128 fashion 21, 22, 36, 48, 65, 92, 104, 106, 115, 116, 118, 121, 136, 183, 191, 201, 203, 209 feminism 137 Feng, Zikai 89–90 feng shui 145, 197–200 Fergusson, James 61 Foster, Norman 195–201 Frampton, Kenneth 182, 197 French East India Company 23 French Indochina 71, 114, 127 Fry, Edwin Maxwell 128–33, 163, 182 Fukasawa, Naoto 204 Gandhi, Indira 168 Gandhi, Mohandas 27, 70–1, 80, 105, 128, 163, 178 gender 53, 70, 71, 103, 105, 137, 177, 182 General Electric 55 Ginza district, Tokyo 42, 117, 118 GK Design Group 172–6 passim globalization 5, 6, 10, 11, 28, 191, 201 Gothic Revival 42, 44, 60 Gropius, Walter 84, 88, 89, 100, 179 Guan, Huinong (Kwan Wai Nung) 114, 182 Habitat 206 Hara, Hiromu 202 Hara, Keyna 204–5 Hindu 3, 47, 59, 61, 66, 67, 132, 133, 142 Honda 1, 150, 151 Hong Kong design 114, 182–90, 191–201

Index 253

designer 10, 114, 182–90, 191–201 Sino-British Joint Declaration 185, 195 Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) 10, 192–4, 201 Hongkong Bank building 195–200 Horiguchi, Sutemi 83, 85–6 Huang, Chujiu 107–11, 113–15

manufacturing 40–1, 52, 55, 74, 149–60 passim Jayaker, Pupul 163 Jeanneret, Pierre 99, 128–30, 133, 163 Jencks, Charles 196–7 Jingdezhen 13–21 Jones, Owen 68

IKEA 206–8 Imperial College of Engineering, Tokyo 38, 39, 44 India British colonial 8, 57–71, 74, 75, 78, 119, 178–9 National Institute of Design 128, 161, 163–4 War of Independence, Rebellion 57–8 Indian de-industrialization 26, 28–9, 58–9 design 3–4, 10, 21–32 passim, 58–71 passim, 127–34, 161–9, 178–9 textiles 7, 13, 21–32, 58, 210 Indochina. See French Indochina Indonesia 3–4, 24, 26, 105, 112, 113, 127, 161, 166, 169 Indo-Saracenic style 61–3 industrialization 4, 10, 29, 52, 57, 59, 67, 69, 70, 87, 119, 128, 149, 158, 161, 168, 211 Inoue, Jukichi 44 International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) 161, 165–9 passim, 175 Ishimoto, Kikuji 83

Kaijiro, Notomi 39 Katsumi, Masaru 100 Katsura Detached Palace 42, 85, 98–100 Kauffer, Edward McKnight 92 Kawakita, Renshichiro 88 Kenmochi, Isamu 54, 100, 150, 172 Khadi 70–1 Kia 2, 158 Kipling, Lockwood 69 Koenigsberger, Otto 178 Koike, Kazuko 202–5 Korea 8, 20, 35, 37, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77–8, 118–19. See also South Korea Korean design 20, 77–8, 158–9 designers 20, 158–9 Korean War 137, 150 Kurata, Chikatada 54 Kurokawa, Kisho 173–4 Kwok, Chin (Philip Gockchin) 120–1 Kwok, Lock (James Gocklock) 120–1

Jain 61, 133 Japan colonies 8, 37, 71–80, 82, 94, 118–19, 137 Meiji period 8, 9, 35–45, 49–51, 59, 64, 81–3 Taisho– period 52–6 Tokugawa period 35, 39–40 Japanese design 5, 6, 10, 20, 35–45, 49–56, 71–80, 81–8, 90, 94–100, 149–60, 171–7, 183, 187, 201–8 designers 9, 10, 20, 30, 35–45, 49–56, 71–80, 81–8, 89, 94–100, 149–60, 171–7, 188, 201–8 lifestyle improvement groups 8, 52–4

Lau, Freeman 163, 186, 189 Le Corbusier 10, 31, 54, 86, 99, 100, 128–33, 141, 142, 143, 163, 179, 181, 182 Lee, Kuan Yew 142, 145, 147 LG 2, 158 Li, Shutong 89–90 Liu, Zhiping 89–90 Lu, Xun 91, 93, 108, 137 Ma, Yingbao 120, 121 Macau 200 Madras 58, 60, 68 Maekawa, Kunio 86, 97, 99, 173 Malaya (British colony) 47, 48, 63, 112, 113, 114, 127 Malaysia 63, 127, 143, 154, 160 Manchuria (Manchukuo) 8, 55, 71, 72, 74–5 Mano, Zenichi 152, 153

254 Index

Mant, Major C. 61 Mantetsu (South Manchurian Railway Company) 74 Mao, Zedong 134–44 passim Marx, Karl 29, 139 Marxism 134, 139, 167 Matsushita Electronics Corporation 150, 151–5. See also Panasonic Matsushita, Konosuke 152–4 Mavo 83, 87–8 Mayer, Albert 128–9 Mayer, Hannes 88 Mendelsohn, Erich 83 Metabolism 173–4, 197 Mill, John Stuart 29, 50 Mitsubishi 41, 52, 55, 150, 157 Mitsukoshi department store 79, 115–19 Mongkuk, King (Rama IV) 47–8, 49 Morita, Keiichi 83, 155 Moriya, Nobuo 54 Morse, Edward 95 Mucha, Alphonse 56 Mughal Empire 27 Emperors 17 tradition 61, 178 MUJI 10, 191, 201–8 Murayama, Tomoyoshi 88 Murkharji, T.N. 66 Muslim consumers. See Islamic consumers Nagano, Uheiji 72–3 Nehru, Jawaharlal 127–34 passim, 142, 161–2, 168 New Delhi 129, 130, 178 Nintendo 157 Nissan 1, 150, 159, 207 Norman, A.C. 63 Olbrich, Joseph Maria 85 Opium Wars 21, 48, 92, 107 Oriental “style” 21, 24, 63 Orientalism 56, 67, 77, 100 Ottoman Empire 17, 19, 26 Paiwan people 76–7 Pakistan 127, 134

Palmer and Turner 121 Panasonic 1, 150, 152 Papanek, Victor 165–7 Patell, Nasarvanji Mervanji 104, 105 Pei, I.M. 199–201 Perriand, Charlotte 54, 98–100 Pevsner, Nikolaus 4 Philippines 48, 71, 105, 127 Prill-Schloemann, Tilly 98 Pronk, Cornelis 17, 20 Qian, Juntao 88–94 Qing Dynasty. See China Ranjan, M.P. 164, 168, 169 Raymond, Antonin and Noemi 86, 97–8 Redgrave, Richard 68 Royal Saxon Porcelain Manufactory 19 Ruskin, John 70 Russia 36, 74, 134 Russo-Japanese war 37, 74 Said, Edward 67 Sakakura, Junzo 86, 99, 173 Samsung 1, 2, 158–9, 210 Scandinavian design 5, 157, 206 Semper, Gottfried 68 Seoul 78, 79, 119, 158 Shanghai 9, 37, 81, 88–94, 106, 108–11, 114, 119–23, 134–6, 158, 175, 192–3 Shanzhai 209–10 Shimizu, Kisuke 42, 82 Shozan, Sakum 36 Siam 8, 35, 45–51, 56, 57, 112, 113. See also Thailand Sikh 67, 132, 133 de Silva, Minette 10, 171, 177–82 Singapore 1, 10, 45, 47, 71, 110, 112–14, 127, 141–7, 154, 178, 192 Singer, Issac Merritt 102 Singer Sewing Machine 9, 102–7 Sino-Japanese war 36, 72, 86, 92 Sony 1, 150, 151, 155–6, 176 South Kensington Art School 42 South Kensington Museum 68

Index 255

South Korea 1, 158–9, 191 Southeast Asia 15, 18, 22, 24, 27, 46, 48, 72, 79, 107, 110–14 passim, 119–22, 127, 141, 143, 147, 179, 186, 191, 192 Spain 17, 25 Spooner, C.E. 63 Sri Lanka 105, 171, 177–82 passim. See also Ceylon Steiner, Henry 192–4, 197, 201 Stephenson, Robert 58 Stevens, Fredrick William 60 Sugimoto, Takashi 202–3 Sugiura, Hisui 89, 118 Sullivan, Louis 97 Swadeshi 27, 69 Tai-Keung, Kan 10, 171, 182–90, 194, 201 Taiwan 1, 8, 10, 37, 71–3, 75–9, 184, 186, 188–90 Takizawa, Mayumi 83, 87 Tanaka, Ikko 202 Tange, Kenzo 86, 172–4 Tao Shuo 14 Tao, Yuanqing 90–4 Tata, J.N. 64 Tatsuno, Kingo 44, 82 Taut, Bruno 54, 56, 83, 98–100 Tiger Balm 112–14 Toshiba 1, 151, 154, 155, 202 Toyoda, Sakichi 40 Toyoguchi, Kappei 172 Toyoguchi, Katsuhei 54 Toyota 1, 40, 150, 159–60, 202 Tros, Willem 17

United Nations Education and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) 4 United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) 167 United States. See American Vajiravudh, King (Rama VI) 51 Vastu Vidya (Vaastu) 59–60, 178 Victoria Terminus (Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) 60 Viennese Successionists 85 Vietnam 18, 127 Wagener, Gottfried 40–1 Watanabe, Riki 172 Waters, Thomas 42 Wedgwood 19, 21 Wong, Wucius 183 World Heritage Site 4 Wright, Frank Lloyd 9, 39, 56, 95–7, 99 Wu, Mengfei 89 Wyatt, Mattew Digby 68 Yada, Shigeru 83 Yamada, Mamoru 83 Yamaha 150, 172 Yamato Hotels 74 Yamawaki, Iwao 88 Yamawaki, Michiko 88 Yanagi, Soetsu 99 Yanagi, Sori 99 yatoi 38, 40, 42 Yongzheng, Emperor 17 Yumeji, Takehisa 89

Plate 1 The Tokyo Terminus of the new Tokyo-Yokohama Railway, 1872. Credit: Getty/John Stevenson/Editorial #: 526988450/Collection: Corbis Historical.

Plate 2  Chakri Maha Prasat, Grand Palace, Bangkok, 1876–82. Image by author.

Plate 3  Cultural Revolution poster, “Greet the 1970s with the new victories of revolution and production,” 1970. Getty Images/Credit: Heritage Images/Editorial #: 486781293/Collection: Hulton Archive.

Plate 4 Zhiying Studio, Calendar Poster, Great Eastern Dispensary, Shanghai, 1930s. Getty images/Editorial #: 463963751/Collection: Hulton Archive.

Plate 5  Hisui Sugiura, poster for Mitsukoshi Department Store: The Renewal of the Western Building of the Main Store and Completion of the Shinjuku Branch, 1925. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Plate 6  Kikkoman soy sauce bottle, designed by Kenji Ekuan in 1960. Author photo.

Plate 7 Kan Tai-Keung, poster: Exhibition of 13 Famous Hong Kong Artists, Nagoya, 1989. Credit: Kan Tai Keung.

Plate 8 Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Headquarters, Hong Kong. Credit: Kirsten Day.