Shenzhen designer Gu Zhengyou created posters titled “White Cat and Black Cat.” The pieces remind us of a famous quotation from Deng Xiaoping: “No matter if it is a white cat or a black cat; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat.” It was Deng’s way of changing China’s focus to pragmatism when the reform and opening-up policy was implemented in 1978.
A fusion of traditional and modern Chinese elements can be seen in Li Guanlin’s work which is a poster based on the Chinese Taoist god of fortune. Written on this piece is another of Deng’s quotations: “Liberate the minds and seek truth from facts.”
To understand the artistic nature of this venue, one needs to look into the background of Shenzhen’s progress in graphic design. The youngest city in China, Shenzhen has fostered contemporary Chinese graphic design and is the center of China’s printing industry. The exhibition host, Shenzhen Graphic Design Association (SGDA), is the first professional graphic design institute established on the Chinese mainland.
Over the past three decades, Shenzhen has attracted a generation of young pioneering design students and professionals. They have established graphic design as a creative discipline and experimented with new graphic language.
Graphic design has been flourishing in many Chinese cities but particularly Shenzhen, where it has become quite diverse in style and form. With the many young and inspired designers embracing global and national cultural influences, graphic design has become a unique way to present the transformation of China over the past 30 years.
It is significant that the poster exhibition is being held in Shenzhen as this is where Deng Xiaoping conceived the doorway to the outside world should open. In 1980, two years after launching the policy to open up and reform, Deng pointed to a small fishing town on the northern border of Hong Kong and ordered it to be the country’s first special economic zone. Here, China would experiment with foreign investment and export manufacturing. Three decades later, it has become the world’s largest manufacturing center with thousands of factories and a population of more than 10 million.