Quotes of the Day

The lot of the Chinese graphic designer has not been a happy one. In mainland China design was, for a long time, an instrument of socialist propaganda, and to be a graphic designer was to be a sort of mechanic, running chunky, graceless type across posters of model peasants or valiant soldiers. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, designers spent much of the 20th century toiling in the service of another omnipotent master — the export market, which required packaging and other printed matter produced strictly to Western specifications and sensibilities. Questions of form, style and color were not settled upon locally, but in British or American head offices.

It wasn't until the 1980s that graphic designers felt able to properly reference Chinese themes. China's economic reforms, and Hong Kong's imminent decolonization, prompted the quest for a common visual identity. This took place not only at the very moment that Western consumers began exhibiting unprecedented curiosity about Chinese belief systems and culture, but also at a time when multinational brands needed a sinicized graphic language in order to address hundreds of millions of Chinese shoppers. A postmodern Chinese style subsequently entered the global marketplace, appropriating elements of brushstroke calligraphy, Buddhist iconography, imperial and folk art, Shanghai Art Deco imagery, China Coast painting and the political art of the Cultural Revolution, while applying Western typographical ideas to Chinese characters.

It is, however, the post-postmodern phase of the genre that readers will encounter in 3030: New Graphic Design in China. This thought-provoking anthology is edited by the talented Hong Kong designer Javin Mo and brings together the work of 30 of his generational peers from mainland China — designers aged around 30 and therefore born at the dawn of the country's economic liberalization. Very little of the book consists of applied graphics — the retail posters, brochures, advertisements, packaging and point-of-sale material that are the designer's daily duty. Instead, the work is mostly theoretical: experimental typography, avant-garde illustration and imaginary commissions. One can, to some degree, condone this editorial policy. Having spent the past few decades preoccupied with either communism, industry or cultural identity, Chinese designers deserve the freedom to simply play with form. But at the same time theirs is a practical art, meant for the unglamorous business of mass communications, and unless we see them excelling in that context, the pieces here can be regarded as nothing more than exercises.

That's not to say that they aren't enjoyable. Wu Zhen's two-color poster series, I Love Guangzhou, would never earn the local tourist board's tick of approval, but it has a streetwise, hand-drawn roughness that is far closer to the actual character of the city than official depictions are. Jon Fong's white paper-cut rendition of the infamous couplet "A hundred flowers blossoming/ A hundred viewpoints contending" is wonderfully funereal, referencing the use of the motto in Mao's Hundred Flowers campaign, during which hundreds of thousands of rightists were imprisoned, tortured or killed. Ren Qianyi's obscene eye charts — in which the letters and numbers used by opticians are replaced with bawdy illustrations — might be a comment on the nature of pornography, or an invitation to look for the unexpected in the most prosaic situations. Li Xinlu's Beijing Lightning Babe illustrations poke brightly colored fun at the mass gymnastic displays so beloved of authoritarian regimes.

The generation represented in 3030 produces work that is experimental and irreverent, but of high enough quality to avoid seeming jejune. As its members mature over the next decade, we will know whether these pages have documented the emergence of the most creative and fortunate establishment of graphic designers China has ever seen, or a marginal group of theoreticians, intoxicated by the freedom denied to their predecessors, clucking over puzzling fonts and byzantine typography. This book doesn't help us decide which, but it does open the debate.

• Liam Fitzpatrick