Back to the Future, or Forward? Hong Kong Design, Image, and Branding

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Footnotes for this article begin on page 28. Introduction It is now more than ten years since Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region of mainland China. Hong Kong was and is particular in its multiple identities as a British colony, a Chinese territory, and a global city; yet its heterogeneity is increasingly typical of the twenty-first-century urban experience. Consideration of design in the global context in relation to Hong Kong raises a number of issues. The most obvious and potentially the most interesting is the complexity of Hong Kong design's emerging and simultaneous relationship with at least two cultural contexts. One is the international culture of globalization and global products (which has underpinned Hong Kong's economy), and the other the local culture of Hong Kong itself and that of greater China and Asia which, given Hong Kong's colonial history, takes a distinct form. Yet to speak of a bifurcation of cultures (the old cliche of East meets West) is too simplistic and essentialist to address Hong Kong and its recent history. While internationally the dominant mode of universal global and design culture is still predominantly Western (and largely American), it has become more nuanced as Asia has become more influential as the world hub of manufacturing; and as locally and regionally inspired design from Asia penetrates international markets. Also, globally, new configurations are replacing the former dominance of the national. We can, for example, distinguish Catalan from Spanish design (see, for example, Viviana Narotzky's paper, page 62) and, of course, Scandinavian design successfully applies as a way of identifying a wide range of design qualities and values, where reference to the component nations would not. We also know that major global brands are highly complex by virtue of their production, consumption, and design. If, at this point in history, these brands still serve to represent the international dominance of Western culture and lifestyle, the design and conception of products themselves are beginning to shift closer to the manufacturing centers in Asia.