Syndicated from The Black Renaissance
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Last week I had the opportunity to participate in an industry panel hosted by Buymedesign entitled “What is Design Curation in Asia?”. Alongside major figures in the industry such as Business of Design Week project manager William To (check my interview with him here), influential blogger JJ Acuna of The Wanderlister and Arnault Castel of famed Hong Kong store Kapok, we provided a range of differing opinions as to how we saw the role of curation in an increasingly crowded and noisy design marketplace. Unlike more mature markets like Europe, the concept of good design, and also what might be considered “Asian” design is still nebulous and at times plain enigmatic. This is especially the case in Asia, a large geographic region that has grown tremendously. This development has allowed both promising and not-so-promising designers to grow. This brings in the role of the curator, someone who can connect the dots together, separate the weak from the chaff, and provide due merit to good design. Curation is necessary, because it pushes designers to create better work, destroys complacency and ultimately places Asian design fairly next to their international counterparts. Curation, at its core, is a necessity.
Curation is about the razor-sharp voice of the unrelenting tastemaker. He must take individual elements and combine them together to create his own voice. Unlike the designer whose raw materials may be fabric, wood, porcelain or whatever medium he specializes in, the curator’s tools are the products that these designers create. When these individual elements are put together to create an ecosystem much greater than the sum of its individual parts, then this is considered good curation. When he can take a product, and style it in such a way that he creates an unexpected element of surprise with the familiar: that is good curation. Curation can change the eye, teach people to appreciate lines, color and proportion in a way they may not have initially envisioned. When people can look at your curated work and say to themselves “I never saw it this way”, then something great has been accomplished. To have great taste or style therefore, is to constantly reinvent this eco-system, keeping certain signature aspects of your taste alive whilst incorporating new elements that people may initially have consider ugly. “Ugly is attractive, ugly is exciting” says Miuccia Prada, famed Italian designer known for redefining what is considered ugly and beautiful. What separates a good curator against a great one is this ability to take the ugly, and transform it into something relevant and desirable to contemporary times.
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Good taste is also dependent on what surrounds us: it is the air, the spirit, the joy of life that encapsulates anything and everything we experience. “Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.” says Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk. My sense of taste is wholly tired to my own personal experiences, just as yours is inextricably tied to your life. I remember visiting Germany for the first time in my earlier years. At that time, I had found little connection to the work of Jil Sander, a minimalist fashion label originating from Germany. The work was, in my eyes, austere, bare and oddly shaped. That first day when I took the taxi to the hotel, I felt Germany. I smelt the bricks of Bauhaus architecture, felt the kind of green trees and sunlight you can only imagine about in books until you experience them. And it was there that I suddenly had a revelation and understood the Jil Sander aesthetic. I felt the deepest most profound connection and understanding to what the work was about and where the design was coming from. My eyes opened to a new way of seeing, just as my heart opened to a new way of understanding.
These kind of geographical and cultural barriers that prevent us from viscerally experiencing other designs still exist worldwide. But the advent of technology is slowly breaking them down. Tools such as Pinterest and Tumblr allow the concept of design and amateur curatorship to become evermore accessible. Whilst curation is still part of the hallowed halls of any high society art gallery, the boom in amateur curators has expanded exponentially. Yet true curators (be they amateur or professional) are still a relatively rare breed. The vast majority still remix and emulate other works, slapping on the word “curation” with little understanding as to the depth of what the word means. Just like terms such as “couture” and “atelier”, “curation” is become an increasingly hollow word from its over-usage. But regardless of the imitators and emulators, good taste will always stay. Good taste and curation will forever be a beacon of society, not because they stand on hierarchy of high-brow versus low-brow design, but because these are the people who dare the challenge the status quo, open human hearts to acceptance, and represent the testimony to our own evolution.
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Image Source: Zeup Design Studio via Buymedesign, Aiste Nesterovaite via Buymedesign