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Thunder roars in Nanxiang art studio
By Gu Xianhui and Wang Jie |
May 31, 2010, Monday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
ALMOST every visitor to the Zhidi Industrial Park in Nanxiang is attracted by Lei Art Studio. It is really "thundering," although the word "lei" was not so popular when the studio was named.
"Lei" (literally meaning "thundering" or "shocking") has been a popular word since 2008, used to describe something astonishing, weird or ridiculous in Chinese pop culture.
Back in 2007 when the studio was founded in the Creative Park (commonly known as the "Red Workshop") of the Shanghai Urban Sculpture Art Center, it became an extraordinary attraction.
Inside, everyone is practicing painting, no matter how old he or she is - from a small child upwards. The studio is owned by a couple, Lu Hong and Zhang Lei, who both share the same unique educational ideology. Apart from passing on painting techniques, they have attached particular importance to the role of painting in cultivating and tempering people.
Outside the studio, its artists are bringing into full play their thoughtful observations, distinct cultural perspectives and daring creativeness to promote corporate images for many enterprises.
Ms Zhang once spent 10 years looking after her daughter after teaching fine arts at a school for over 10 years. She hated, however, to reconcile herself to the role of a housewife. After thinking about her future for some time, she came up with a plan to found a studio where she could teach people how to paint.
"We always ask our students to paint on easels," Zhang noted when talking about why her studio can attract so many students. She has found that many other painting schools prefer to use desks instead of easels - a practice that "lacks the necessary feeling for painting."
Apart from such easels, the huge bookcases filled with tomes about painting also look particularly impressive in this small studio.
Zhang said they never provide "model paintings" for students to copy. When asked how a student is supposed to paint, she gave a quite "thundering" answer: "You can draw anything you like. There is no need to limit the boundless imagination of children with any pre-defined frames," she explained.
Her teaching method is to give tailor-made instructions to her students to address their different preferences. Zhang noted that sketch drawing would be too boring for beginners because it might dampen their interest at the very start.
"Actually, if you allow children to draw anything they like, they will be anxious to learn more techniques once they find their skills have come to some bottlenecks," she explained. When talking about how she founded such an educational style, Zhang credited the inspiration to her daughter, Lu Beika, who once thought her life was not enjoyable enough and asked her mother in a grown-up way, "Do you think I'm happy?"
This question brought Zhang to the sudden realization that she had been "too demanding," so she tried to change her educational approach by allowing her daughter to choose whether to continue learning piano nor not. The daughter chose another path of art instead of piano: she picked up painting brushes to portray her life experience and has been in steady progress since then.
Mr Lu, the boss of the studio and husband of Zhang, is also an outstanding designer, whose signal works include the logos for many famous brands like Shanghai Shenhua Football Club and Shanghai TV Station. He is always particular in incorporating local culture in his designs. For example, the logo for Shanghai TV Station is a stylized blue magnolia: blue symbolizes oceans and magnolia is the emblem flower of Shanghai. The ingenious combination of these two elements has created for the local brand an image permeated with the charms of the Shanghai-school culture.
Lu has been cherishing a close tie with Jiading since his team designed the overall brand for the Shanghai International Circuit. When F1 was just introduced into China, many people were still clueless about the race. Lu conducted market research after being assigned to design the overall brand, but the results were quite daunting: some people even asked what F1 was because "they only knew a pop band called F4."
When designing for the brand, Lu stressed the features of the circuit with a heavy touch of the Chinese red, a color that symbolizes not only China but also "passion" - which is exactly what F1 is about. The logo of the Nanxiang Zhidi Park of Enterprise Headquarters was also designed by Lu, a stylized symbol resembling a landmark auditorium in the park.
Despite the simple look, this logo actually implies a lot: the auditorium used to be a popular venue in Nanxiang Town for cultural events such as public shows and exhibitions, so it is an ideal icon for the industrial orientation of this park.
Lu has struggled against some headwinds as he grew from a billboard painter to a brand promotor. In the 1980s, painting billboards and dressing shop windows were both laborious jobs: artists had to work outdoors against all kinds of bad weather and sometimes double his job duty as carpenters or tailors at the same time.
Sometimes when they were too occupied with both physical and mental work, the results were not as good as they had expected. Although today's computer-aided designing software has "liberated" artists from repetitive work, it has also raised the standards for designers by requiring them to delve further into brand connotations. All those designs by Lu have perfectly manifested the connotations of each brand thanks to his efforts.
"Lei" (literally meaning "thundering" or "shocking") has been a popular word since 2008, used to describe something astonishing, weird or ridiculous in Chinese pop culture.
Back in 2007 when the studio was founded in the Creative Park (commonly known as the "Red Workshop") of the Shanghai Urban Sculpture Art Center, it became an extraordinary attraction.
Inside, everyone is practicing painting, no matter how old he or she is - from a small child upwards. The studio is owned by a couple, Lu Hong and Zhang Lei, who both share the same unique educational ideology. Apart from passing on painting techniques, they have attached particular importance to the role of painting in cultivating and tempering people.
Outside the studio, its artists are bringing into full play their thoughtful observations, distinct cultural perspectives and daring creativeness to promote corporate images for many enterprises.
Ms Zhang once spent 10 years looking after her daughter after teaching fine arts at a school for over 10 years. She hated, however, to reconcile herself to the role of a housewife. After thinking about her future for some time, she came up with a plan to found a studio where she could teach people how to paint.
"We always ask our students to paint on easels," Zhang noted when talking about why her studio can attract so many students. She has found that many other painting schools prefer to use desks instead of easels - a practice that "lacks the necessary feeling for painting."
Apart from such easels, the huge bookcases filled with tomes about painting also look particularly impressive in this small studio.
Zhang said they never provide "model paintings" for students to copy. When asked how a student is supposed to paint, she gave a quite "thundering" answer: "You can draw anything you like. There is no need to limit the boundless imagination of children with any pre-defined frames," she explained.
Her teaching method is to give tailor-made instructions to her students to address their different preferences. Zhang noted that sketch drawing would be too boring for beginners because it might dampen their interest at the very start.
"Actually, if you allow children to draw anything they like, they will be anxious to learn more techniques once they find their skills have come to some bottlenecks," she explained. When talking about how she founded such an educational style, Zhang credited the inspiration to her daughter, Lu Beika, who once thought her life was not enjoyable enough and asked her mother in a grown-up way, "Do you think I'm happy?"
This question brought Zhang to the sudden realization that she had been "too demanding," so she tried to change her educational approach by allowing her daughter to choose whether to continue learning piano nor not. The daughter chose another path of art instead of piano: she picked up painting brushes to portray her life experience and has been in steady progress since then.
Mr Lu, the boss of the studio and husband of Zhang, is also an outstanding designer, whose signal works include the logos for many famous brands like Shanghai Shenhua Football Club and Shanghai TV Station. He is always particular in incorporating local culture in his designs. For example, the logo for Shanghai TV Station is a stylized blue magnolia: blue symbolizes oceans and magnolia is the emblem flower of Shanghai. The ingenious combination of these two elements has created for the local brand an image permeated with the charms of the Shanghai-school culture.
Lu has been cherishing a close tie with Jiading since his team designed the overall brand for the Shanghai International Circuit. When F1 was just introduced into China, many people were still clueless about the race. Lu conducted market research after being assigned to design the overall brand, but the results were quite daunting: some people even asked what F1 was because "they only knew a pop band called F4."
When designing for the brand, Lu stressed the features of the circuit with a heavy touch of the Chinese red, a color that symbolizes not only China but also "passion" - which is exactly what F1 is about. The logo of the Nanxiang Zhidi Park of Enterprise Headquarters was also designed by Lu, a stylized symbol resembling a landmark auditorium in the park.
Despite the simple look, this logo actually implies a lot: the auditorium used to be a popular venue in Nanxiang Town for cultural events such as public shows and exhibitions, so it is an ideal icon for the industrial orientation of this park.
Lu has struggled against some headwinds as he grew from a billboard painter to a brand promotor. In the 1980s, painting billboards and dressing shop windows were both laborious jobs: artists had to work outdoors against all kinds of bad weather and sometimes double his job duty as carpenters or tailors at the same time.
Sometimes when they were too occupied with both physical and mental work, the results were not as good as they had expected. Although today's computer-aided designing software has "liberated" artists from repetitive work, it has also raised the standards for designers by requiring them to delve further into brand connotations. All those designs by Lu have perfectly manifested the connotations of each brand thanks to his efforts.
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