The Design of 2008 Beijing Olympics | 2008北京奥运会的设计
Comments(0) 按：这篇文章曾被翻译成法语后发表在法国设计期刊 Etapes（”艺态”）的2007年11月刊上，由于博客很久没有更新，所以故计重施，再来灌水一次。英文原文由本人撰写。感谢Amy Gendler为此文进行的修改校对。
This article was translated and published in the French design magazine Etapes’ 2007 December issue. Again, for the blog to appear alive, it comes to rescue the embarrassment of no update for … months? Thanks to Amy Gendler for proofreading and editing.
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The year 2008 will welcome the first Olympic games in the capital of the ‘Middle Kingdom’; the ancient tradition of the Greeks comes to another culture that is as old as theirs. Some decades ago, it would have sounded uncanny to have the Olympics in China, or even up to this moment, but the world is striding faster than we are comfortable with. Cultures mix and clash in this era of globalism in a way that no country can be immune to. When we take a look at what China has to offer to visualize the identity and spirit of the Olympic games, people will be confronted with a very different but totally fresh approach.
Unlike its neighbour Japan, host to the 1964 Olympics and a country that happily embraced incoming cultural and artistic influences, China often seems trapped in a certain struggle, between its rich and lasting traditions and the powerful Western influences. To the progressive minds, those rich old traditions have also been the shackles that have kept the nation from assimilating positive cultural influences from the rest of the world. Nevertheless, when it comes to national level design projects, the ‘traditions’ almost always play the upper hand and become quite distinct. And clearly the designs of Beijing Olympics are also saturated with the traditional Chinese identity.
These designs are met with ambivalent responses from local designers and general populace. The Beijing Olympic emblem, named ‘China Seal’, by a design consultancy in Beijing, is widely criticized for being overly archaic and derivative without proper contemporary modification, lacks a modern spirit and somewhat evokes unpleasant feelings, whereas the design of medals and pictograms could be predicted as epochal designs in the entire history of Olympic games. Good or bad, in all the designs, a certain sense of Chineseness can be easily detected.