Craft: the Reset
Design Society, Sea World Art and Cultural Center, Shenzhen, China
Craft: The Reset is a large-scale exhibition about the reawakening of crafts in contemporary design and society. It investigates the widening possibilities of crafts as an equally important creative impulse for China's future innovation. Crafts are fashionable. A surge of interest is seeing a growing amount of people learning, consuming, sharing, and supporting crafts works. Many mainstream products are adapting a craft look or story, catering to new aesthetic sensibilities, new consumer groups, and global trends.
Approaching crafts from four distinct angles, Craft: The Reset evaluates how creative practices are reinvigorating crafts from within, using this medium as an interface to engage with broader themes in contemporary society. It explores how designers create new lifestyles with crafts. In this context, we ask how designers are relating to the past through traditional crafts, how they are engaging with materials, how crafts are being innovated or channeling for driving new innovation, and how crafts represent a new idealism and responsibility. Each section shows how designers are thinking through crafts, revealing a new spirit and pioneering attitudes towards quality, detail, time, culture, skill, value, and connection.
Sea World Art and Cultural Center is a new public space designed by well-known Japanese architect firm Maki and Associates. Through crafted architecture, curated galleries, shopping experiences, and multi-faceted events, the center is the inspiration for the local community and the global vision of Shenzhen.
Design Society partners with Victoria & Albert Museum, London, telling the power of design through major exhibitions about the past, present, and future of design. It is a cultural platform that generates a diverse public program with the mission to activate design as a social catalyst. Its mission is to foster synergies, connect China and the world, and empower the inter-connectivity between design and society, design and daily life, and design and industry. Design Society will test new ideas, incubate new talents, and explore new opportunities for creative industries.
Chang Sun was the assistant curator intern at the Design Society, Sea World Art and Cultural Center.
Her main responsibility was facilitating over 150 exhibited objects and relevant interpretative materials. She also cultivated a tight and favorable relationship with over 60 exhibitors, tracking their situation frequently. Chang was the writer, editor, interpretation, and proofreader of the exhibition captions and wall texts. She represented the curatorial team to collaborate with the third-party design studio in designing the exhibition Visual Identity System.
Other responsibility included scheduling and documenting on-ground and online meetings, organizing and archiving all relevant materials, and reviewing over 60 bilingual legal contracts,
Chang credited as the assistant editor of the exhibition publication. She led the team successfully publishing the catalog, by initiating content curation, visual illustration, book production design, and budget control.
Lost & Found — Views from Teochew & Swatow (1921-1939)
Yuezhong Museum of Historical Image, Shenzhen, China
Yuezhong Museum of Historical Image (MoHI) is a Shenzhen-based privately owned non-profit academic institution that collects, researches, and displays Chinese historical media materials. The museum focuses on in-depth research and interpretation of "the missing Chinese memories oversea" and "the Shenzhen memories hidden locally," including urban settings, local life and customs, wars, and contemporary documentation. Its collections are gathered internationally from public institutions and private collectors. MoHI is organized by a professional committee of experts, scholars, documentary filmmakers, photographers, and curators as academic support and thinktank.
Chang Sun was the curatorial assistant of the museum. She navigated and executed the exhibition itineration in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. During the itineration, she initiated and scheduled guided tours, serving as the docent. She also supported the team in editing museum's annual archive.
