Viewing ‘made in China’ from the inside out
Print Edition
FROM copycat chairs and fake F-16 fighter jets to a mass-production shoe factory and the outdated Hero pen workshop, Swiss designer Gregory Brunisholz has sketched an insightful, sometimes witty picture of manufacturing in China.
With a second-hand camera bought in Shanghai, he and fellow designer Anaide Davoudlarian spent almost five months on the nation’s railroads, stopping here and there to venture into factories in cities big and small. He travelled from Beijing down to coastal Guangdong Province, through Zhejiang’s Yiwu, Jiangsu’s Wuxi, Jiangxi’s Jingdezhen and Shanghai.
Brunisholz, 30, compiled hundreds of photos and notes into the book “Made in China Diary,” which was published in 2014. Last week he was in Shanghai to promote the book and talk about what he calls an “industrial pilgrimage.”
“Because 60 percent of manufactured products sold worldwide are produced in China and we all consume products made in China, I wanted to see from my own perspective by whom, how, where, at what price and under what conditions those products are manufactured,” the Swiss designer said.
In 2013, the pair set off and travelled around places in China that specialize in such commodities as pearls, porcelain, socks, shoes, furniture and paintings.
Without any sponsorship, they chose some 25 factories by surfing the Internet, accepting recommendation from friends and even listening to the chat of locals they met.
“Oh you have a factory here ! Could you show us around?”
The “made in China” label is often equated with cheap products and knockoffs. Without making any judgments, Brunisholz said the trip gave him a chance to explore domestic production up close.
“I’m not a journalist,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to jump into any conclusion or to judge those working conditions. I’m a designer, driven by sheer curiosity. I came to learn and see what’s behind the ‘made in China’ label. The one thing I’ve learned for sure is that I love China.”
It all started with a Christmas tree decoration in his hometown Geneva. It came from a Chinese factory. Brunisholz established contact via Skype. When he came to China, the factory was on his must-visit list.
Anxious to meet the factory managers after their cyber communications, he phoned and asked for a tour. The response: “Yes, of course, but what do you want to buy?”
Brunisholz replied that he just wanted to say hello and meet the people he had communicated with. The response: “No problem, but what do you want to buy?”
Aha, Brunisholz thought, if I want to get into some of these premises, I need to seem like a buyer even if that isn’t my aim.
So he posed as a potential buyer for an inflatable, life-size version of the F-16 plane. That took him to a factory in Wuxi in Jiangsu Province, which manufactures inflatable structures for events, advertising and theme parks.
“I was welcomed with a fancy limousine at the train station because usually only government people buy these products,” he recalled.
The factory workers inflated the plane for the Swiss. Though the landing gear that folds up and the insect eye-like cockpit looked funny, Brunisholz wrote in his book that it was still striking to see the contrast between the violence of war with inflation technology dating back to the D-Day invasion and the naïveté of balloons often associated with bouncy castles.
In Shunde, Guangdong Province, Brunisholz visited a factory that copied many of the great classics of 20th century furniture design. He noticed the employees worked six days a week amid epoxy fumes and fiberglass dust without any safety protection.
It shocked Brunisholz to see designs of such conceptual rigor reduced to copycat products in such a chaotic way. Still, he told Shanghai Daily, he chose to remain neutral on the issue of piracy.
“Picasso had a saying: ‘Bad artists copy and good artists steal’,” Brunisholz said. “Everybody is copying everyone else nowadays. Copying is just a way of getting somewhere. Here in China, you can find people copying furniture for example, and it seems hard to stop them because there is a market. I think the way to stop them is to educate the public not to buy copies.”
In Guangzhou, where small workshops often operate in small streets and businessmen from every corner of the world are running around with mobile phones in each hand, Brunisholz met Vignesh, an Indian who spoke perfect Chinese and was arranging to import two containers of knockoff sports shoes for his four stores back home. The Indian said he had been a patron of Guangzhou markets for more than 20 years.
“He told us he never buys brand-name shoes for over five euros,” Brunisholz recalled.
During the five-month journey, he visited the “City of Pearls” in Zhuji, Zhejiang Province, which produces 73 percent of current world production. He went to the “Capital of Socks” in Datang, Zhejiang Province, where more than 10,000 companies produced a third of the world’s socks. He viewed a center in Dafen, Guangdong Province, which has become the world’s largest concentration of painters.
With unbridled urbanization apparent everywhere, the Swiss said he was sad to find that many old-fashioned workshops and craftspeople were withering away. He cited the example of the Shanghai Hero Pen Co, which has been turned into a museum to display the old machines used to make the once-famous writing instruments. In Beijing, he found that workshops had been pushed to the far fringes of the city because of high rents.
“Like my country Switzerland, I’m neutral,” Brunisholz said of his experience. “I’m just displaying what I’ve seen in those factories. I came to learn, not to judge.”
He added, “It was an amazing journey in one of the world’s biggest countries — not for scenic spots but to see how its people work.”
The project is still a work in progress, the Swiss said, envisioning maybe another 20 years at it.
For more information on the book, log onto its official website www.madeinchinadiary.com
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