Designer digs into symbols, icons for ideas
Print Edition
WHEN Henry Steiner left New York in 1961 on a two-year assignment to Hong Kong, the Vienna-born graphic designer had no idea where the city was.
Fifty-six years later, he is recognized as the “father of Hong Kong design.”
Steiner has earned kudos for using Eastern and Western icons in many of his works — some of them insightfully, at time wittily or simply playfully.
His portfolio of works include the HSBC red-and-white hexagon logo, the Hong Kong banknotes issued by Standard Chartered Bank and the Hong Kong Jockey Club logo. He also designed the logo for ShanghaiMart in Changning District, which is based on the Chinese character of water.
The HK$20 banknote features a carp riding the tide. In ancient Chinese folklore, when a carp jumps over the rainbow, it becomes a dragon. Steiner used the popular tale and featured the dragon on the HK$1,000 banknote of the same set.
The set of five banknotes feature five animals — fish, tortoise, kirin (Chinese unicorn), phoenix and dragon — each tied to Chinese legends and also representing the five elements of nature — metal, wood, water, fire and earth.
On the back, they feature juxtaposed images of tools or ideas used in traditional Chinese money exchange with technology applied today, such as abacus versus binary code or traditional Chinese coin with the chip of the debit card.
“I don’t like the idea of hybridization,” the 82-year-old designer told Shanghai Daily during a recent visit to the city.
“It is not out of purism, but I find many mixing to be quite superficial and a vulgar way of working with things to make them look exotic.
“I am not a big fan of such exoticism. It takes more discipline to do it properly, and often times it is not done so,” Steiner says.
When working in the realm of cross-cultural design, Steiner prefers the idea of “compare and contrast.”
For example, his 1980 design of HSBC’s annual report had split faces of Chinese opera mask and Statue of Liberty side by side. In the same report, he also used the split image of half pearl — representing Hong Kong as “Pearl of the Orient” — with half of the “Big Apple.”
“The first Chinese symbol that comes to my mind is tai chi, which works in a similar way,” he says. “You have two aspects side by side — not mixed — and they work together.”
When Steiner arrived in 1961 as the design director for The Asia Magazine, there was virtually no advertising industry in the city, which was very different from the world of “Mad Men” he was familiar with in New York.
“If you have seen the TV drama ‘Mad Men,’ it was a great time for advertising in the States. That was my time.
“Hong Kong was very different then, it was quite primitive,” he says, recalling his early days on the island.
It was during that time that he started deciphering the icons and symbols rooted in Asian culture.
“It wasn’t like I intended to do something interesting artistically, but as a designer I was communicating with an audience, and I followed the slogan of my Yale professor who said, ‘show them something they know and show them something they don’t know’.”
He explains this idea by the famous designer Paul Rand. “If you can see something you recognize in a different context, you can get people’s attention better.”
He soon got interested in the Chinese zodiacs, which were always represented in the same old-fashioned way. He hoped to give the 12 animals a new approach, and started to have the tiger jump out as blue and black rather than the traditional yellow and black.
In the Year of the Rat, he used a piece of cheese in which the bubbles depict the profile of a Mickey Mouse.
“I played with these symbols. Without the burden of history of tradition, I gave the audience a respect for Chinese popular art. They are so familiar with the symbols that they took them for granted. I tried to let them see the contemporary aspect of folk art,” he says.
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