Design Commissions
Graphic designer Lu Liang designed the communications tools for the exhibition Made by Us at the 2013 Architecture Biennale in Shenzhen and the exhibition What is the Netherlands. She established her studio, The Exercises, while studying at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, where she graduated in 2011. The Excercises works with a great variety of organisations, artists, designers and companies with a shared interest in the relationship between language, object, text and image.
Made by Us - Architecture Biennale Shenzhen 2013
Het Nieuwe Instituut invited Dutch research group The Mobile City to help it develop a dialogue around the concept of smart cities between Chinese and Dutch architects, media makers and designers. The project _Made By Us_ was launched during the Beijing Design Week in partnership with the China Millennium Monument Museum of Digital Arts (CMoDA).
What is the Netherlands?
In the exhibition _What is the Netherlands_ curator Stephan Petermann (AMO, the research department of design bureau OMA) outlined a portrait of 14 Dutch contributions to the World Expo since 1910. AMO transformed the 14 radically different pavilions into a series of 1:1 models.
Lu Liang: "The is represented by the word hand (English), main (French), Hand (German), ruka (Russian), 手（Chinese), etc. The same concept but became incomprehensible when one heard in a foreign language. This given example proves the arbitrary relationship between language and things. My interest --which is clearly shown in my profession---lays in questioning that arbitrariness.
Language has the ability to manipulate how we see, because of the artificial link between things and the words that describe it. Ferdinand de Saussure asserted the arbitrariness of the sign--which is, the essentially, circumstantial, conventional and historical nature of the bond between the signifier (e.g. a word) and the signified (the object or concept represented).
Soon the Chinese Scholar's Rock emerged as the questioner of that arbitrariness... The rocks have long been admired in China, not only for their striking aesthetic quality, but equally for their resemblance to nature, figures or mythical creatures. Any word appropriated to the rock defined its meaning. Thus they mean everything and nothing. It seems we couldn't find any language to represent these rocks, nor categorize them. This lead me to the question: Is this way--the only way we know-- to perceive knowledge?
Graphic design, just as the Scholars rock, have the power to "manipulate" the contents through a visual language. It can creats new ways of representation and categorization, thus challenge the connection between "words" and "things".
The case of "Wat is Nederland", was a good example of categorizing things in different ways, especially for such a massive amount of contents. I designed a typological way to frame the many different kinds of contents, from manifestation to the government budget sheets, from artworks to economic analyses. Yet the most interesting and challenging part was to implement all these typologies on a 3D level."