DesignBoom has a feature, this month, on Chinese artist Wang Qingsong’s epic installation ‘Follow Me’.
It’s an epic, sprawling collection of work that mirrors, in part, the epic, sprawling change that has taken place in China over the last 20 years.
This from the artist himself:
Everyone appears full of aspiration and seems satisfied with the achievements of reform and rapid development, which are expressed in the Chinese slogan, ‘one change a year, one big change in three years, and one unidentifiable transformation in five years.’ Capitalism has ‘modernized’ our formerly agricultural country. In the last two decades, the economic reform has witnessed significant achievements-for example, being selected to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, both of which bring it into much closer contact with other countries.
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As a matter of disclosure, I’ve limited familiarity with both Wang Qingsong’s work and the modern economic rise of China. What leapt off the page to me, though, was this slogan (with which I had no prior familiarity):
‘one change a year, one big change in three years, and one unidentifiable transformation in five years.’
We’re suckers for rapid, identifiable transformation. It drives investment. It drives news cycles. It drives Twitter.
Calculated, unidentifiable transformation is a much murkier proposition (which is, perhaps, why the changes in China scare the hell out of so many Westerners). It’s also a big part of the reason for the collective impatience with President Obama – who promised change (but did not promise that it would be instantly recognizable).
I’ve noted frequently here, and in a particularly robust conversation with Gareth Kay, that there exists tremendous inherent value for brands in mundane, incremental change that reveals itself only through the larger transformations it enables. Consider the massively incremental transformations at HP as outlined by Carly Fiorina some years ago or the slow evolution of IBM into a services provider.
From a macro view, those thousands of iterative records of small change in China as depicted by Wang look something like this:
An altogether more profound illustration of epic transformation, lost in the micro view.
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- Innovators Outpaced by the Need for Innovation