Re: Focus Design Design Histories and Design Studies in East Asia: Part 1 Cambodian Ikat in Transnational Artisan Partnerships (TAPs)/ Yuko Kikuchi

Design Histories and Design Studies in East Asia have been developing steadily, but unfortunately this has not been widely recognized in the UK or in other Euroamerican centres of this field. In this series of short articles, we would like to give a brief overview of the notable local developments in Japan (Part 1, by Yuko Kikuchi), PRC/Hong Kong/Taiwan (Part 2, by Wendy S. Wong) and Korea (Part 3, by Yunah Lee). The current direction of this discipline in the Anglophone world is towards adopting global/transnational design perspectives.1 This shift was made possible because the Anglophone world has already accumulated data on national design histories and the disciplines of design histories and design studies are mature. On the other hand, in East Asia, with the exception of Japan, this discipline is just emerging and the current focus is on building nationally based design histories and the creation of empirical studies based on case studies. The authors of this series not only see in these developments from East Asia some engagement with studies from the Anglophone world but also identify clear discrepancies. For example, the term ‘design’ itself raises a complex issue that is currently under investigation, reflecting post-colonial studies’ interest in cultural translation.2 It has to be remembered that the word ‘design’ in the context of East Asia is a translation either directly from English or through double translations: i.e. into other local languages via Japanese. As such, the idea must be appropriated into geographically specific visual cultures and into the existing indigenous system of production. It was translated into various terminologies at various times during the modern histories of this region, and terms such as ‘zuan’,‘ishō’, ‘sekkei’, ‘sangyō kōgei’, ‘shōgyō bijutsu’ in Japanese; ‘tuan’, ‘sheji’, ‘gongyi meishu’, ‘shiyong meishu’, ‘yingyong meishu’, ‘shangye meishu’, ‘zhuanghuang yishu’, ‘sheji yishu’ in Chinese and ‘gongye’, ‘misul gongye’, ‘doan’, ‘saenghwal misul’, ‘sanup misul’ and ‘dijain’ in Korean were applied or invented to accommodate the approximate meaning of new concepts. In Japan, there is a consensus now that ‘zuan’ and ‘ishō’, used in the context of export and international exhibitions since the Meiji period (1868–1912), contain the modern conceptual equivalent of ‘design’, and the term ‘dezain’ (a transcription of the English term ‘design’) came into use in the 1950s during the post-war Americanization of Japan. In PRC/Hong Kong/Taiwan, owing to political and ideological differences, there was no consensus on the term before the 1980s. After three decades of interaction in design, the term ‘sheji’ has, however, now become an agreed-upon translation for the English word ‘design’ in three locales. Although PRC is still using ‘sheji yishu’ as the official title of the academic discipline in university education and still touting its long ‘gongyi’ heritage of Chinese civilization as the origin of Chinese modern design, designers often refer to their industry as ‘sheji’, the term that has been commonly used in Hong Kong and China. In Korea, the term ‘gongye’, introduced through contacts with the Japanese and the West during the 1880s, was broadly used to indicate the concept of ‘design’. During the 1920s, the term ‘doan’ was adopted from the Japanese term ‘zuan’, which included similar notions of design. Since the 1960s, the term ‘dijain’ gradually replaced other terms such as ‘doan’ and ‘sanup misul’, while the meaning of ‘gongye’ was increasingly separated from that of ‘dijain’. The definitions of these terms had also constantly changed, being dependent on two other translated foreign concepts, ‘art’ and ‘craft’. These terms are elusive, partly overlapping with the Euroamerican concepts, yet they are also different. Even the post-war American-driven commercially oriented terms ‘dezain’ (in Japanese) or ‘dijain’ (in Korean) or ‘sheji’ (in Chinese) do not have a clear cut definition, as ‘design’ does in Euroamerica up to the present. The translation of the terms and the subsequent changes made in local visual cultures and industries reflect on the emerging academic discipline of design histories and studies in this region.