Chinese Characters: The Next Esperanto?
This session was set up ideally for a real Visualogue, as promised,
and moderator Motoo Nakanishi did a beautiful job of asking the big questions
after five speakers made individual presentations. Upon a black felt-covered
stage were six stools, four tables, four projectors and three microphones.
A double-sided screen was suspended above the guest speakers. Four hundred
seats, half on either side of the stage, were filled by an audience that
mimicked what we found out is the world's true population breakdown;
one in five of us are Chinese.
Nakanishi first visited China 18 years ago. His personal photographs
showed a visual transformation over time that was borne out by presentations
by Hang Jian (chairman of History and Theory of Art, Quinghua University,
Beijing), graphic designers Shao Longtu, Guao Chenghui and Wang Chao
Ying and design consultant Zhang Xiao Ping. Some of the work was commercial
and the marketing concepts (new to China) western in origin. Some was
for cultural clients, and some was for government organizations, but
all pointed out how Chinese characters, which fall into six different
categories, depending upon their combinations of sound and meaning, are
fundamentally more deeply effective as visual communication than Roman
letters can ever be.
As China is influenced, and, in sessions like these and greater global
exposure of Chinese graphic design, influences the rest of the world,
Nakanishi suggested that today, when half of the world's population speaks
Chinese, this intensely visual language may well become the world's next
Esperanto. (MH)
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