Fusion Power Exhibition

The word fusion means the process of combining two or more distinct entities into a new whole. It may refer to the nuclear fusion reaction, which can generate enormous power. It is also used in recent years to describe the combination of elements of various cultural traditions, started from culinary field.

In media society, culture becomes labels of effective feeds to the consumption side, also, it is frequently used as empty outlines for grand narratives. Then the real production of design seems less and less associated with culture by any means, as today’s designers always avoid talking about it. At the same time, we should be aware of the fact that globalization along with technology innovations brings contemporary world an extended, distorted, and intersected spatial reality, where culture grows and spreads, fast or slow, in unfamiliar ways, without its traditional geographical labels. If optimistic universal values of modernism have long ago lost grounds, regionalism is also challenged as we find it now difficult even to define a region under nowadays-sophisticated production consumption relationship. This is an age of power generated through fusion and also another age of discovery.

Shanghai, as a metropolis started from fusion, provides the most meaningful opportunity to examine the fusion phenomenon and culture today. In this exhibition section, we invited 12 groups of designers from diverse cultural backgrounds but all have connections with Shanghai currently or in the past. Each organizes a scene with a set of design works of their own and/or others’ sharing similar(or very different) pursuit or interests in respond to the fusion topic with their own position. Here we are not attempting nor able to depict a panoramic view of today’s design world, but rather to provoke discussions and explorations by looking at the emerging changes in design fields from a fresh perspective.