Twenty days was all they had between receiving the order and presenting an initial proposal. That’s not all that long when you’ve just been asked to design the Jiangsu float that will be a part of the Tiananmen parade to mark 70 years of communist rule in China.
The task fell to Nanjing University of the Arts who quickly gathered a team of around 20 teachers and students who got to work scratching their heads. The finished piece would eventually pass the main gate of Tiananmen on 1 October, taking all of about 20 seconds or so, but not until the designs had successfully jumped through a number of hoops.
So how do you represent a province spanning 100 thousand square kilometres and home to around 80 million people, all within a 15-metre long colourful parade cart?
Let’s take a look, from bottom up. At the base you’ve got Nanjing cloud-pattern brocade swirling around in gold, blue and turquoise to represent Jiangsu’s three main waterways; the Yangtze River, the Huaihe River and the Grand Canal. It’s a sympathetic nod to nature and culture, although there’s not much more of that. From here on up it’s all about technology and the future.
At the centre of the float is an “invincible super computer” (I quote here from the design explanation); a large screen essentially, with a clear message. Just as the float rolled onto CCTV’s live stream the words, “strong economy”, lit up on the screen, like the ubiquitous red and white slogan banner.
In prime position up front is a bathyscaphe; which I am sure you know is a kind of deep-water vessel which takes people to the depths of the ocean for scientific, and perhaps other, pursuits. This one comes with a robot popping out the top to say hello. To balance it out at the rear of the float is a real person suspended within a compass-like ring. Does her air-born performance represent Jiangsu’s achievements in space too? I’ll let you decide.
To top it off is a slanted multi-lane running machine which sports five men and women who stand for the courageous and innovative people of Jiangsu, so we are told. Clad in tight-fitting silver suits that look like something out of Austin Powers, they run together to a never-ending finish line.
While the university was tasked with producing the final design, hundreds of other people were involved in the process. One of the main design features to be rejected was the S-shaped structure that puts the “su” in Jiangsu. Several initial designs also incorporated the Yangtze River Bridge (see above), an obvious choice, as it was the first heavy bridge designed and constructed using only Chinese expertise in the 1960s that became an iconic symbol of Communist China. The bridge designs get my vote, but their rejection sends a clear message that the 70th anniversary was not about nostalgia and memory, but about pushing forth and racing towards the future.
