The Last Designer, Henry Steiner

For someone who once didn’t know what “graphic design” was, Sandy Choi has become a remarkably skilled and informed practitioner.

He was in a Yorkshire school where he’d been sent to study computer science or civil engineering after typically having no exposure to Art or Music at his Hong Kong middle school. A discerning and sympathetic art teacher saw promise in him. She suggested he take his portfolio down to London and try for the foundation year at St. Martin’s. Sandy wasn’t too sure what she had meant by graphic design, but gave it a go, and was accepted.

This story reminds me of Pierre Mendell describing his inability to find a calling to satisfy him. With nothing to lose, he enrolled in the school of applied art in Basel. On his first morning he was given a pencil, a large sheet of paper, assigned a visual problem to solve, “and I was happy.”

Later Alan Fletcher, my classmate at Yale and Sandy’s external assessor at St. Martin’s, on learning that Sandy was going back to Hong Kong, suggested he look me up. At that interview I told Sandy I was uninterested in paper training fresh graduates. Since he had grabbed his diploma and run back to Hong Kong without any practical experience in London, I suggested he work for a year with Kumar Pereira, an ex-employee with his own practice, to learn some basic realities and then come back. Precisely a year later he did and began a two-year stint in my studio, working, he recalls, on the Dairy Farm manual, annual reports for the MTR and Hongkong Land.

What did he learn from me? Not much, he says, and I was not easy to work with. (My company was considered such a rigorous training ground that its nickname was Shaolin Ji, after the tough kung fu temple.) Having now had his own studio for five years, he sees how demanding one has to be to get good work from one’s staff.

Sandy’s office is in basic white, one wall covered by a large bookcase; he has actually read all of his design books. An orderly, sparse work table. Some posters rectilinearly aligned on the floor including a recent acquired Tomaszewski. An esthetic ambiance rooted in the 50’s, familiar and in which I feel perfectly at home.

He quotes by heart a passage where Paul Rand recommends simplicity, honesty, objectivity and industry. He thrives on bringing visual clarity to confusing material and would love to work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in-house for one year doing information architecture. His design pantheon includes Bayer, Cassandre, Lissitzky, Muller-Brockmann, Chermayeff, Tanaka, Tschichold. I wonder at how Sandy acquired his deep sense of “contemporary classicism”.

His speakers are playing Kind of Blue by his favorite musician, Miles Davis. On display is a framed lithograph by Antoni Tapiès in a style much looser than his design work but which, along with the work of Jackson Pollock, he feels has some affinity with Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. While the love of jazz and abstract expressionism may seem paradoxical, he is at heart an orthodox modernist and as such at odds with the visual chaos of Hong Kong advertising and the risk-free, tasteless locally designed architecture.

Sandy remembers when he worked on finished mechanicals for my annual report page spreads how, even though they were pasted up on thin card sheets, the stacks were massive. Today we have the computer which allows us to organize the same materials but much faster, without needing any storage space for camera-ready boards. We also love it for the way it lets us see immediately, finished and in color, ideas which used to take ages to render as comps. Laborious pastels, stats and rubber cement discouraged making any changes, even if improvements.

This wonderful, fast, obedient machine can be the designer’s most helpful friend. But it can also churn out lurid, fuzzy, layered, illegible images, combining as many fonts and stock photos as desired, maintaining Hong Kong’s visual pollution. Teaching the computer and new software techniques have replaced design training. Why should students be bothered with drawing and conceptual thought when you can turn out, as Sandy says, the “trendy wallpaper” which satisfies Hong Kong’s clients?

The simple minded Confucianism and lowballing style of our educational system - deeply distrustful of spontaneity, originality or awareness of design history - has spawned a lost generation of practitioners who take inspiration only from their terminal screens. An army of mouse appendages.

When well into his nineties, the American comedian George Burns was known for dating a series of very young models and starlets. Asked why he didn’t go out with women his own age, he replied, “There are no women my own age.” I ask Sandy to name some promising Hong Kong designers under forty. He can think of none. I agree.

I ask him if he feels alone. The question puzzles him, “Why?” “Well, because many designers feel misunderstood.” “I’m not that difficult to understand,” he insists.

Yet the mystery of how Sandy developed his deliberate way of working and his sure taste, persists.

Would Sandy consider working somewhere else, even though he is at home here? Yes, in New York, San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Kyoto. Only the last one seems an odd choice. Not a big city, not a cauldron of modernity. Yet like Sandy, calm and confident; emblematic of an obsession for order and a profound tradition of Asian craftsmanship.

I hope he doesn’t go. He is living example of what design can be about. Hong Kong needs him. We all do.

Henry Steiner

31 January 2002