In many ways, Lecong is old school in the way that all wholesale markets are old school. They are what the internet looked like before the internet – a great convergence of things in physical space all at once. And yet the internet doesn’t have the same visualising effect that a market has – the ability to take a step back and see the forest for the trees. The internet is all trees, seen one page, one click at a time. Going to Lecong is, thus, a useful way to understand our modern design landscape and the vast flows of goods in China that move from production site to container ship, to end destination, all strangely touching on this one hub of activity. I leave utterly exhausted, but somehow feeling some pieces of the puzzle connecting.
By fate of the strange alchemy of the internet, the Tolix Chaise A went from being a chair to a three-dimensional meme. I started out wanting to figure out why a chair had become ubiquitous. In the end, however, it had little to do with any individual entrepreneur or company ruthlessly conquering a global market. Although we can pinpoint recent examples, those stories already seem to belong in the past and to an outdated model of business. Instead, the forces at work with the Chaise A are bit more diffuse, related to how completely and utterly the manufacturing landscape has been remade by e-commerce in the past 20 years. These changes may be harder to see or comprehend in the Global North, where manufacturing has already been largely stripped away by cost-cutting and union-busting, but in China, which has been a leading player in shaping e-commerce, the change is clear and present. It’s a world where images can be turned into any number of objects overnight; where entire villages are retooled into decentralised production sites for niche products online; and where a French metal bistro chair from the 1950s can become a viral production phenomenon. Comparisons to the internet are hard to avoid, in part because the internet has become so integral
to the existence of an object. We could think, for instance, about memes. Nobody knows the original author of a meme and you can’t identify where a meme gets made. It simply circulates and circulates, until people don’t find any use in circulating it anymore. Furniture today behaves like memes: you see an Instagram post with a chair, you like it, an ad pops up for more things that look like that. At the same time, a feedback loop is being pushed onto buyers and manufacturers to produce more of something. Those appear in more photographs that get circulated online, and so on and so on. By fate of the strange alchemy of the internet, the Tolix Chaise A went from being a chair with a great backstory to a threedimensional meme. In a nutshell, that’s the answer I was looking for. If we can draw a critique of any of this, it’s not that the process is an injustice towards Tolix. I side with Schindler in thinking that the circulation of copies only helps to boost brand value. Instead, the real problem is the perverse same-sameness that this system seems to create. Charles Eames was once asked by a Swedish journalist how he felt when he saw his and Ray’s furniture being used in a Swedish airport. Eames replied that it was flattering, but surely the airport could have chosen from any number of great Swedish designs. And here is the same problem, albeit at an exponential scale. There are thousands of great chair designs that exist, and tens of thousands of designers. Factories are more flexible than ever to respond to market analysis, which itself is supposedly able to pick through an increasingly fine-grained consumer segmentation that identifies all our most personal bespoke desires. We could be awash in an eclectic rainbow of designs. And yet, here we all are, sitting on the same cold metal chair, drinking a pastis. E N D Research time and travel for this piece were made possible by a Hong Kong Design Trust Seed Grant.
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