Bridge To The Future
With an international career spanning more than 40 years, Alan Chan is the godfather of Hong Kong art and design.
In celebration of Lane Crawford’s 165th anniversary, Chan was commissioned to create an art installation based on his thoughts of the future. Here he reveals why making connections with the world and other people is key to the future of art and design.
For most people, bridges are usually just a way to get from A to B, but for Chan the structures represent much more. “The bridge to me is about sharing,” says the veteran designer. “It expresses a feeling about my design philosophy and what life is about.”
Fascinated by bridges throughout his career, Chan has based a number of installations around the concept, from a bamboo structure at the OCT Art & Design Gallery in Shenzhen to his new work that forms part of Lane Crawford’s 165th anniversary celebrations at stores across Hong Kong and China.
“The bridge itself is a fascinating structure,” says Chan. “Wherever in the world you go, there are bridges. It exists as a physical structure to take you from one point to another, but it also goes over obstacles. It is inherently quite an oriental structure – the circularity of it. Where is the beginning or end?”
For Chan, however, the bridge has a deeper significance as the perfect metaphor for communication and human connection – two things that are vital for not only the future of mankind but also for the future of art and design.
“Communication is honesty and integrity,” says Chan, who cites family connections and relationships as the most important things in life. The bridge, he says, is the ultimate symbol of this communication – the object that joins two things that are separate, whether those are places, people, concepts or even eras.
In Hong Kong, of course, this is often translated as the coming together of East and West, and Chan admits that this has been a recurrent theme of his career. “It is about the blending of both cultures, which has greatly influenced my process of design and works since 1970 when I first started working in an international advertising agency,” he says.
Looking to the future, Chan believes that it is only by bridging the distances between cultures, ideologies and one another that we can truly move forward, and that to do this we must always be open to the many possibilities the world affords us. “When we open ourselves up to the world with no deadline and no limits – that is the future of design.”