So Good

Qian Qian was my web design professor for 2 courses I took in college: web design and advanced web design. He's pretty good I guess.. since he's been interviewed in Print Magazine, and he was asked to submit an animation to represent his country (China) for the 2004 Olympics.

His work is pretty interesting. It's very... hip? in a way that reflects the pop culture that apparently defines China in the world of graphic design these days. Now I know everyone is entitled to their opinions, especially with art. Some of his work is very nice.. But others, I look at and my designer senses get confused. I'm not saying the work is bad or isn't well-executed, because they are very well executed. I'm looking at this specific piece at the moment:



Whoa.
Okay, being an artist.. this is how my mind processes this piece:

Okay, it's a panda with a rocket for it's bottom half. It has a disc around it's center with little pandas on it, and the main panda doesn't seem to be happy about the fact that he's a pandarocket, possibly spewing some fuel out his side. And it looks like there's somebody trapped inside his mouth, which I guess would also be an uncomfortable thing . I wonder what this means? I know pandas are an endangered species native to China... but I know they aren't shooting pandas into space on rockets. My next thought is maybe this is a statement about something where pandas are getting entangled into something about fuel usage? The "fuel crisis" ?? I have no idea.

And there you have it. So I have no idea what this piece means.

Sometimes I wonder about people's ability to use their art for useful things (or their ability for their art-for-useful-things to actually be useful to those things). Sometimes it's just fine for work to be a lifelong inhabitant of a blank wall somewhere, just something for people to enjoy. Other times I think a talent can be overused. I've seen the work of artists that appear to have found their style, and they keep copying that style among all of their productions. Eventually, they must generate a slew of work that just resides as dusty .psd files somewhere. What good is that? I understand the usefulness of creating lots of works in order to achieve a final goal in that piece. But sometimes it's just like, oh it's another.. pandarocket. What do I do with this? I searched Qian's facebook page today too. There's a ton of these:

but with different "fillings" (like the same.. uh, bunny? cat? outline with different ideas designed inside of them). It almost seems like a spare-time filler of a project. I really don't want to harass the integrity of my former professor's work (after all I'd know nothing about Flash without his influence). I think some of his work is very beautiful and wonderfully executed. I guess I would just like to see talent deemed "so good" used less often as a space filler. I don't know. Actually yeah I do know. And that's what I'd like to see more in the work of modern professionals.