Design Trust has announced that Ling Fan, a 2006 Princeton graduate alumnus, has been selected as the winner of the M+ / Design Trust Fellowship 2014-2015 (Research Fellowship Grant).
From the Design Trust press release:
A speculative designer, educator and entrepreneur working to bridge creative talents with social and business problems, Fan’s project Hong Kong As An Archetype: Revisiting Modernist Ideas of the City and its Urban Forms was chosen out of 40 other applicants in the running. This research, receiving a monthly stipend of HK$40,000 for 6 months, focuses on an archetypal interpretation of Hong Kong’s modernist urban forms. Exploring the dialectics surrounding the complex phenomenon of urbanization, poised between two major concepts of political power and economic power, Fan seeks to illuminate a critical understanding of the idea of a contemporary Chinese city in its varying incarnations.
“My research aims to recuperate the idea of the Chinese city as a modernist project beginning in the 1940s, thereby arriving at an understanding of the underlying logic quintessential to our city’s built environment. The fellowship will enable me first to reconstruct the modernist history of Hong Kong’s urban forms, an area of scholarship relatively overlooked, and second to interpret these findings in comparison with Beijing, as archetypes, thereby contributing to the continuing discourse and theories of our city’s evolution,” Ling Fan explains.
About Design Trust
Design Trust was established in 2014 as a grant funding enity, aiming to support creative projects that promote design talent, research initiatives and content related to Hong Kong and the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. Working across a multiplicity of design disciplines from graphics, media, and fashion to the built environment, Design Trust aims to actively accelerate creative design and development of meaningful projects.
About the M+ / Design Trust Fellowship
The M+ / Design Trust Fellowship programme aims to support an original research project investigating issues relating to design and architecture in the Greater Pearl River Delta region. The successful applicant will be based at M+ for three to six months conducting independent research, as well as engaging in intellectual exchanges with the museum’s curatorial staff and its programmes.
About Ling Fan
Ling Fan is a speculative designer, educator and urban entrepreneur. Trained as an architect, Fan works at the verge of architecture, design, urban theory, and media technology. He is the co-founder of Tezign, a startup to bridge creative talents with realworld social and business problems. He founded FANStudio in 2010 to practice in between art and architecture and was the founding innovation director for C-Pod (Crystal Platform for Open Design), the design think tank for Crystal CG from 2008-10. Fan teaches architecture, media art, human-environment interaction, urbanism and interdisciplinary design at China Central Academy of Fine Arts and University of California at Berkley. Fan Ling was awarded the “Contemporary Young Art Criticism” prize, Martell “Focus on Talent” project, and China “National Art Special Project” grant. He has been supported by the China National Scholarship Council, Dutch Design Fashion Architecture Foundation, and Martell Art Foundation among others. His works have been exhibited at prestigious events and fairs including Beijing Design Week, Gwangju Biennale, Shanghai Art and Design Biennale as well as Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale. Fan received a design doctorate degree from Harvard Graduate School of Design, a Master of Architecture from Princeton and a Bachelor of Architecture from Tongji University.
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