University of Macau (UM) Distinguished Professor Lampo Leong and doctoral student Yang Chao participated in an exhibition titled ‘A Century of Youth: Poster Design Competition to Celebrate the Centenary of the Communist Party of China’. Across the country, a total of 100 designers were invited to attend the event, and Prof Leong and Dr Yang were the only two designers from Macao to receive the invitation. The exhibition was a great success, with information about the exhibition and some of the winning entries being posted on the official Twitter and Facebook accounts of General Secretary Xi Jinping. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the People’s Daily New Media Centre and the Publicity Department of the CPC Jiaxing Municipal Committee jointly organised an exhibition—which involved both online and in-person elements—of the winning entries of a poster design competition in celebration of the centenary of the CPC held earlier. The location of the exhibition was historically significant because Nanhu Lake of Jiaxing, Zhejiang, was the place where the CPC concluded its first National Congress in the ‘Red Boat’ in 1921. The theme of the competition was ‘A Century of Youth’, which means that the century-old CPC is a party with sustained vitality that constantly strives for greater achievements. Taking the opportunity, the People’s Daily New Media Centre encouraged designers to use their creativity to celebrate the magnificent journey of the CPC through poster design, a unique art form that could best integrate the learning of the Party’s history and aesthetic education for the general public. The competition has attracted works from many professional designers since it was launched during the two sessions of the National People’s Congress held earlier this year. A total of 3,319 graphic and dynamic design works were received. 116 were selected by a panel of experts for the exhibition, and 29 won the awards. Members of the expert panel include Prof Fan Di’an, president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Prof Gao Shiming, president of the China Academy of Art, Prof Lu Xiaobo, dean of the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University, and Prof Wu Weishan, director of the National Art Museum of China. Works from invited designers were not included in the selection for the awards. Prof Lampo Leong’s work, ‘Harmony’, combines the Chinese radical ‘he’ with the English symbol ‘&’ to form the Chinese character ‘harmony’. The logo and colour of the five-starred red flag and the lotus flag of the Macao SAR are also embedded in the design. The background is a reproduction of a 1764 map of Macao overlapped with the texture of Mount Fortress, a World Heritage site in the city. Through a multi-layer fusion of meaningful images and badges, and the combination of Chinese and English words, the design expresses the message of ‘harmony and stability’ in the Macao society after the handover, demonstrating the success of the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ policy. Yang Chao’s design is a set of two posters. The Chinese characters ‘one’ and ‘hundred’, taken from Chairman Mao Zedong’s wild cursive calligraphy, are combined with the characters’ modern font commonly used today, as well as the images of the CPC’s emblem and the Red Boat, to express the century-old glory of the CPC and the ‘Red Boat Spirit’. (Figure 8) Macao designers’ receiving invitation to attend this exhibition shows the growing status of Macao in the field of design, and the efforts to develop Macao’s cultural and creative industries is one of the four policy ideas stated in the policy address of the new Macao SAR government.  
Source: Faculty of Social Sciences
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