Editorial II. Design education in China

Abstract

China’s design education stems from education in craft and fine art. The beginning of China’s design education can be associated with artist Li Ruiqing, who was a scholar of the Imperial Academy. During the late Qing Dynasty, in 1906, he established the subject of ‘Crafts and Pictures’ at the Nanjing Educator School, which is now Southeast University. During the next 100 years, China’s design education passed through four stages: a focus on patterns and crafts, crafts and ornament, ornament and design, and creative design. The Japanese model of design, which is reflected in the first three stages and can be traced back to the Bauhaus design education system, had as its purpose ‘to educate the Craftsman-Artist’ (Chapkova & Zhang, 2019; Bredendieck, 1962, p. 15). Therefore, art and ornament have long been considered important parts of design, and the history of China’s design education represents the development history of fine art institutes to a certain degree (Wu, 2001).