From 25th April to 25th July 2017, the National Museum of China of Beijing host the exhibition “Series Off Series”, curated by Andrea Branzi, together with Triennale Design Museum, and realized jointly by the Directorate General of Museums and Fondazione La Triennale di Milano.
The curator explains: «Series Off Series is dedicated to illustrating “What is Italian Design?” through the original relations existing between project design and production. Relations that – in our country – often follow a non-linear itinerary, based on the spontaneous interweaving of two cultures: that of design and that of production. These have never been welded into a single logic, into a single reality in Italy. Rather, they exist within a dense network of collaborations among individual entrepreneurs and individual designers, where each one always conserves his own autonomy of role and thought».
A selection of 120 works illustrates the contemporary scene of Italian design, a dynamic loop in which industrial production is fuelled by the most advanced, independent experimentation of independent research, and vice versa. The latter feeds on a productive fabric that also includes the custom-built prototype or the one-off piece. All the works on display are on the website en.chnmuseum.cn
In the preface to the catalogue of the exhibition, Minister Dario Franceschini states that «Serie Off Serie satisfies the need to look at the enormous heritage of the past, but also to consider as cultural assets some important areas of Italian creativity such as fashion, food and design for which our country is known and appreciated all over the world».
The project is the fourth significant Italian commitment in the framework of the collaboration between Italy and China, sealed through a Memorandum of Understanding on the 7th October 2010, and it is also part of the excellent cultural relations between the two countries that was confirmed by the Cooperation Agreement underwritten together with the Minister of Culture of the People’s Republic of China Luo Shugang on the 20th July 2016.
«After the exhibitions dedicated to Art in the Renaissance (2012), Painting and Sculpture in the Baroque Age (2014) and Venetian painting between the 15th and 18th centuries (the latter opened in the spring of 2016 and ended last December with an extraordinary public success), the Ministry now intends to offer to the Chinese public the opportunity to know the history of Italian industrial design as well as admire some of its best-known objects», explains the Director General of Museums Ugo Soragni.
For further information, see the press release of the exhibition and the text of the curator Andrea Branzi.