MOCA Beijing and MOCA China
Combining Eastern and Western Aesthetics for Contemporary Brand Identity

Crux
While in Southern China, Macao and Hong Kong on consulting engagements in September 2005, we met Jeffery du Vallier d’Aragon Aranita, Deputy Museum Director of MOCA Beijing, soon to be the city’s first museum of contemporary art. The chemistry was great and the timing was serendipitously perfect for us to support the founding and development of the museum, which then was little more than an ambitious idea backed by a sizable Rolodex. First things first, we began by developing the brand identity.

Challenge
What initially appeared to be a significant challenge, the fact that our offices in Los Angeles were 16 hours behind Beijing’s GMT +8 time zone, was relatively easily overcome through effective planning and the use of Internet-based collaboration tools. We worked for several weeks via email, instant messenger, iSight video cameras and Skype with MOCA Beijing Museum Director Zhang Zhaohui, as well as Mr. Aranita, with whom we met in New York for a day of meetings leading into a Thursday night crawl through the galleries in Chelsea for additional inspiration.

The bigger challenge was of course the two very different cultural aesthetics. “We had to be careful to recognize that my visual influences and preferences are culturally Western and may not always be fully in sync with Eastern aesthetics and symbolization,” says Kiran RajBhandary, now MOCA China's Director of Design, International. “So we aimed for a solution that bridged both perspectives.”

Solutions
With Director Zhang's insights into the cultural significance of colors and the original meaning and purpose of “art” in Chinese culture, we were inspired by the museum's envisioned role of fostering artistic growth through the cultivation of contemporary art.

“This dialogue with Zhaohui was critical,” says Colin Mangham, President of Daily Brand and now the Vice-Chairman of the MOCA China Board of Trustees. “The Chinese written language is ideographic, with characters communicating ideas, whereas Western letterforms are more simply phonetic, representations of audible sounds employed as strings of linguistic building blocks. The exception to the latter is when a letterform M becomes a familiar acronym (M = Metro) through frequent emblematic association over time, such as through the process of branding.”

Since Chinese symbolic motifs are invariably representational, depicting things in a naturalistic way, we chose the Chinese character yishu, which symbolizes plant cultivation and the social virtues of the grower as provider of all things. We chose the color red because of its inherent power and cultural significance.

Results
With the M representing the “Museum” in a decidedly contemporary approach, we were able to achieve an efficient and appropriate logo that communicates sophistication as a function of its relative simplicity. The marriage of the black, angular Western letterform with the red, dynamic Chinese character growing out of it, reaching skyward, results in a balanced visual iconography that communicates the dynamic role MOCA China, which evolved out of the concept and team behind MOCA Beijing, will soon play in the international arts scene.