Elephant brings Chinese culture to Western brands

I’d planned to ask Elephant for the story behind his nickname, but upon seeing him in person, the question seems moot. The husky 26-year-old is wearing baggy jeans and an oversized gray sweatshirt, and standing a head above the rest of the crowd at Jing’an Temple on a busy Saturday morning.

Though he certainly looks the part, the origin of his unusual alias is his surname, 项 (xiang), which is pronounced the same as the Chinese word for “elephant” -- 象.

Elephant’s two sins

There are two things Elephant cannot stand.

The first is the tendency of Chinese artists to imitate Western styles, aiming for the cool factor at the expense of authenticity.

The second, and perhaps graver sin in Elephant’s eyes, comes from artists who pay a token homage to traditional Chinese art forms, but haven’t put much thought into the meaning of their work.

“You can see plenty of that type of thing at Moganshan Lu,” he says. “On the surface it looks Chinese, but there’s no attitude behind it. Just because someone paints a line of ink on a scroll, that doesn’t make their work Chinese. A child could do that.”

As Elephant will tell you, he’s not just an artist. He’s a Chinese artist. He undertakes each of his projects with one goal in mind: to ignite “the new beginning of Chinese old culture.”

This is evident in all of his illustrations, many of which look like elaborate series of interlocking doodles, where traditional Chinese elements -- Tang-dynasty style patterns and Buddhist Mandala circles -- mingle with turntables, sneakers and other street-culture accoutrements.

Professional mission

As a creative designer and illustrator at the advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, Elephant has quite the prominent platform from which to conduct his mission, leaving his imprint on the visual identities of clients from Coca Cola to Nike.

“[Elephant] has an exceptional ability to understand what makes brands and their products cool and attractive to consumers. He combines this understanding with a style that always provides a creative, fresh take on the brand," says Sean Leow, founder and CEO of Neocha.

“He appreciates and draws from various stories and cultural symbols from Chinese culture and combines that with the confidence to modernize them in a relevant and inspiring modern way."

Far from seeing branded projects as being at odds with his artistic expression, Elephant infuses every campaign he works on with a bit of his own story. The story starts in his birthplace of Qingdao, where his parents encouraged his pursuit of the arts from a young age, including an early fascination with photography. Elephant recalls that color film was difficult to find in 1980s China, so he would take black-and-white photos with his Ricoh camera, and his father would add color by painting on top of the developed prints.

The story continues in Jinan, where he learned the arts of calligraphy, paper-cuts and wood-carving at Shandong Art and Design University. After winning a design competition during his final year of school, he moved to Shanghai at the urging of one of the competition’s judges, the head of a Shanghai-based design firm who told him, “Elephant, Chinese culture is in your blood.”

Three years later, those words have stuck with him even as he’s assimilated into the melting pot of Shanghai, developing a taste for Western hip hop and Japanese electro music along with his continued love of Beijing opera.

If the fact that all this back story is wrapped up and packaged on a Nike t-shirt means more people will get to see it, that’s all the better in Elephant’s eyes.