From Exporting Products to Exporting Aesthetics, Chinese Cars Have Their Own Narrative

"I want to take you to romantic Turkey, then go to Tokyo and Paris together..."

We seem very used to giving cities "labels": Paris is romance, Tokyo is avant-garde, Milan is fashion. And in the automotive world, there are also such labels, for example: Detroit represents the strongest steel age of the American automotive industry, Munich defines the standard of German luxury with rigorous engineering aesthetics, and Turin, Italy is a city that cannot be bypassed in the history of world car design.

In the past, if we wanted to compliment a Chinese car as good-looking, we would say it is "foreign style" or "has a European vibe". It means that the ultimate reference for whether a Chinese car design is good enough has always been in the West.

And at the Turin Auto Show that opened on September 11, the situation changed. Fabrizio Giordano, Co-founder and CEO of GFG Style, said, "On quality, attitude, innovation capability, and the pace of launching new models, Chinese brands have far left us behind."

Next to the square where the Turin Auto Show is held is the Turin Royal Opera House. This building, originally constructed in 1740, experienced a fire in 1936 and was rebuilt later. What is truly legendary is not just its history spanning hundreds of years, but that despite the passage of time, it still meets the usage standards for modern performances. Behind this is an engineering innovation that is almost like "moving mountains and filling seas".

Since the building's facade and auditorium are cultural relics that cannot be easily altered, engineers could only look for answers in the rear part of the building: while preserving the historical space, move the stage area backward and deepen it, and reconstruct complex stage machinery and audio-visual systems with modern technology. Therefore, when you walk into this place, you will experience a strange "sense of time travel"—the current facade and auditorium still retain the historical traces of the 19th century; and only a step away, the backstage has already become a complex stage system composed of advanced machinery and modern engineering technology. Old and new do not replace each other, but are reconnected by engineering technology within the same building.

This dialectical unity of innovation and inheritance also occurs inside the opera house. The "Turin Auto Show Geely Design Forum", jointly hosted by the Turin Auto Show, TADA Turin Car Design Award, and Geely Design, is the first time in history that a Chinese brand has held a design forum abroad.

Top Western designers hold the discourse power of automotive design in the internal combustion engine era, but they are relatively unfamiliar with automotive design in the smart electrification era. This time, Chinese designers are no longer just answering questions within rules established by others, but have the opportunity to define rules together with global peers.

Guests such as Pininfarina Chief Creative Officer Dave Amantea, GFG Style Co-founder and CEO Fabrizio Giordano, and former BMW and Alfa Romeo Chief Designer Andreas Zapatinas attended. A group of veterans over half a hundred years old in the Turin automotive design world came together to discuss Chinese car design. Looking back on the hundred-year cycle of car design history, this is a relay of inheritance and an exploration of innovation. And behind this lies a strong signal that those Chinese brands once considered as "students" or "factories" by the European design community are now being genuinely recognized by a host of hall-of-fame masters.

This is the moment when Chinese design and brands have entered the main hall of respect.

Chen Zheng, Vice President of Geely Automobile Group and Head of Geely Global Design, once worked in Turin for 14 years, where the design spirit he was taught was innovation. Returning to Turin again, he also gave a speech themed "Technological Advancement, Design Evolution", responding to the proposition of automotive design in the smart electrification era.

Chen Zheng said, "Form follows function, and function serves experience. Technological advancement will inevitably bring about design evolution."

Beyond innovation, Geely Design believes that for Chinese designers in the current era, there should be an additional question: to make global car design aesthetics have one more Chinese expression, and promote the globalization progress of "Chinese Design". Geely's solution strategy is to inherit cultural values and translate them into products through design.

At the forum scene, Geely Design presented the Chinese design system to which it poured great efforts over the past three years to the users and design practitioners of this capital of automotive design in the form of a "Geely Design Special Exhibition". There are many Chinese car companies that have taken products abroad, but Geely is the first to take the Chinese design system abroad.

I think, at the beginning of the exhibition opening, the Geely Design team was probably worried—whether the Chinese design system can be understood and recognized by the pioneers and practitioners coming from the hall of car design? The answer is affirmative. When you see them burrowing over papers through these photos, you can deeply feel that the resonance of aesthetics transcends the barriers of region, ethnicity, and language.

To express Chinese design, the laziest answer is naturally "Chinese elements". Draw a dragon, print auspicious clouds, smear a bit of Chinese red, stick two blue and white porcelain patterns. These things are indeed easy to recognize as Chinese design at a glance, but if you compare design to a language, they are at most just a few easily recognizable characteristic words. What truly allows a language to stand firm should be its rigorous grammatical system behind it.

Geely has set a very good example. They moved the cultural research from the most micro "capillaries", such as R-angles and Chinese colors, to the scene of the "Turin Auto Show Geely Design Forum". In this ancient Italian city, the first presentation of Chinese automotive culture appears particularly vibrant.

The ancient Southern Dynasty art theory "Xie He's Six Principles" talks about "vivid spirit resonance", but on a car, how to quantify spirit resonance? Geely's answer lies in the R-angles. The R-angle is the smallest design unit in the overall vehicle shape, yet it directly determines how light flows on the car body. Chinese jade pursues the introverted and warm "precious light", and the most taboo is the "harsh light" that floats on the surface and is dazzling to the eyes. Geely deeply studied ancient architecture flying eaves, bronze vessels, and calligraphy strokes, refined hundreds of curvature regulations, and transformed emotional spirit resonance into parameters that engineers can call upon.

Color is also the same. "Qing" is difficult to translate in English; it is neither purely Blue nor purely Green. In the West, Lapis Lazuli became exclusive for painting the Madonna's robes due to its rarity; in China, Qing is an emotional symbol of the unity of Heaven and Man. Geely designers walked out of the laboratory, returned to nature, and took colors from the silken soft light of Lake Como, the purity of Sayram Lake, the depth of Crescent Spring, and the misty rain of West Lake, sorting out four sets of heart laws of "Selection, Representation, Usage, and Appreciation", making "Geely Cyan" become a standard color with contemporary Eastern characteristics.

The design philosophy of Western Bauhaus is "design serves function", which echoes the concept of "craft must have meaning" in ancient China's "Kao Gong Ji". Geely Design, rooted in its own brand essence, proposes the concept of "Craft must have meaning, meaning must be Geely". The "Ji character pattern" on the "Eye of the Instrument" of Galaxy Warship 700 originates from the pass stamp, implying passing smoothly and going all the way; the air vent of Galaxy Starlight 6 combines West Lake ripples and Hu character patterns, meaning "gentle breeze and smooth flow, endless generation"; the ups and downs and density of water ripples on the instrument panel of Preface L PLUS strictly resonate with the center console curvature, guiding visual breathing with a sense of order. Patterns are no longer isolated decorations, but a combination of function, aesthetics, and emotional value.

There are actually many studies on Chinese culture, and what makes Geely valuable is that they also penetrate these research truly into products, forming a mass-producible design methodology that spans sedans, SUVs, hardcore off-roaders, and is compatible with different energy forms.

For example, Galaxy E5, as Geely Galaxy's first global car, faced the first difficulty of aesthetic diversity. Facing this challenge, Geely's approach was not to cater to the fashion trend of a specific market, but to find common aesthetics with global penetration power in tradition—Chinese porcelain, and refined it into the "Smooth Jade Flowing Light" body surface, allowing foreign users who do not understand Chinese porcelain history to also feel its high class and comfort. Since its launch, Galaxy E5 has fully bloomed in more than 40 countries and regions such as Malaysia, Australia, and Israel, truly achieving one design accommodating global aesthetics.

If Galaxy E5 is looking for global aesthetic compatibility, then Galaxy Warship 700 not only conveys Chinese aesthetic values, but also translates China's most cutting-edge smart electrification technology to global users through design.

In his speech at the forum, Chen Zheng mentioned, "Design has shifted from 'serving function' to 'creating experience'. The scope of design has expanded from a means of transportation to a complete 'usage scenario'."

In the design of traditional boxy SUVs, designers focused on solving problems in the driving scenario, allowing users to focus on driving and facilitating driving in extreme off-road environments. Today, Chinese off-roaders represented by Galaxy Warship 700 can achieve "Smart Climbing" with one key, allowing ordinary users to easily have professional-grade off-road capabilities. When driving is no longer a problem, the design focus of Chinese box cars becomes "human-world interaction". For example, after users park the car, they can camp, provide power, communicate... these demands that originally did not belong to what the car should solve are now all accommodated within the scope of design considerations.

This new design thinking allowed Geely Galaxy Warship 700 and Starship 7 EM-i to win the TADA Car Design Award together.

China is the source of this automotive intelligentization and electrification revolution. Many innovative technologies and functions are transmitted from China to the world. Designing the "product usage ecosystem" is a very unfamiliar topic for Western designers. This time the Geely Design Forum also played a role in conveying Chinese new thinking to the global automotive industry.

Fabrizio Giordano expressed concern about the global ecosystem position of Italian automotive design at the forum site, and expressed agreement with Chen Zheng's statement that "global automotive design practitioners must work hand in hand". He said, "The most outstanding characteristic of Asians is their willingness to communicate. They know that even in a country like ours where the application of new technology is slightly lagging, it is still possible to collide with brilliant inspiration that changes the whole situation".

We have followed Geely's annual international design forum held in Shanghai at the end of every year. Every session, we can see them bringing out the research on Chinese aesthetics and the values behind them, as well as the results; every session, they invite predecessors and cross-disciplinary veterans from the automotive design world to attend and discuss the path to the formation of the "Chinese Design System".

When "Chinese Design" is still on paper, we thought it was just a blueprint; when it was moved to the podium, we thought it was just theory. Until today, when Geely brought this whole set of Chinese aesthetic system under the dome of Turin—it is no longer a research report, no longer a PPT, but the body curves that overseas designers stop to gaze at, and the sigh of European users when opening the car door.

What this Turin Auto Show gave us the greatest feeling was: Chinese Design has established itself on the global stage!

Many major historical turnabouts happen in seemingly ordinary meetings, forums, and conversations.

In 1979, engineers at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center did not know that the daily work results they demonstrated to Jobs could change the way humans interact with computers. In 1932, curators in the MoMA exhibition hall did not know they were pushing Bauhaus to the world.

Today, when designers from East and West are debating, asking questions, and shaking hands under the dome of Turin—perhaps in many years to look back, the turning point of Chinese design "from Western learning spreading east to East-West integration" happened in Turin, at the Geely Design Forum.

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