For a rural arts festival, Untitled Macao takes the pastoral from pastel to kaleidoscopic

In Guanzhong, within the Chinese province of Shaanxi, there’s a traditional custom called Mangba Hui, which entails rural farmers inviting friends, family, and opera troupes together to celebrate the summer harvest. Keeping this tradition alive and revitalising the custom for the 21st century is the Guanzhong Mangba Arts Festival, which has expanded the event to include art and craft activities, as well as a folk film festival, all with the aim of keeping the artistic rural culture thriving. Recently celebrating its sixth year, the festival needed an identity that reflected its delicate balance of customary and contemporary voices while championing the vibrancy of the community it fosters.  

To achieve this, the festival collaborated with Untitled Macao, a design studio based in Macao, China, founded by creative director Au Chon Hin. “We chose to participate because we have long focused on the integration of traditional culture and modern design,” Hin says. The team aimed to entice young people and international travellers to rural Chinese culture by making them feel welcome. In celebrating Mangba Hui – and expanding its reach – Untitled Macao were tasked with championing rural traditions but also finding a tonal equilibrium between traditional, rural, urban and modern living.

To achieve this balance, Hin says, that they lead with the idea of “locality” and, transofrming elemants of production and life in the village into a series of symbols. Through elementary, geometric forms, the identity illustrates rural scenes – whether it be food stuffs, animals, gatherings, architecture, or landscape – and reimagines their natural hues through a more saturated lens. “These elements are presented in the form of abstract illustrations,” Him notes, preserving “rural memories” in a simple, modern light. Hin says that Guanzhong is also informally known as the ‘Capital of Carbohydrates’, and so pasta features as a key visual element throughout, reflecting the towns culture of food and the warmth it can provide in contrast to hectic urban activity. 

While going for a modern overall look, there are nods to more traditional techniques. One such is the soft, subtle application of hand-rendered texture to modern typography, an effect that Hin suggests “symbolises the interaction between villagers”, contrasting the modern, mathematical illustrations. The narratives behind Untitled Macao’s illustrations doesn’t stop there. In fact, the illustrative system is exactly that – a system – with different stroke styles interpreting different things. “For example, triangles and circles are combined to represent stacked grains, and smooth lines are used to outline the contours of animals,” Hin says. “The composition breaks the traditional symmetrical pattern, adopting irregular typesetting and dynamic visual flow to guide the viewer’s gaze to wander across the image.”

Untitled Macao’s festival identity achieves a welcoming and warm balance between a brand that feels appropriate while, at the same time, surprising – culminating in something that challenges preconceptions of rural life and rural living without diminishing it. “The core of the design is not to challenge people’s inherent perception of nature,” Hin explains, “but to break the stereotype that ‘rural culture is equal to simple realism.’” Throughout Guanzhong Mangba Arts Festival’s geometric kaleidoscope of saturated hues and contemporary typography, the studio has reinterpreted an arcadian lifestyle but, importantly, as Hin says, the identity “preserves its original artistic tension while giving it contemporary aesthetic value.”