enovate Chats With Hangzhou Creative Leaders

Charm Café

Charm Café is a youth focused creative centre located in Zhongshan Bei Lu, the creative street of Hangzhou. They provide a platform for Chinese artists and designers to present and sell their artwork, as well as regularly hosting offline activities to encourage creative thinking amongst Chinese youth. Some of their main activities include monthly West Lake Idea Mart (DIY Mart) and weekly Charm Café creative class and exhibition. They also help with organizing China Hangzhou Cultural & Creative Industry Expo in every October and China International Cartoon and Animation Festival in every May.

Creative class in Charm Cafe

Shu Chang

Shu Chang is co-founder and manager of Chame café. He is 26 years old and studied Finance at Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics. He used to work for Hunan TV station as a TV host for one year, later he worked at a user generated content website for two years. Since he cannot give up his strong passion for youth cultural as well as design, in September 2009 he decided to start Charm café with the Hangzhou government’s support and investment from his partner. His dream is to promote creative culture and encourage creative thinking by educating Chinese youth and providing a platform for creatives from all around China to share and market their products.

Interview

During our weekend trip to Hangzhou, we sat down with Shu Chang and chatted over a few cups of joe. Here are some highlights from the conversation:

How do you describe the current youth culture in Hangzhou?

There is a phrase called “Hang’ Er Feng” which describes a trend following phenomenon in Hangzhou. A lot of young people are following and copying trends from outside of China, but I think it’s good, we can learn by following and copying, at the end we will discover our own style.
Hangzhou is more conservative than Shanghai in terms of accepting new things since we have a very deep and distinctive culture, but I think right now it’s the time for innovation and development based on our original culture.

What is the future outlook of youth culture in Hangzhou?

I think we will still be in the process of learning and copying within the next 3 to 5 years, but you can see there are more and more creative activities and parties in town amongst local youth. In 5 years, you will see much more youth focused indie brands as well as opinion leaders. Local culture will be the key influence and I think we will have our own and distinctive style by then.