Yang Dean, founder of Xiamen Smart: an innovator who integrates art and technology

Xiamen Smart Enterprise founder Yang Dean is a senior designer with more than 20 industrial design experience. He started his business in Xiamen, a city known as the “Sea Garden” in Fujian Province, China. , Fujian Province has inherited the sculpture craftsmanship for thousands of years. The development of folk handicrafts such as Dehua ceramics, Hui’an stone carvings, Putian mahogany furniture, Fuzhou lacquerware has become a world-class shining business card. Fujian accounts for 30% of the national sculpture industry. Share, has more than 2 million employees and nearly 100 billion output value. However, with the rapid development of digital technology and the declining inheritance of manual skills, how can these traditional arts be given new vitality with the help of emerging technologies? Yang Dean believes that 3D Printing and 3D digital technology are the new engines for the development of these cultural and creative industries.

People are called at home “robbery” is
said to someone in Fujian Yang Dean took a nickname, called “robbery at the gates of the people,” this is clearly not praise the call so I surprised, seems to reflect the local traditions Fujian Sculpture art panic about the arrival of 3D printing. If a machine can replace humans and quickly make sculptures that are more complex and exquisite than humans, does it mean that traditional art will gradually withdraw from the stage of history?

However, Yang Dean does not agree with this. He has his own understanding of 3D printing. “This kind of statement is actually too narrow. 3D printing digital technology is like Ma Liang’s magic pen. The creative inspiration is realized quickly. Artists should master such tools and use it to create better, just like traditional painting, photography, and videography. They learn from each other and develop instead of replacing them. As long as they have creative ideas, everyone is Designers and everyone are artists.”

Over the past few years, Yang Dean has not only successfully integrated 3D digital technology with cultural and creative industries, but also established close cooperative relationships with major art schools, museums, and arts and crafts companies to help They inherit and protect big data of artworks and upgrade traditional craft industries. And the workplace confusion of Li Zhinian, let’s start a business!

Yang Dean, born in 1973, graduated from the Industrial Design School of Fuzhou University of Arts and Crafts, and the Oil Painting Department of Xiamen University School of Art. Following this life track, Yang Dean should focus on the pursuit of art full of uncertainty. However, he entered a state-owned enterprise and became an advertising designer, carrying the “iron rice bowl” that everyone envied at the time. This end was twelve years.

At the embarrassing age of more than 30 years old, frivolous and too old, and too young to be comfortable, do you continue to stay in a mediocre system under a stable system, or to find more possibilities in life? Obviously, most people will be confused in their 30s, and Yang De’an is no exception.

In the end, driven by the restless soul, Yang Dean chose to start a business. He applied the current Internet buzzword, “The world is so big, I want to see it.” In 2005, Yang Dean founded Xiamen Smart Industrial Design Co., Ltd., which successively engaged in industrial product R&D and design and power equipment manufacturing industry, and completed the transformation from design creativity to manufacturing.

3D printing can be said to be Yang Dean’s third venture. In 2009, Yang Dean accepted the invitation of Xiamen Science and Technology Bureau to become an expert judge in the field of industrial design in Xiamen, and participated in the preparation of the Xiamen Industrial Design Center. At that time, the center purchased more than 10 million various industrial-grade 3D printing scanning equipment. During the cooperation, Yang Dean had a deep understanding of the forming principles and applications of 3D printing, and he immediately realized that 3D printing is in his own cultural and creative field. There are a lot of cross-border opportunities, this will be a technological revolution!

Yang Dean, who knows nothing about 3D technology, led the design team to learn from the simplest printing principles. With 20 years of industrial design experience, he conducts R&D and exploration from various industry applications. However, it was difficult to get started at the beginning, wrong orientation, unable to recruit professional R&D personnel, difficulties in business development, large investment in the early stage, and difficulty in short-term return… But as long as the will is firm, success can be made out, with the help of seeking talents. With eager enthusiasm, Dr. Wu Huaiyu, an expert in the field of 3D printing, was moved by Yang Dean’s persistence and took the lead in joining the Smart team. Two PhD supervisors from Huaqiao University Tan Yuanqiang and Tsinghua Bauhinia Research Institute Liu Zhiguang joined the R&D ranks. . Smart is now full of talents.

Promote the digitalization of traditional cultural and creative industries
Last year, a fire broke out in the Lingshan Sanskrit Palace in Wuxi. The news of the “treasure torch” on the Internet still lingers Yang Dean’s heart. He is worried about a group of large lacquer sculptures “The Days of Wukong’s Absent” that Professor Zhuang Nanpeng, the tutor of the Academy of Fine Arts, has collected in the Vatican Palace. Will it “suffer”. This group of interesting works won the gold medal of the 10th “Hua Li Award” China Creative Competition.
“Artists’ works are often orphans. Once destroyed, even the artist himself cannot restore the original appearance. If we keep the data of these works, we can restore and protect these precious works. Artwork.” Yang Dean said.

Although the fire made Yang De’an a false alarm, it is clear that how to safely protect and display artworks and cultural relics has become an urgent problem in the cultural and creative circles. Based on this, Yang Dean is leading the Smart entrepreneurial team to use digital modeling and 3D printing to provide big data services for cultural and creative products, and is committed to effective digital storage and intellectual property protection for cultural and artistic heritage and creative products.
Nowadays, we can see the 3D printed version of “The Days When Wukong Was There” in various materials and sizes in Smart’s exhibition hall. The naive attitude of the master and apprentice has been preserved without any difference.

This is just a small epitome of the role of 3D printing in the field of cultural creativity. Smart’s award-winning work “Bullish” at the Changchun International Sculpture ExhibitionWith the continuous promotion of the application of Smart 3D printing technology in the industry, the digital sculpture revolution has begun to emerge in Fujian, the most concentrated area of ​​the national sculpture industry. Various industry associations and companies in the cultural and creative industry have come to Smart for inspection and exchanges. In the words of Zhang Shouzhi, a professor of the Tsinghua Academy of Fine Arts, a leading ceramics industry, “I have traveled all over the world and have not seen a company like yours. At the same time, you have a professional art and design team, complete industrial-grade printing equipment, and innovative research and development capabilities. You are the partners I have been looking for for so many years!” 3D printing technology has developed a variety of state banquet porcelains for the BRICS meeting, and technological innovation has achieved great success! This is a historical milestone in the transformation of ceramic production technology, marking that China’s ceramic industry is about to enter the ranks of digital intelligent manufacturing. Under the vigorous promotion of Prof. Zhang Shouzhi, an authority in the industry, the governments and enterprises of various large ceramic producing areas across the country began to take action to develop close cooperation with Smart.

Yang Dean revealed: At present, sculpture companies are generally facing a serious shortage of talents. It takes at least ten years to train a senior craftsman who is proficient in carving techniques. There are very few young people who are willing to sink their hearts to learn handicrafts, and the mobility of technical personnel is particularly high. Faced with the increase in production orders, carving production companies The development dilemma has become increasingly prominent.

The team led by Yang Dean can use 3D digital technology to solve the production technical problems of the engraving industry. First of all, it began to be used in the arts and crafts industry of traditional manual production. The required models were designed in the computer through accurate digital modeling technology, and then mass production was completed through 3D printing and digital output equipment. During this period, more than ten years of work experience are no longer required. The master of stone carving or wood carving greatly reduces the labor cost and the uncertainty of human error.

There is usually only one classic work of a famous artist, which is difficult for ordinary people to own; there is a serious shortage of sculpture technicians in the sculpture industry, and there is a labor shortage in the industry; the initial creativity of designers or ordinary people can only stay in the mind of the idea or limited to the drawings , Cannot be quickly converted into creative physical works; museum cultural relics are exhibited all over the world, which consumes a lot of manpower and material resources, and it is inconvenient to import and export…
These headaches that are often encountered in the cultural and creative industry are now easily solved by Smart, and can provide all-round services for cultural and creative enterprises, including product development and production, creative design, and corporate personalized customization needs. And big data collection services.

In addition, Yang Dean believes that mankind is about to enter the era of the Internet of Things, and the 3D printing industry must be integrated with the Internet to allow more people to understand, contact, and apply 3D printing technology. Smart is very open on this point-actively cooperate with various arts and crafts enterprises, art schools, the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the School of Materials Science and Engineering of Xiamen University, and the Taiwan Cloud Association to develop a design innovation application platform with experts in various fields. In addition, it has also established a 3D Maker 3D printing technology cloud platform ecosystem to realize the integration of intelligent manufacturing and the Internet, and build a 3D cloud platform online to collect big data, and create a consumer circle, enterprise circle, entrepreneurial circle, product circle, and collection circle offline. Create a new model of digital industry.

3D printing meets ceramic art: the most beautiful accident
. The development of the country’s first clay 3D printer can be said to be Smart’s most unexpected touch of magic. In early 2015, Qiu Shuangjiong, an 83-year-old Chinese ceramic art master, brought a piece of clay to Yang Dean and asked him if he could develop a clay 3D printer.

As we all know, traditional pottery art is on a rotating pottery wheel. The two hands follow the rotation of the pottery wheel to slowly shape the clay into various shapes. It seems a simple process, but in fact, the hand only realizes that precise force control is needed. The pottery wheel The rotation speed of the ceramics and the wetness of the clay need to be paid attention to at all times. If you don’t pay attention, you will lose all your previous efforts. And if 3D printing with more precise control is used to do it, what new state will this traditional art bring to?

This kind of thought made Yang Dean very excited. The Smart team began to cooperate with Xiamen Industrial Design Center for research and development, overcoming numerous difficulties and finally developed the country’s first clay 3D printer equipment at the end of 2015. However, the Smart team discovered during the research and development process that if only the existing 3D printer was modified without fundamentally adjusting the printing technology to adapt to the particularity of the clay material, the printed pottery would be deformed, collapsed, and burned at the same time. In the future, there will be many problems such as low thermal resistance, cracking, etc., which cannot be compared with the ceramic type manufactured by traditional technology. Therefore, the Smart team spent nearly a year in cooperation with the Fujian Dehua Phoenix Ceramics Research Institute, and finally understood the nature of pottery clay, gave birth to a new concept of clay, and completely solved the problem of the collapse of pottery clay. At the same time, it also summarized a set of 3D printing process suitable for ceramic clay, and produced ceramic clay 3D printer styles suitable for different users, with a maximum printing volume of 800*800*800 (cm).

Are pottery clay products that have left handwork and rely solely on machine control as pottery? Yang Dean, who has been immersed in the art world for a long time, believes that “3D printing, a digital technology, has actually brought the possibility of a new artistic language to ceramic art, and it is not 3D printing itself that needs to be emphasized.” First of all, one of the biggest benefits that 3D printing brings to traditional ceramic art is the degree of freedom in form. Due to the characteristics of craftsmanship and materials, traditional ceramic art has a lot of creative space in form, but it is also subject to many specific constraints. 3D printing adopts the “additive manufacturing” method of superimposing layers, following the process of ceramic production of clay sticks, breaking through many limitations of traditional ceramic art in morphology;

secondly, the gap between layers in the 3D printing process is used in industrial applications The above is a kind of “defect” that requires post-processing, but in the clay printing, this “defect” can be emphasized. Through the control of the printing track of the 3D printer, various unexpected creations are created on the surface of the pottery. texture effects; Further, in the industrial production mode, the machine is in full control of the pre-set, but if the randomness is introduced in the case of human intervention in a 3D printing process, environmental factors (such as temperature, humidity, noise, Geographical location, etc.) are integrated into the production process, and the parameters are transformed into the shape and surface texture of the 3D printed product to create a unique sense similar to handwork, which is full of creative expectations for creators.

“It is not so much that new technology will’replace’ traditional craftsmanship, but it is better to say that new technology is expanding the definition of the concept of’craft’ itself.” Yang Dean is a senior designer, an artist, and an entrepreneur. Starting from these roles, his understanding of the new technology of 3D printing may be more accurate. Under this understanding, he has been practising to help the traditional cultural and creative fields expand a broader territory, whether it is to promote the digitization of artworks or the promotion of clay 3D printing technology, Smart always uses “boosters” instead of “boosters”. The identity of the looter is participating in this unprecedented storm of technological revolution.