What Graham Fink did next
Graham Fink, the former chief creative officer of Ogilvy China, is back on English soil after a seven-year voyage out east. Above all else his experience gave him an appreciation of duality, a philosophy he’s now embedded into his working life.
Graham Fink draws with his eyes
Fink is currently in that enviable stage of a long-term creative’s life: one where he can dip and out of his passion – multimedia artwork – and commercial projects at leisure. He’s busier now, busier than when he was helmed Ogilvy’s creative in China, picking up advertising clients in his adopted home and the UK while honing his own style of art.
His latest baby is Duets – Recalibrating the Forces of Duality, a collaboration with Shanghai fashion designer Ziggy Chen. The array of surrealist photos examines the dichotomous dual nature of gender; the modern, double exposures are set against darkened backgrounds reminiscent of Rembrandt portraits.
The idea sparked when Fink noticed the androgynous nature of Chan’s designs at his industrial, deconstructed store in Shanghai. “I went in and said I'd really like to meet him,” Fink recalls. “Eventually we met and chatted about a lot of different things before I went over to his studio in Shanghai.
“We spent a lot of time looking at his clothes and his process. He speaks a lot about east and west, Yin and Yang, traditional and modern. The duality theme is at the centre of everything he does, and I said that's a fantastic theme, we could do something with that.”
The photography is a far cry from Fink’s other works. His ‘Drawing with my Eyes’ series is probably his most famous – a blend of tech and artistry that turned his eyes’ own lenses into a paintbrush (he meticulously scanned the faces of his subjects for portraits that are one half Picasso, one half etch-a-sketch). But, again, it riffs on the theme of duality. In this instance, it was about the old and the new.
There’s no doubt it was Fink’s experience in China has inspired this fixation with the dual. The culture’s deep reference for heritage and the beautiful is quickly being coupled with technology that’s progressing “really fast”, according to the creative.
“China is putting billions into AI to make sure they are the winners. They’ll probably win because once they're decided they're going to do something, they get on and do it. They tend not to have lots of meetings about it.”
He also witnessed a growing willingness to improve in the realm of craft, often cited as the reason China still lags behind on the creative award scoreboard. In fact, that was what he was sent out to do with Ogilvy: guide a team of nearly 350 creatives in the creative ways of the west, while allowing cultural nuances to shine through.
Fink’s teachings from his time there could fill a book (they have already filled a Ted Talk). Don’t write in English and translate directly to Chinese, not least because your metaphor and analogies won’t make sense. Longer ads – up to seven minutes – are acceptable on special occasions. The envelope can be pushed when it comes to the saccharine. And while storytelling is universal, the Chinese view imagery very differently – literally.
“If you put a picture of a tiger up with natural foliage around it, we in the West would all look at the tiger first before we look at the surrounding foliage,” he explained. “But the Chinese wouldn't necessarily look at the tiger first – their eye would fly around the image really quickly and they would take everything in at once.”
This way of seeing infiltrates all verticals of life, including business. It means that if there’s a big issue to be tackled in a meeting, “in China they wouldn't talk about the big issue.” Instead they’d talk about all the things around it until the solution presents itself naturally.
Eventually, the mammoth nature of the task at hand led Fink to find his way back home. “I was doing a lot of the work myself and helping other people do their stuff,” he said. “It doesn't take long before you spend, well, a lot of hours at work.”
But he’s back and emboldened with a new way – a dual way – of looking at the world.
“If I see a dreadful piece of design it makes me sad. When I look at logos and commercials I often think, how may meetings have they gone through to get to this?”
Duets is on display at the Annroy Gallery until 24 August