Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic “The thing with art”, Henry Steiner says, “is that you use it to solve your problems. Graphic design you use to solve other people’s problems.”It sounds like a line he’s used many times before. But it is also a pretty succinct definition of the profession that used to be more widely known as “commercial art”.Steiner is speaking to me in Hong Kong, whose visual culture he has absorbed and reshaped to the extent, although you might not realise it, that when you are in the city you are absolutely steeped in his work. We are talking about Henry Steiner: The Art of Graphic Communication, a retrospective at the city’s vast M+ museum, an engaging, often surprising and visually rich exhibition of works gathered from a long career.Steiner was born in Vienna in 1934, but the Jewish family’s bourgeois life was brought to an abrupt end by the Anschluss of 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria, forcing them to emigrate to the US. Little Hans’s name was changed by an immigration officer to Henry, and there it stayed. He relates only one anecdote of his Austrian days: about “a memory of being on my tricycle, I was maybe three or four, and I saw a van with a trailer advertising a soap powder, OMO, and it was playing music. It completely entranced me. It drew me so much that I even left my tricycle in the street to go and look.” Commercial art, it seems, had already supplanted ice cream in the mind of young Henry-to-be.In the US, soap powder was replaced by sci-fi. He “was a huge fan”, he says, during his Brooklyn childhood. “It was the late 1940s, the golden age of science-fiction illustration. I tried writing a bit. But I quickly got over it,” he deadpans.Designers shouldn’t have their own style — that should all be from and for the client. It’s so different to artSteiner then found himself at Yale, with its remarkable cast of central European émigré artist-teachers. “The [design department] head was Josef Albers and I was taught printmaking by Gabor Peterdi. Paul Rand [whose logos for UPS, ABC and IBM remain familiar] was there too. One day Peterdi said I should come and study graphic design. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What is it?’”Steiner quickly got the hang of it. In 1961, while working for Asia magazine, he had the opportunity to go to Hong Kong for — as he thought at the time — a year or so. He never left. “I’d always been fascinated by Asian art,” he says. “I collected Japanese prints — well, maybe I should say I accumulated them. I was amazed that you could own these things for a few dollars.”Hong Kong must, I suggest, have been a graphically stimulating place in those days, with its neon signs and the mix of Chinese and English. “The visual culture here was very busy. There were great movie posters, hand-painted action scenes that stayed up for a few weeks.”Steiner’s style began to develop, blending Modernist Madison Avenue with Chinese motifs. Would he say it was Modernist, perhaps hybrid? “Yeah, I was a Modernist,” he replies. “But hybrid? Maybe bastardised is better. Or ‘cross-cultural design’ — that was the title of my [1995] book.”Steiner went on to create visual identities for so many companies that he became the de facto designer of the island’s emerging identity. There was Hongkong Land, Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Hong Kong Air International and, most enduringly, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), whose red geometric logo is now so familiar. “I looked at the flags of the hongs, for the boats,” he says, referring to the 19th-century colonial-era business houses and merchants on the island. “The Hong Kong bank’s flag was an ‘X’ [derived from the Scottish saltire] with red triangles on either side. It was so idiotically simple that it took someone like me to dare to do it.”Steiner also remains proud of the logo for the Dairy Farm retail group, which, unusually, used English and Chinese text interchangeably. Of the packaging Steiner designed there are the Taikoo sugar boxes, one of his first commissions from the 1960s, but also the very Pop-art designs for the Peak Tower Restaurants, for instance, using a blown-up tram ticket. His own firm’s letterhead for the Year of the Dog (or “Canine Person”, as it has it) features a chewed dog biscuit, and he made wonderful paperback covers: all inventive, striking and thoroughly memorable.Most surprising, however, are the company reports. These most dreary publications turned into visual masterstrokes in Steiner’s hands. The covers feature vivid images: titles drawn on blackboards, the old Art Deco HSBC building reconstructed from corrugated card or Plasticine, an apple morphing into a ball bearing and a Statue of Liberty abutting an opera actor in full make-up. In an interview with M+ curators, Steiner said that these are “not a picture of something but a picture. A lot of people don’t know the difference.”Later in his career Steiner created a series of striking posters using Asian imagery brilliantly, often slyly hybridised with Pop invention. And there are the banknotes, designed for Standard Chartered Bank from 1978 in a series that went on for four decades, some still in circulation today (“Whenever I find one in my change,” he says, “I put it away”). “The old notes were all classical mythology, nymphs and Greek gods, because that was what was considered ‘classy’ and European,’’ he says. “I had something to do with discovering this new look of Asia, and its dynamism.”He found inspiration in the island’s architecture, the lions in front of institutions, the landscape, wildlife and Chinese mythical animals. He included images of the Fragrant Harbour in the 19th century and of the modern city with its skyscrapers. The banknotes became a branding of Hong Kong, encapsulating a complex story of colonialism and commerce, mythology and technology that it had, perhaps, been reluctant to tell itself.Steiner’s life has been, as he puts it, “lived between cultures”. “I don’t have any message that I want to say or communicate,” he says. “Designers shouldn’t have their own style — that should all be from and for the client. It’s so different to art.” Yet Steiner’s work was pivotal in developing the look of one particular culture — that of his adopted home, Hong Kong.To November 10, mplus.org.hkFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
