Counterfeit stickers, 2013 collected on the occasion of the exhibition V&A in Shenzhen: Rapid Response Collecting, staged at the 5th Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, The Value Factory, Shenzhen.

These stickers, a by-product of the shanzhai fake goods industry, are applied to counterfeit electronic products to make them appear more authentic. Shanzhai products, counterfeit or faked consumer goods, are an international cliché of Chinese low-cost manufacturing.

Shenzhen, China’s first special Economic Zone is located at the tip of the Pearl River Delta. The city grew from a modest fishing town into a vast, sprawling metropolis of more than fifteen million in just thirty-five years, through manufacturing, trade and relentless commercial energy. Today Shenzhen is the world’s third busiest container port, with a population with an average age of the less than thirty and almost entirely composed of recent migrants.

The invitation to participate in the Bi-City Biennale enabled the museum to engage with this fast-changing city and to road test the recently introduced Rapid Response Collecting strand. The museum asked more than sixty people in Shenzhen to propose a design object that told a story about their city and the result was an exhibition of twenty-three things and twenty-three stories about the place. By exhibiting everyday objects, the show placed centre stage the realities of urban life, of industry and of commercial and social change.

These counterfeit stickers were suggested by Aric Chen, curator of design and architecture at M+ in Hong Kong. Chen says that the Shenzhen economy will soon not be so dependent on this kind of production. For Chen, the stickers, applied to fake products to make them look more authentic, are ‘a testament to the ingenuity and thoroughness of the shanzhai industry that has helped propel Shenzhen these past 30 years. But at the same time, they hint at their own obsolescence. At some point in the not-too-distant future, these stickers – and all they imply – will be a relic of an earlier era.’

The Shenzhen exhibition was the first test of Rapid Response Collecting, a new approach intended to make museum collecting more responsive to global events, and to situate design in immediate relation to moments of political or social change. The museum opened its own space dedicated to Rapid Response Collecting in July 2014.