Bolo: Love-idea=Love for Idea + Idea of Love
In the early spring of the year 2008, a seed of love sprouted in Beijing. Love-idea, a small charity organization gathered by a group of life-loving idea creators, is now opening its arms to a grand wish:
Positioned as a special charity channel, Love-idea is poised to turn the ideas of urban residents into eye-catchy products via rural workforce. Those products are then sold to small markets of cities with the earnings returning to the rural areas. With that, a small chain of idea industry (city-country-city) is forged out.
At the first meet with Bolo, founder of Love-idea, she was participating in a documentary salon. She was short-haired and dressed in a black blouse. The silk scarf glittered around her white smooth neck, splashing a stylish smell, and highlighting a brisk and bright profile. But an in-depth conversation led me to her thoughtful side. It is, perhaps, her ambivalence of characters that gifted her with the power to combine love and ideas.
Attracted by her delicate shell eardrops, I asked her if she had any experience in art design, or interest in traditional folklore. To my great surprise, she had never learned or worked in art industry; but her initiative for the NOP cause came partially out of her affinity for the traditional folklore. The model of Love-idea is, in a strict sense, an idea, which was inspired during a visit (which was launched by “Heavy Backpack”, a volunteer organization) to Shuoyang of Guangxi Province in May, 2007. Bolo, being a member of the visit, witnessed a heart-breaking scene:
A woman in fifties was quietly sitting in a gloomy room, sewing an Indian sari glimmering in the dark. But beyond her knowledge was that the sari that took weeks to finish but yielded only 20 RMB was tagged with an exorbitant price in the market as a handicraft. The majority of the value was snatched by agents-in-between.
Stirred up by the obvious exploitations, Bolo established Love-idea with a view to helping those impoverished rural laborers. For them, there was no end in sight for a higher income. So Bolo was determined to save the extra rural workforce from being a money spinner.
Layman as she is in idea creation, Bolo has many friends in art industry. They can afford the time and energy to create something new. And more importantly, they have the aspiration to seek for a way directly out of life to spread their love, which is above anything else to be an idea-creator of love.
“We have a teammate nicknamed ‘fan of fun’ who makes lamps from used zips. That’s a lot of fun and provides not only fine works but also an environment-friendly notion,” said Bolo with a balmy smile. “Of course, love crosses over borders,” she highlights, “I hope more people (not just designers) could take care of things around them.” Self-improvement and helping others are not restricted to art industry; the idea-creation of artifacts is nothing but a form of charity. “For example, we once sold the poems collected in the idea bazaar as a means to fund charity,” explained Bolo. From her illustrations, what Love-idea tries to deliver seems to be the concept that even those who know nothing about design could feed back to the society with ideas.
“What is charity? Can we count what generates value for the society as a charity in the broad sense?” Bolo, with a deeper understanding of charity, sticks to her own definition. In her mind, charity implies far more than the name itself, or any form of it; it concerns substantive elements such as love, responsibility and social value. “Take a business for example,” she added, “what seems to only benefit itself virtually benefits the society. So businesses can be broadly defined as charity.” Those narrowly-defined NGOs have shouldered their commitments but may have followed a wrong route. Therefore what Love-idea can and will do is only “do something and do it as well as possible, however insignificant it may be.” Besides, according to Bolo, it is better to put ourselves in an equal status with those we help than to override them.
Love-idea organized an activity named “Face-to-face with Ethnic Yi” in mid-April, which was aimed at providing an interactive platform for Ethnic Yi and urban citizens interested in ethnic handicrafts to communicate and socialize. And hopefully some opportunities of development may be available to the people of Ethnici Yi. Apart from that, the website of Love-idea is being constructed. The wiki-model network platform will be used to deliver missions of love, which ranges from a design of a recycle bag to a proposal for folklore preservation.
Creating ideas with love, the practice advocated by Love-idea, is more of a life philosophy. It could splatter in all walks of urban life, filling our life with love and fun, and passing the warmth to our rural people. For love and idea shall never rest in peace.
