A creative market brimming with the fresh scent of corn and youthful energy opened vibrantly on the morning of July 18th in front of the new village committee building of Shanhu Village, Jinhe Town, Jiexi County.

The village's IP mascot, "Shanhu Kid," featuring a yellow corn-shaped head and dressed in lake blue and pastoral green, adorned various cultural products, themed stamps, and agricultural product packaging.

Traditional crafts like cloisonné and lacquer-dyed fans were featured in interactive stalls, while Qiaopi (overseas Chinese remittance) culture was introduced to the public through digital games and themed postcards.

Organized by the College of Design, Crafts, and Fine Arts of Guangdong Vocational College of Arts, with support from multiple provincial and local units, the "Village Encounter: Shanhu" creative market will run until July 19th.

Beyond the Market: Embedding Design in Rural Value Chains

While appearing as a simple village market, the event addresses a deeper question: how can university art and design move beyond "sending works to the countryside" to "creating sustainable value for rural areas."

As Guangdong's "Hundreds of Thousands Project" progresses, the focus of county, town, and village development is shifting from initial visible changes to ensuring sustainability, resource appreciation, and tangible benefits for residents.

National policies encourage integrating creative design, fine arts, handicrafts, and digital culture into rural socio-economic development.

This creative market represents the college's grassroots practice of embedding its professional resources into the rural industrial chain, value chain, and consumption chain.

From Selling Corn to Telling the Shanhu Story

A key challenge for rural creative activities is avoiding a generic, "one-size-fits-all" approach.

The design team from Guangdong Vocational College of Arts did not apply a pre-made template but sought answers within the village itself.

Local elements like sweet corn, lake-field ecology, traditional dwellings, ancient village textures, and Qiaopi culture became the raw materials for extensive research and creative translation, leading to the birth of the "Shanhu Kid" IP.

This mascot, with its corn-shaped head and design elements reflecting local architecture and landscape colors, is not merely a cartoon corn but a cultural symbol condensing the village's name, produce, ecology, and local character into a recognizable, spreadable, and extensible brand.

Centered on this IP, the team developed a village logo, visual identity system, and a series of products including figurines, plush toys, stamps, and agricultural packaging, while also planning signage, photo spots, and consumption scenes.

This effort has connected Shanhu Village's previously scattered resources into a cohesive brand language recognizable to tourists, the market, and usable by villagers.

The creative market serves as both a showcase for these outcomes and a testing ground for products, gathering real-world feedback on popularity, visitor engagement, and market suitability, transforming design from a closed aesthetic exercise into a process involving public participation, market validation, and continuous iteration.

From One-Day Event to Permanent Workshop

To prevent outcomes from dissipating after the event, the college focused on platform building.

Collaborating with provincial and town-level rural revitalization teams, the college helped plan the "Welfare Lottery Empowerment & Creative Workshop" project for Shanhu Village, which involves renovating a village-owned disused warehouse.

With a total investment of 1.7 million yuan, the project aims to transform approximately 986.25 square meters into a multifunctional platform for resident artist creation, rural cultural product R&D, public experience, and成果展示.

For universities serving rural areas, the real challenge is often not generating an idea but turning it into a prototype, then a product, and finally integrating it into stable production and consumption cycles.

The "Creative Workshop" provides a permanent载体 for the entire cycle from research and design to prototyping,展示, feedback, and commercialization.

The market event acts as a pilot test, accumulating real data and on-site experience to optimize future space operations, product mixes, and experiential programs, charting a development path from temporary events to permanent spaces, product conversion, and industrial extension.

From One Village to the Entire County

Shanhu Village is not the first site in Jiexi County where the college's design力量 has been applied.

In recent years, the College of Design, Crafts, and Fine Arts has consistently deployed professional teams, studios, and corporate resources to meet the needs of Jiexi's典型 towns and villages for landscape enhancement, cultural preservation, and industrial development.

相关 projects have integrated 8 majors, 45 studios, and 786 teachers and students, collaborating with 19 local enterprises.

Thirty-seven teachers have been stationed at Jiexi's rural revitalization talent驿站, forming a systematic service chain from cultural decoding and visual translation to outcome转化.

In Mianhu Town, teams transformed the cultural DNA of the ancient town into murals, signage, cultural products, and digital content, visually reintroducing its heritage into public spaces.

For enhancing Jiexi's agricultural brands, teams combined local produce with modern visual design, moving packaging designs from classroom concepts to production lines.

Addressing specific issues like unclear scenic area signage, teams improved wayfinding systems, allowing design to directly respond to tourist experience and grassroots governance needs.

By the time of a recent案例申报, the teams had completed 39 key area planning schemes, 124标识 systems, implemented 1,339 square meters of rural murals, developed 51 digital IPs and cultural products, and facilitated the production of 25,300 units of "Guangdong Brand" agricultural packaging, generating related output value of 8.3817 million yuan in 2024 and serving 16 towns and sub-districts across Jiexi.

These practices were crystallized into a case study selected as an outstanding典型案例 for Guangdong's 2025 "Dual Hundred Actions," with the Mianhu ancient town cultural gene activation project also入选 a national ministry education activity.

These project implementations demonstrate that university design services must evolve from sporadic activities into systematic projects to yield visible, usable, and sustainable county-level development results.

Growing Together with the Countryside

For the village, the college provides not just design outcomes but a working mechanism for continuously identifying problems, responding to needs, and transforming resources.

For the college, Jiexi is not merely a destination for social practice but an open classroom for talent cultivation,专业建设, and成果转化.

Real rural projects have no "standard answers." Students must repeatedly communicate with village officials, residents, support teams, and market entities, understanding how agricultural products are made, how rural history is narrated, and how public spaces are used.

Resident approval, product feasibility, and visitor engagement become more direct measures of success than classroom grades.

This mutual empowerment integrates the educational chain of arts vocational education with county development needs.

Students enhance their professional skills and understanding of rural China by solving real problems, while the locality gains sustained youth creativity, professional services, and传播 resources.

The college is gradually building a closed-loop system from county-posed challenges and university response to college execution, project implementation, outcome commercialization, and educational feedback, transforming individual village visits into long-term cooperation.

The market may end, but the design process must not.

The potential of a single kernel of corn depends not just on a charming IP image but on an entire mechanism encompassing cultural excavation, product development, scene creation, market operation, talent cultivation, and outcome conversion.

As the Shanhu Village creative complex project advances, "Shanhu Kid" will appear beyond market stalls, and more local culture, traditional crafts, and特色物产 will be rediscovered, experienced, and consumed anew through design.

Awakening the countryside through design,承接 creativity through industry, and nourishing the地方 through education—this creative market in Shanhu Village is writing a vivid footnote on how arts vocational education serves the broader rural revitalization project.