Dripping in nostalgia, restaurant MáLà Project's identity by Jingqi Fan hurtles us back to the ’90s

Flipping through the jewel-toned images of MáLà Project’s identity by New York-based graphic designer and art director, Jingqi Fan, is akin to stepping into a time machine. And yet, it’s not a regular time machine, for the identity takes us to a place that feels drenched in nostalgia, but is also immediately modern. MáLà Project, based in the Big Apple, celebrates neo-Sichuanese cuisine. Known for its dry pot dish – made from a complex blend of 24 herbs and spices, and wok-fried in its signature Má (numbing) Là (spicy) sauce – ‘it’s a fiery medley of mouthwatering ingredients that first snuck onto mainstream menus in 1990’s China, just as the country opened its doors to the rest of the world.’ When Fan began building a world for MáLà Project to live in, she was drawn back to ’90s China, a unique time in the country’s history, when Eastern tradition and Western novelty coexisted for the very first time. “The bilingual communications that followed were often a haphazard patchwork of elements that felt refreshingly new and rule-bending,” notes Fan. To draw from this unique cultural duality, and set a course for MáLà Project that distinguishes both its spirit and business, she dove deep into research. “Food is a reflection of culture and a carrier of memories. When this project first began, I noticed that the modern Chinese restaurant scene abounds in stereotypical motifs that only scratched the surface of a country with history developed over thousands of years,” she says. From Tang dynasty heirloom seals, Su-Shi’s classical poetry to Mao-era ration tickets, and Faye Wong’s cassette tapes, Fan’s research was eclectic and wide-ranging. Focused on subverting the obvious and expected, she wanted to understand how certain cultural traditions shaped the visual language of the past and present. “Only in this way could I create a visual universe that embodied MáLà Project’s nostalgic spirit – not just a facsimile of the ’90s Chinese aesthetics,” she reveals.