My fieldwork on CHFE (Part I)

The 7^th China International Housing & Furnishing Exposition (CHFE) held in Ningbo International Conference and Exhibition Center on April 10-13, 2009. CHFE exhibits products of real estate, building materials and housing decoration etc.

About 20 real estate developers exhibited their products there, most of which are for residential use.

Most of the real estate exhibits were decorated luxuriously with a western style. Pianos and violins are played there showing an upper class lifestyle. The most impressive scene to me is that a girl played piano in an exhibit corner decorated with classic western elements: oil painting, plaster model and fireplace.

It is also interesting to find out that almost all the real estate billboards are ‘bilingual’. Apparently, they are not going to sell those houses to foreigners. English is more a decorative thing here to make the advertising a superior look. The most ridiculous English sentence is on a billboard by Ningxing City Garden, which reads ’you changed your master’s degree…from computer science to…so you could participate in…’. It seems like the advertising designer randomly picked it from somewhere just to decorate the advertising.