This year's second-year students were given the task of coming up with design proposals for an electric Formula One car. One of the most illuminating designs - which Wong says succeeded in creating a futuristic car that still managed to retain current F1 DNA - was Cullen Zeng's car, designed as a Honda (too bad Honda pulled out of Formula One last year).

"Look at the way this car sits - how it hovers right above the ground," Wong told Car Design News after the review. "It has the feeling that it is hugging the road." Mr Zeng and Hugh Zhang, another student, managed to preserve the "F1 DNA" even as they tried successfully to take the sport in new directions, Wong said.

However talented Ms Wang, Mr Zeng and the other students at CAFA's school of transportation design may be - or indeed how determined they are to pursue car design professionally - they face dim prospects in a domestic industry that doesn't value their skills.

Wong, their instructor, is trying to change that. Over the past five years he has worked on-and-off as an outside design consultant for Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Corp. (BAIC), helping the company come up with uniquely designed and styled cars of its own, which it aims to launch over the next few years. A 1987 graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, he went to work at GM's main design studio near Detroit before becoming a car design instructor in the mid-‘90s, teaching car design in California and Hong Kong.

Since arriving in Beijing a few years ago, Wong has designed, among other cars, the Beijing Warrior (the rugged vehicle China's army now uses as its main jeep), the Beijing 800 sedan and several other concept cars shown by Beijing Auto at the Beijing auto show in 2008.

Since joining CAFA last September, he has concentrated much of his efforts on changing the outlook of students like Ms Wang and Mr Zeng.

Wang says she was planning to continue her design studies in the US, but was compelled to stay in China and pursue her dream of becoming a car designer when she learned about the car styling curriculum established by Wong, which is similar in structure to that used at Art Center.

Ms Wang has it better than many of her fellow aspiring car designers across China, which in recent years has opened a number of transportation design schools. She plans, for now, to work with Mr Wong after graduation, consulting for Beijing Auto.

Until Chinese automakers start taking design more seriously, however, theirs will remain a challenging job market, and a lot of homegrown talent coming out of schools like CAFA will go to waste.

Related Website:
China Central Academy Of Fine Arts