Reflection On Chinese Cover Design In 1930s

Reflections on Chinese Cover Design in 1930s

Yewen Fan

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” (Dickens 1999, pp.1)

During the early years of twentieth-century, with the collapse of the last feudal dynasty, Qing dynasty, China suffered an unprecedented wave of political and social change that resulted in a self-identity crisis as Chinese people were sandwiched between centuries-old traditions and a flow of Western importation. In an atmosphere of domestic discontent and increasing Western influence, artists and designers engaged in a wide range of artistic experimentation with eagerness and established a new identity for their Chinese audience, one

Many book and magazine covers designed in this period got enrich the visual vocabulary of composition by absorbing new resources from Western art and design styles like Modernism, Constructivism, Art Nouveau and so on. They combined Chinese traditional flavors and Western composition artfully and formed Chinese own artistic productions. As Scott Minick and Ping Jiao noted the Chinese design in 1930s achieved “a masterful synthesis” of color, shape and pattern that transcended many superficial Western applicants. These stylistic book and magazine covers generally can be divided into two groups. The first is a group of covers showing an intense desire for political self-determination and the recovery of a sense of national identity working with abstract symbols, linear construction and broad color planes pulling from Modernism and Constructivism (see figure3). The second group is called Shanghai Style (Wong 2003). It is considered to entail a blend of traditional fine and folk arts like bronze and stone carving, along with geometric patterns, asymmetric layout and san serif typefaces from Art Nouveau and Art Deco (see

It changed the functions of books and the entire concept of the book design (Andrews 1998, pp.181). By tradition, the major function of books before 1920 was to sustain traditional Chinese culture and to support the existing power structure of monarchy (Zhao 2011, pp.164-165). Most of those books before 1920 were not designed and crafted for profit-oriented use. Thus, books at that time used very plain and text-based covers to fulfill the utility of easy to be identified and marked the boundary between classes, as the traditional signs of classically trained elites was the elegant use of classical Chinese. Books in ancient feudal China were viewed as their property only, inaccessible and without application to the lives of the great majority of Chinese people. That is, covers designed before 1920 were for reading rather than