The graphics of China

Chinese graphic design in the twentieth century, by Scott Minick and Jiao Ping, Thames & Hudson, 1990

This book is a revelation. Maryland’s Scott Minick and his wife, Shanghai’s Jiao Ping, have salvaged some momentous images before, they hint, the Middle Kingdom runs into another round of earthquakes, wars and revolutions. Their prose is clear; their colour pictures, beguiling.

From its invention of paper (first century AD) to its development of woodblock printing and movable type (AD 600-1048), China has long had a great tradition in the graphic arts. Its domination by Western powers, however, has brought mixed results.

Some merely mimicked Occidental styles. Others, following the vernacular writing and design of the inter‑war period’s Lu Xun, achieved a brilliant synthesis of Eastern and Western ideas. Others still engaged in a Maoist celebration of the backward peasant life – a fusing of regional folk art and folk heroes, Han nationalism and the socialist realism of Stalin.

Once Western firms set up design studios in Shanghai, as British American Tobacco did in 1902, they strengthened each of these three trends. When the 1919 Treaty of Versailles upheld Japanese power in China, its May Fourth student movement of the same year pushed designers away from old narrative and harmonious forms, and toward free abstraction and emotion. The effects, to my eyes, were best personified by Qian Jun‑tao, a Shanghai musician who befriended Lu Xun.

Qian’s book‑covers rose above even the delightful Art Deco ads which led the ‘Shanghai Style’: ads about cigarettes, cosmetics, ready‑to‑wear dresses, pharmaceuticals and social diseases. And, while other designers amiably followed Rodchenko in photography and montage, Qian also proved a Chinese Lissitsky. He put Chinese calligraphy in a kind of sans serif format, and used its up‑and-down, left‑to‑right potentialities to the full.

In 1942, in his mountain retreat of Yan’an, Mao made a key address to a forum of artists and writers gathered there. Its spirit was captured by his later dictum about art: that ‘the more artistic it is, the more harm it can do the people’. With America’s intervention in Korea in 1950, the revolution by default that had occurred in 1949 found itself stiffening in resolve. China, which had long been pulled apart by rival imperialisms, was now unified: its economy grew apace. Thus would its designers slavishly follow Mao’s line until the Great Helmsman died in 1976.

Yet their work wasn’t all bad. While the 1950s meant drab photos of factories, farms and construction, the swift failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward in agriculture of 1958 let in some wonderful illustration – until the Cultural Revolution of 1966 engulfed the world for a decade in hyper‑realist posters idolising Mao, as well as ads for the risible operas favoured by his wife. Since Deng Xiao‑ping’s open door policy of 1978, however, Chinese graphics has advanced rapidly. Of particular note are the low‑tech prints of Qin Long, the use of airbrush à la Alan Aldridge, and a tasteful revival of folk traditions.

As with most of today’s design history, this book neglects the impact of key upheavals on creative practice. We learn nothing of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, of Sun Yat Sen, the crushing of the revolution in Shanghai in 1927, or the Sino‑Soviet split of 1958. But this is to cavil. The authors are to be congratulated. More please!