Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century

From posters and advertisements to book covers and magazines, here is an astonishing collection of graphics, brilliantly uncovered by the authors, the long-forgotten sources, mostly in China itself, having survived innumerable upheavals: natural catastrophes, war and revolution.

Beginning with the basic traditions of Chinese graphics, the authors show how the writer and artist Lu Xun became the centre of cultural revival in the new China. We see Art Deco coming to China in the Shanghai Style; and the birth of a dynamic national design style, born of Russian Constructivism and China's own drive for new technology. The Socialist Realist art of Mao in turn adopted folk traditions to fuel the Revolutionary machine, while the continuing search for a new identity can be seen in the graphic images of protest from the summer of 1989.