Abstract With limited public exhibitions and industrial collaborations, book/journal cover design emerged as a critical means for the creation and dissemination of modern art in Republican China (1911–1949). At the time, the need for good everyday design helped justify painting and drawing as essential to modernizing Chinese society. The new concept and practice of design (tu’an) enabled artists to evade the constraints in subject matter and style inherent in fine arts media, thus allowing them to innovate in the graphic medium. The periodical Gongxian, in print from 1927 to 1929, recruited both renowned avant-garde painters and little-known female designers to design the cover of nearly every issue. Gongxian registered the strategies and methods developed by China’s first generation of modern designers, who hoped to merge global visual trends with local inspirations. By examining the graphic treatment of the female nude motif, the adoption of archaeological material, and the typographic invention of Chinese script as a unique design vocabulary, this essay demonstrates how the designers localized transnational design and made modern art accessible to middle-class consumers in Shanghai. The case study demonstrates that cover art in China was not an extension of modernism that originated in painting and drawing, but the very site and driving force of modernism. The circumstances of modern design in China thus offer a better understanding of global modernism by rethinking the relationship between painting, print, and design.
Ren Wei (Thu,) studied this question.