Heroic and Everyday: Jiang Xin's Book Cover Design and Modern Art in Republican China (1911–1949)

In 1925, China’s foremost modern writer and intellectual Lu Xun (1881–1936) lamented the superficial nature of modern book design, writing: “It seems that one is only capable of drawing a soldier on a horse dashing forward, as if this is the representation of the so-called ‘revolution, revolution!’”[1] For Lu Xun, unsophisticated revolutionary visual tropes failed to represent the new visual culture brought on by China’s dramatic political transformation from a dynastic empire to a modern democratic republic in the early twentieth century.[2] His remark came at a time when the modern, lightweight livre de poche containing new literature written in vernacular Chinese began to emerge as a new visual medium for the creation and circulation of visual modernity.[3] In China, book cover art played an outsize role in balancing revolutionary aspirations with the commercial viability of cultural products. More specially, book cover designs created by avant-garde artists mediated between high-minded modern art and literature nurtured by a litterateur-artist coterie and a glamorous visual culture driven by a new urban middle class.

A republic in name was of little use without an enduring and effective education of the public to sustain the fundamental ideological shift. Modern education focusing on popularizing Western sciences and thoughts was at the center of the New Culture Movement in the 1910s and 1920s.[4] As part of the movement, cultural reformers promoted Western-style drawing and painting as a technology capable of aiding national salvation in the face of Western powers’ encroachment in China. This nationalist ideal aside, modern art education and practices also catered to transformations in market demand for art and academic art training. In a case study of the Shanghai Art Academy, for example, Jane Zheng demonstrates how the school’s program navigated both market demands and Shanghai’s burgeoning cosmopolitan culture.[5] Unlike in Europe, where the avant-garde movement “c[ould] be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society,” there was no bourgeois class to serve as an antagonist for modernists in China.[6] On the contrary, as a result of educational reform and economic development, a new urban middle class emerged in the 1920s to become the primary audience for avant-garde art and literature. Writers, artists, and publishers weaved social and political concerns into their cultural products containing new literary and visual vocabularies informed by international artistic trends. Book cover design, therefore, offers an ideal medium through which to understand the “tension between prosaic everydayness and high-minded ideology, between quotidian commercial culture and heroic political culture,” which, as Joan Judge argues, represents “one of the most enduring dialectical tensions in China’s twentieth-century history.”[7]

This essay examines the artist Jiang Xin’s (Jiang Xiaojian, 1894–1939) book designs created for the period’s popular literary pieces. In this new graphic medium, the lack of genre-imposed constraints allowed him and other avant-garde artists to experiment with a wide range of motifs and styles that were impossible in more academic mediums such as painting and drawing at the time in China. Through a close examination of two designs by Jiang, the essay argues that he deployed methods associated with both academic painting—the aspiration of which was closely related to the revolutionary call for national salvation through art education—and commercial design palatable for the rising middle-class readers to visualize more easily the otherwise privileged concepts of subjectivity and interiority, two central themes facilitating the individual emancipation pursued during the New Culture Movement.

Painter, Sculptor, and Design Entrepreneur

Born to a scholarly family in Jiangsu Province, Jiang Xin was among the earliest Chinese artists to have the privilege of studying and traveling in both Japan and France, a desirable training only available to the elite and those sponsored by the government.[8] Jiang graduated from the oil painting department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1916.[9] Upon returning to China the following year, he was immediately recruited by modern China’s first private art school, the Shanghai Art Academy, a school founded in 1912 to teach drawing and painting from life (Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China, 38). To further increase his prestige, between 1921 and 1925, Jiang lived in Paris, where he received informal training in painting and sculpture.[10] Jiang’s expertise in sculpture earned him steady commissions for public statues of China’s most prominent revolutionary leaders including that of Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), the first president of the Republic of China, and the generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975).

Jiang was one of the founding members of the Heavenly Horse Society (Tianmahui), a society founded in 1919 and arguably the most influential art society dedicated to the development of modern painting, design, photography, as well as Chinese ink painting in 1920s China.[11] Julia Andrews observes that the society helped to form a new Shanghai cosmopolitan aesthetic that gave visual form to the modern way of life under development in the city.[12] Writers and artists, who belonged to neither the wealthy upper class nor the urban poor, felt connected to the larger world by both physically partaking of the goods and participating in an imagined community of global modern art and literature, a community enabled by a cultural space comprising Art Deco buildings, department stores, bookshops, coffeehouses, dance halls, movie theaters, public parks, and a race club.[13] Jiang’s advocacy and organization of public art exhibitions through the Heavenly Horse Society illustrates avant-garde artists’ contribution to building Shanghai’s cosmopolitan way of life by exposing the urban middle class to modern art through a system inspired by the French Salon and the Japanese Imperial Art Exhibitions (bunten, later teiten).[14]

By the time Jiang returned to the treaty port city in the mid-1920s, belief in the importance of engagement with art was no longer confined to members of the artistic community, but formed a key component and demonstration of modern China’s most important educational reform known as aesthetic education (meiyu). Proposals promoting aesthetic education had appeared in the writings of education reformers since the 1890s in China, but only became widely implemented in the 1910s following the advocacy of Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), the Republic’s first minister of education.[15] Drawing inspiration from the works of Friedrich von Schiller and John Dewey, Cai promoted the idea that art was not merely an edifying pastime, but could replace religion and Confucian ethics as the principle vehicle to maintain morality in a modernizing Chinese society.[16] More specifically, aesthetic education cultivates the appreciation of beauty, which, in turn, produces pure and lofty habits and gradually eliminates selfishness and the idea that one may reap benefits by harming others.[17] Artists frequently used the idea that art can foster good moral values and help build a better society to advertise the social utility of fine arts that had once been perceived by the public as a luxurious diversion.[18] The period’s most prominent Western-style painter Lin Fengmian (1900–1991), for example, emphasized modern artists’ social responsibility and their task to “guide the advancement of the emotions of humankind.”[19] The painter and theorist Wang Yachen (1894–1983) argues in 1924 that the aesthetic perception and emotional capability nurtured by art could help tell good from evil and enrich one’s spiritual life.[20]

The lofty goal of fostering good morals and public edification was not always attainable due to the realities of 1920s China. Inadequate public exhibitions limited access to works produced by avant-garde artists. Reproductions of their works in periodicals may have increased their visibility, but the low-quality images and the lack of any context related to the works contributed little to their impact. Facing this reality, Jiang embraced mediums such as woodblock prints, design, and Chinese bronze alongside his career as a painter and sculptor. In 1927, he became the art director of the Yushang Fashion Company established by his friend the writer Xu Zhimo (1897–1931), Xu’s wife Lu Xiaoman (1903–1965), and the celebrated socialite Tang Ying (1910–1986). In 1929, Jiang, along with a few fellow artists and writers, founded an applied arts cooperative which produced artistic commodities ranging from painting to metal casting.[21] Most of his original paintings and applied art objects did not survive the political vicissitudes of the twentieth century. In their absence, the book cover designs he created for some of the most sensational literary works in the 1920s offer us valuable evidence of the form’s use as a middle ground between elitist avant-garde art and commercial visual culture.

Design for Xu Zhimo’s Self-Dissection

Once the privilege of the gentry class, the reforms implemented in the early years of the Republic expanded educational opportunities and created a sizable literate population in urban centers such as Beijing and Shanghai. New literature written in vernacular Chinese by modern-minded authors offered a channel for the expanded literate class to grapple with issues brought on by China’s modernization, such as the reflection on selfhood and individuality, conflicting sentiments about Westernization, critique of traditional morals, and women’s suffrage.[22] Almost all Chinese books produced prior to the modern period were thread-bound and featured the perennial indigo cover (or silk for prized items) with titles written vertically in calligraphy. In the 1920s, the high demand for new literature and competition for readership drove publishers, large and small, to embrace portable paperbacks and invest in enhancing their visual appeal.

For smaller, independent publishers established by progressive writers, appealing cover art was all the more essential to the competitiveness of their publications. Luckily, they were also in a better position to work closely with artists who shared a similar cultural and social space.[23] In 1928, Jiang designed a remarkable cover for his friend and collaborator Xu Zhimo’s collection of lyrical prose titled Self-Dissection (Zipou) (fig. 1). The book was published by the Crescent Moon Bookstore, a private publishing company descended from the literary group the Crescent Moon Society and founded by Xu and his writer friends.[24] The Crescent Moon Bookstore was among a dozen small, privately-owned publishing houses established by communities of self-conscious intellectuals. These presses were champions of the New Culture Movement as they demonstrated a strongly avant-garde and politically progressive publishing agenda not shared by big publishers.[25]

Xu’s prose collection includes essays he wrote while visiting Europe but begins with a piece with the eponymous title “Self-dissection” in which the author probes into his psyche in search of reasons for his inability to write and ultimately experiences profound disillusionment.[26] The existential crisis resulting from a male protagonist’s painful search for self-identity represents a key feature of new literature created in the 1920s. This self, as Lydia Liu argues, was often “constituted as a privileged site for the contest over the meaning of modernity.”[27] I argue here that Jiang’s design accompanying the book visually enacts Xu’s unrelenting probing of the self through the use of a colorful and affective design language, thereby, making the book’s content more intelligible for the reader.

The design features the caricatured face of Xu Zhimo. It is dramatically bisected by a pointy red triangle, a rupture that serves as a visual analogue to the author’s conflicting self-identities. The Cubist-inspired collage effect created by intersecting angular shapes alternates with organic, undulating black and red vertical lines redolent of Art Deco. By stacking and slicing different planes of shades and shapes, the cover’s kaleidoscopic surface translates the author’s self-dissection into a dazzling visual play between opacity and transparency, angularity and curvature, black, red, and green. The design dissolves the privileged subject position by relying on an almost primal dynamism to generate visual meaning. The popular periodical Shanghai Manhua commended the design’s elemental liveliness without any reference to the book’s content: black as a representation of minerals, green as flora, and red as fauna.[28] The controlled equilibrium between abstraction and representation also helps introduce modern art and design aesthetics in a less formal medium than academic painting and drawing.

The contrast between Jiang’s paintings and his graphic work from this period illustrates the artistic flexibility offered by the modern book.[29] Jiang’s paintings exhibit a tendency towards flatness and ornamentation (zhuangshi) as he saw them as shared features of traditional East Asian pictorialism and modern art.[30] These tendencies are apparent in his design of Self-Dissection as well as in his paintings. An oil painting by him from around 1928 demonstrates how flatness and ornamentation emerged as visual markers to code the hybridized cultural space of 1920s Shanghai (fig. 2). The painting depicts a vase embellished with figural motifs and filled with lush blossoms. The clean, divided background is reminiscent of the still-life paintings by Vincent van Gogh, who was attracted to the flatness and decorativeness of Japanese art and borrowed heavily from it in his own works. Despite Jiang’s desire to innovate, the painting, still operating within the confines of style and subject, is limited in its expressive possibility, contrasting mightily with his book designs from the same period.

Design for Chen Chunsui’s An Unofficial History of Studying in the West

Jiang also created covers for less elitist literary works. In 1927, he designed a cover for the popular novella by Chen Chunsui (Dengke, 1897–1974) An Unofficial History of Studying in the West (Liu xi wai shi), also published by the Crescent Moon Bookstore. The book comprises stories of the student Yu Xiaolong’s sojourn in Paris. While many Chinese students were able to study in France under the work-study program established by the two governments, the vivid descriptions of the daily activities and psychologies of the Chinese students studying there made this book a fascinating read for those back home. Despite featuring a male protagonist, the book’s opening story “In the Middle of the Indian Ocean” offers a meticulous account of the dialogues between Chinese female students aboard a ship to France. The story gives special attention to a young woman from the countryside, who was forced into an arranged marriage after losing her parents and is now taking a risk to go to France using borrowed money in search of a better life.[31]

Jiang’s design for the book cover prominently features a fashionably clad modern woman sitting in a café. Paying no attention to her eager-looking male companion, she holds her hands under her chin to gaze out at the viewer. To use an image of the Modern Girl as a cover design needs little justification in the late 1920s. Obviously, it gives visual form to the various female characters in the book. Jiang’s publisher must have taken into account the rise in female readership as the design would allow female readers to identify, albeit imaginatively, with the girl. The design built upon commercial art’s success in using female images during the previous decade, especially those seen in the modern reprise of the “One Hundred Beauties” genre and in commodity advertising, in which modern-looking women became the institutionalized visual signifier of China’s modernization.[32] Tani Barlow observes that “[e]motional, happy, iconic” modern girls were frequently depicted “inhabit[ing] a world of commercial commodities” and knowledgeable of “their use values.”[33] These depictions of the Modern Girl do not cause personhood, and the subject position produced through viewing these images is one that hinges upon using the advertised products, even in fantasy.[34]

Jiang’s use of the Modern Girl icon in the design substantially differs from its representations in popular media. Despite the Parisian chic suggested by the inclusion of the Notre Dame Cathedral and the café setting, the design is not a happy or celebratory image, and is full of contradictions. First, the inclusion of the keen male companion renders the woman into a distinctive archetype of the Modern Girl, namely a dangerous femme fatale who devours the urban male. The woman’s austere, highly self-conscious gaze points to another image of the Modern Girl, one that was finding her own voice in a new and changing society.[35] More specifically, the austerity of her facial expression coupled with her folded hands supporting her chin—a posture suggestive of contemplation and self-reflection—compromises her sexual appeal as signified by her revealing outfit and crossed legs.[36] The confrontation challenges the viewer, making them uncertain about her thoughts and circumstances. Second, and in a manner similar to the triangle bisecting Xu Zhimo’s face in the cover design of Self-dissection, Jiang uses an awkwardly positioned tree to create a conspicuous rupture in the center of the image as if to suggest that, despite her appearance and location, she is removed from the realities of Paris. Sandwiched between a male admirer and a physical blockade, the image visualizes the dilemmas experienced by the female protagonists in the novella, who, although enjoying newfound freedom in Paris and Shanghai, must still navigate a male-dominant society awash in undue expectations. Lastly, the design’s washed-out palette bleaches the Parisian glamour, further challenging the imagined allure of the young woman’s coveted lifestyle.

More remarkable still is Jiang’s choice of an informal sketch that mediates between commercial cartoon and academic drawing. The sketch departs from the customary fine-line drawing technique associated with the depiction of beautiful women in Chinese art, in which virtuosic, inflected lines are inherent to the expression of feminine beauty. The caricature style seen in popular commercial art is visible especially in the woman’s elongated, stiff legs and the man’s disproportionately large head. The comical impression appealed to urban readers, but also serves to offset the seriousness in her gaze. Though not drawn from life, the sketchiness of the design conveys a sense of immediacy and truthfulness—the woman’s brief introspective repose can only be grasped momentarily. This sense of immediacy and truthfulness was the goal that modern Chinese painters aimed to achieve with “sketching from life” (xiesheng), which was arguably the most instrumental concept and practice in the artistic discourse of modern China.[37] Purported to be a more scientific way of making art, sketching from life implied a more personal and subjective way of seeing the world, a method capable of re-inventing Chinese art from the moribund practice of copying masterworks of the past. Although drawings and sketches (sometimes termed as quick sketches, or suxie) by art students were often shown in art school exhibitions as assignments in the fundamentals of drawing, they lacked the varnish and finish that would demonstrate the full spectrum of an artist’s skills. By choosing a style associated with quick sketch for this design, Jiang not only made the image immediately digestible, as the drawing’s informality mirrors that in commercial cartoons; he also validated the sketch as a meaningful finished work of art by imparting the idea that the speediness of execution is indexical of the brevity of an introspective probe.

The design’s ability to convey the woman’s interiority creates a kind of subjectivity shrouded in awkwardness and uncertainty. This nuanced subjectivity, different from the one constructed by and for elitist male intellectuals in modern China, is also virtually absent in the representation of the Modern Girl in calendar posters, pictorial magazines, cartoons, and other popular media, in which a woman’s modern position was realized through her physical boldness and material savviness. As such, the design undermines the narrative of women’s self-determination created by social reforms, and instead, acknowledges the difficult existence of the modern woman, whose physical glamour belies the social and cultural dilemmas still plaguing the fledgling Republic. Book cover design, characterized by its nature of mass production and public display, visually aided this complex understanding of the modern woman in 1920s China.

Conclusion

Tempestuous manifestos and radical stylistic breaches from tradition may have been discursively compelling in modern Chinese art, but Jiang’s designs for Self-dissection and An Unofficial History of Studying in the West provide insights into how avant-garde artists actually negotiated between elitist subject position and tyrannies of commercialization, between the epic and the everyday. In fact, the revolutionary nature of Jiang’s designs lays precisely in their lack of both the shock tactic and a conspicuous violation of expected artistic continuities.[38] The book provided both a vehicle and context for visual modernity to have localized social and cultural meanings beyond aesthetic cultivation. It enabled artists like Jiang to circumvent the elitist discourses in painting to create works in which the flexibility of style and subject allowed a wider audience to access reflections on selfhood and subjectivity. As such, Jiang’s designs were shaped by and contributed to building a transforming society alert to these new conditions.