books

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