Chinese Calligraphy and Modern Typography

Typography - the study of typefaces (or fonts, if you want to be a rube about it) seems to be a somewhat under appreciated discipline in the world of art. Most people don't think twice about the way a letter looks while they're typing in MS Word and probably don't know what sans-serif even is. However within graphic design having an eye for typography is not only helpful, but almost a necessity. Typography has even been around longer than modern graphic design, from the old hand drawn cursive of the 19th and 20th century to contemporary typefaces created almost completely digitally. Like an old shoemaker or watch maker, typography is all about the craft and precision, as well as an overall balance between design aesthetic and pragmatic use.

This brings me to the topic of Sunday's lecture on Graphic Design and Typography in China at the Literary Festival. On the panel was graphic designer Ou Ning, best known for his book, New Sound of Beijing, which brought and defined modern Chinese youth culture and style to the masses, his experimental magazine, Bie Ce and his numerous curatorial endeavors. While the other panelists, Lynn Pan and Pan Jian Feng, who discussed Futurism's influence on Chinese design and commercial typography in China, respectively, Ou Ning recounted his life growing up and being classically trained as a Chinese calligraphy, his life now as a contemporary designer, and how China as a whole could somehow transition from its centuries old tradition of calligraphy and marry it with modern typography. Since Chinese calligraphy is already a discipline based on practice and precision, as well as a limited yet endless level of micro-innovation, it seems like amalgamating the two would be simple and wildly successful. However despite this, the panelists seemed to be in agreement that a product of this perfect union has yet to be created. With its roots in the Futurist movement of the early 20th century, modern Chinese typography has manifested itself in a number of places including advertisements, books, and even street signs seen on storefronts along the street. And while a slew of different methods and ideas have been employed, Chinese typography still lags behind that of the West.

It is this emulation of the West's typographical tradition that is, in my opinion, stunting the growth of Chinese typography. Like painting and other art disciplines, China is still struggling to come into its own in terms of style and it seems like typography is yet another facet of this untapped potential within China. The panel explored a variety of first and second-hand perspectives and raised some interesting questions concerning whether or not Chinese typography and graphic design will ever come into its own. Perhaps it won't?

Inflated Expectations for the Fulfillment of Typography's Destiny in Contemporary China

We consider the destiny of Chinese typography and design in the sense that Chinese writing hovers between the abstract and the concrete. Unlike Western alphabets the Chinese characters have yet to be totally divorced from their hieroglyphic heritage, and in this way their union in contemporary design with photographic images represents at once this evolutionary ascent and melds them together in the formation of a singular aesthetic object. This destiny, then, is never completely attainable but stands as a goal to be sought after-- it is the ideal fusion of the ancient and modern in pursuit of the universal.

From Italy to Shanghai...

Sunday's presentation did an incredible job at giving me a concise visual history of typography starting half way across the world and ending up in Shanghai. Tracing the journey of typography from Futurism to the creative advertising agencies of today highlighted the importance of the written (or digitally created) word itself. After spending so much time in Chinese class quickly jotting down hundreds of characters, the presentation served as a welcome reminder that each stroke has a certain significance that should not be taken for granted.
Coming from the perspective of a person who knew nothing about typography before Sunday, I thought the presentation did a very good job of steering clear of industry lingo by giving a clear and concise explanation of the history and the direction that each panelist expects contemporary Chinese typography and graphic design to head in.
I also thought that seeing the history of the art form beginning in the early 1900's was a befitting introduction to the story of Pan Jian Feng, whos personal story made graphic design seem much less like an occupation and much more like a way of life. His story did a good job of tying in the importance of the tradition of calligraphy to contemporary Chinese graphic design.

Shanghai Style by Lynn Pan

A review by Lisa Movius in that's Shanghai Mar 4, 2008

http://www.urbanatomy.com/articles/detail.cfm?aid=1016

the roots of style
" I like looking at what makes Shanghai different. It is something I
have been thinking about for decades," says writer and historian Lynn
Pan 潘翎. Of course, Pan's done more than just think; she's parlayed
her interest into a writing career spanning several decades and
producing many books. Pan left the city in 1955 at age ten and went
on to spend much of her childhood in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Great
Britain, working in Hong Kong as a journalist for the Far Eastern
Economic Review and in Singapore establishing a research center on
the Chinese Diaspora.

But like many Chinese émigrés, Pan couldn't resist the pull of the
homeland and returned to explore the city of her birth. Her
grandfather was the Shanghainese developer behind many historic
Shanghai landmarks such as the Hengshan Hotel and the Canidrome, and
his legacy forms the narrative of Tracing It Home: A Chinese Journey
(1992). A resident since 1998, she first returned to Shanghai in 1981
and wrote Searching for Old Shanghai, and though stories were
plentiful, she had a hard time finding a willing publisher. "Back in
1981, no one had even heard of Shanghai," she recalls. She found one
in Sanlian Shudian 三联书店 (Joint Publishing Company), which has
seen the book through more than 15 printings.

Pan's oeuvre expanded in 1984, when she penned Old Shanghai:
Gangsters in Paradise after meeting the son of famed gangster Du
Yuesheng 杜月笙during her 1981 trip to Shanghai.
"His wife wore nail polish, and she served cucumber sandwiches with
sweet butter at tea – in 1981!" she recalls.
Not long thereafter, Pan wrote China's Sorrow, concerning the Yellow
River, and The New Chinese Revolution, about Deng Xiaoping's 邓小平
reforms, and in 1990 she released Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A
History of the Chinese Diaspora. She has also edited The Encyclopedia
of the Chinese Overseas and co-written books on Chinese craft art and
on Hong Kong in the 1960s.
Her latest book, Shanghai Style: Design Between the Wars, is the most
extensive and authoritative English-language history of the emergence
of haipai, Shanghai's unique fusion aesthetic, to date. Chinese-
language scholarship on haipai literature, art, design, theater, film
and music is extensive, though for the most part, English-language
pickings are limited to salacious tales of gangsters, bankers, whores
and foreigners, a situation that is perhaps attributable to the
belief that contemporary Western readers are uninterested in Chinese
complexities.
"Foreigners have always underestimated Shanghainese culture," Pan
says, chuckling at British Shanghailander architect George Leopold
Wilson's declaration in 1930 that "Modernism will never go down well
in Shanghai." In fact, it was already popular with Shanghainese
artists, designers and architects at the time, and in 1921, the
city's leading paper, Shenbao 申报, ran an enthusiatic full page
article about Le Corbusier "when he was still considered quite
radical world-wide".

Shanghai Style is an engaging, enjoyable and rigorous academic read,
crammed with illustrations from paintings, books, magazines, comics,
advertising, architecture and interior design.
In the book, Pan differentiates haipai 海派 from what she calls
"Shanghai style" 上海式. Emerging between the wars, the latter,
explains Pan, is Chinese mixed with Western influences, to produce a
period style which was Modernist and commercialized. In the sense of
being bastardized and commercial, haipai shares these
characteristics, though it also encompasses elements of culture and
behavior. What's more, haipai is not period specific; it is
constantly evolving, even today.
One of Shanghai style's best representatives is the accomplished
graphic designer, musician, composer, publisher and entrepreneur Qian
Juntao 钱君??(1906-1998), whose biography launched Pan's
investigation into its origins.
Pan says that "Qian described his style as futurism, or weilai pai
未来派," a unique blend of obscure Russian cubist futurism and
Berlin dadaism. It is likely that Qian studied these two movements in
imported magazines, including Vanity Fair, which in the 1930s was
designed by Russian Mehemed Fehmy Agha and Italian Futurist Fortunato
Depero. Qian absorbed other influences from the set design and
cinematic styles of such films as Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Referring to the influences on artists such as himself and Qian,
cartoonist Ding Cong 丁聪 says they took a bit from here and a bit
from there, digesting and assimilating and translating it so
thoroughly that they completely obscured its origins.

In doing so, they created something entirely new, something uniquely
Shanghai.