Brutalism, Maximalism and Amateurism of The New Ugly in Chinese Graphic Design

Jiarui Wang

Brutalism, Maximalism, and Amateurism of The New Ugly in Chinese Graphic Design

Royal College of Art

MA Visual Communication

London, June 2022

Tutor: Thomas Watson

Word Count: 9726

Brutalism, Amateurism in Chinese

Brutalism, Maximalism, and Amateurism of The New Ugly in Chinese Graphic Design

Colophon

Acknowledgement

Text&Design

Jiarui Wang

Edit

Cyrus Hung Hau Ng

Typefaces

PP Editorial New by PangramPangram

Anderson Grotesk by Stephen T.

French

FZ GaoYuanMingChao

FZ YaSong BN

FZFW ZhuZiHei by FounderType

First, I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my supervisor, Thomas Watson, for his guidance throughout this dissertation.

I would not have been able to complete this project without my partner, Cyrus Hung Hau Ng, who always inspires and supports me, and for his generous editing work.

I'd like to thank my family, Zi Yang, Yikai Wang, Jiashi Wang, and Jiayun Wang, for their love and support for whatever I do.

Many thanks to my colleagues at the RCA, Chiao Huang, Haewon Jeon, and Wenjing Liu, for all the help and ideas they provided.

I'd also like to mention my dear friends, Yilin Chen, Shiqing Zhu, Zhengkang Liang, Tiger Sun, Owen (Ruijie) Rao, Nanyun Shen, Frank Hou, Chen Nie, Tong Tong, Nicole Ru Tsai, Brian (Hsueh-Hung) Cheng, and Marie (Zihan) Yang, for their spiritual support.

A special thank you to Chengan Xia who allowed me to include images of his amazing work, Aesthetic Career

If not specified, all the references originally in Chinese are translated by me. (Source: I'm Chinese.)

Dissonance is the technical term for the reception through art of what aesthetics as well as naïveté calls ugly. Whatever it may be, the ugly must constitute, or be able to constitute, an element of art.

Theodor

W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

Keywords

Aesthetics

China

Class Consciousness

Design History

Graphic Design

Abstract

The New Ugly is a graphic design aesthetic which originated from Chinese vernacular commercial styles. Since around 2018, the style has gained a cult following in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Graphic design, despite its ubiquitous influence in everyday life as well as its artistic potential, is a relatively overlooked practice in academic discourse. This dissertation aims to provide the reader with historic theories regarding ugliness, Chinese graphic design history, as well as cultural context to better understand why the New Ugly has revolutionary potential for graphic design. Other topics include the historic origins, the power dynamics behind the formation, as well as the commercial misuse of the New Ugly.

These findings indicate a need to redefine and diversify the way graphic design is taught, for a more global and class-conscious view towards design, as well as a more critical position against the commercialisation of styles for advertising.

(Abstract word count: 150)

Fig. 01 An ordinary and ugly store front design that reads ‘Jiarui Barbecue’ in Shanghai. The name of this restaurant happens to share the exact same characters with my rst name, ‘嘉瑞’.

List of Illustrations

Fig. 01 Zi Yang, Jiarui Barbecue, 2020, Photo.

Fig. 02 Chengan Xia, Aesthetic Career, 2018, Print, installation.

Fig. 03 Ibid.

Fig. 04 Ibid.

Fig. 05 Katherine McCoy, Poster, Cranbrook Graduate Program in Design, 1989, Offset lithograph.

Fig. 06 Jeffery Keedy, Poster, Cranbrook Graduate Studies in Fiber.

Fig. 07 Louis DeLuca, Two designs of ‘Learning from Las Vegas,’ 2017, Photo.

Fig. 08 Sticker advertisement, Photo.

Fig. 09 Jiayun Wang, Advertisement on subway grab handle, 2022, Photo.

Fig. 10 Chengsu Feng, Copy of the ‘Preface to The Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion,’ Calligraphy.

Fig. 11 Frontispiece, Diamond Sutra from Cave 17, Dunhuang, ink on paper., 868, Zoomable image from the British Library’s Online Gallery. Originally uploaded to en:Wikipedia (log) in January 2008 by Fconaway and in November 2009 by Earthsound.

Fig. 12 Two Name Seals, from Nengerzhai Print Collection.

Fig. 13 Yuanqing Tao, Wandering Book Cover Design, 1929.

Fig. 14 Zhifo Chen, Modern Student Cover Design, 1931.

Fig. 15 Juntao Qian, The Dividing Line in Love Cover Design, 1929.

Fig. 16 The Ark Cover Design, 1935.

Fig. 17 Juntao Qian, The Muddy Stream Cover Design, 1931.

Fig. 18 Propaganda Art Primer, 1967, Woodcut.

Fig. 19 Autumn Harvest Uprising, 1972.

Fig. 20 Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House Propaganda Poster Group, Criticize the old world and build a new world with Mao Zedong Thought as a weapon, 1966.

Fig. 21 Shaohua Chen, Graphic Design in China 1992 Poster, 1992, Offset print.

Fig. 22 Henry Steiner, Poster for Morisawa Inc., 1991.

Fig. 23 Jiang Jun, Urban China Magazine Cover Design, 2005.

Fig. 24 Jianping He, Poster, China Image.

Fig. 25 Guang Yu, Young Nod, Tokyo TDC Selected Artworks 2018-2019 in Beijing NEWS Tokyo TDC, 2019.

Fig. 26 Yeshuyezhi Package Design (Front and Back).

Fig. 27 Jiashi Wang, Mud shield of a moped, 2022, Photo.

Fig. 28 Yui Takada, Diving Graphic, 2018.

Fig. 29 Yu Huang, Newspaper Advertisement Column, Photo.

Fig. 30 Bofeng Liao, Liao Flyer, 2018.

Fig. 31 Bofeng Liao, Name card for AGI in China, 2019.

Fig. 32 Ibid.

Fig. 33 Ibid.

Fig. 34 Ivy Yixue Li, On Being a Factory Worker, 2020.

Fig. 35 Celestial Dragons House, 2021.

Fig. 36 Jianping He, The East Wind prevails over the West Wind, 2019.

Fig. 37 Balenciaga Qixi Campaign, 2020.

Fig. 02 Chengan Xia, Aesthetic Career. A multimedia exploration on how collectivism functions in Chinese corporate culture.

Fig. 03 The repeating text reads: ‘Absorb beauty. Improve beauty. Feel beauty. Create beauty.’

Fig. 04 The text on the screen reads: ‘Team vitality leads your art career to success.’

Introduction

Perhaps it was pure novelty that attracted me to the New Ugly, but when I first saw part of Chengan Xia’s Aesthetic Career [Fig.02-04] at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's 2018 annual Art Fair, I was completely stunned by how unique, humorous, and critical it is. I grew up hating the style that overcrowded China’s visual landscape. I found it ugly, tacky, and not ‘high-art’ enough. Part of the reason that I aspired to be a graphic designer in the first place was to change that situation. Prior to college, I never thought a style that I used to despise and try to distance myself from could be such a powerful tool for irony and criticism. Since then, I have been obsessed with any work loosely related to the concept: the New Ugly, Anti-Design, and Digital Brutalism, to mention a few. To say that these styles or genres are mere trends is a fair statement, but I do not consider trends to be inherently meaningless. A genre is nothing but various movements, a movement but several trends. As I recognise the current of dissonant and critical design practice all around the world again, I feel responsible for assembling and reflecting upon them.

Graphic design as a profession is relatively new compared to other art and design practices, regardless of its prevalent use in daily life. However, much of the academic discussion still focuses on well-established Western discourse, while other cultures, most likely having a premodern design practice, remain neglected. In this dissertation, I included a brief yet comprehensive understanding of the history of Chinese graphic design hopefully in order to broaden the general discourse of graphic design history.

As a graphic designer trained and working in the West, I feel disconnected from the Chinese graphics design discourse, which is why I hope this dissertation could also be my way of reconnecting with my Chinese origins. While I had little access to local Chinese sources on this subject and did not have the opportunity to conduct field research during the writing of this essay due to obstacles from the Covid-19 pandemic, this dissertation is merely an iteration of a larger project which will develop both in depth and breadth in the future.

This dissertation’s main focus will be on mainland Chinese design history, as well as the works of designers from there. Yet, because of the historical, geographical, cultural, and linguistic proximity, it is inevitable to mention designers from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. As Dr Wendy Suiyi Wong identified, the design history of these regions should not be divided, but rather united as ‘the Greater China Area,’ since the interaction between these entities cannot be extracted and studied separately.1

In Chinese there is an idiom PaoZhuanYinYu [抛砖引玉]. Literally translated to ‘throwing a brick to attract jade,’ the phrase means to offer one’s crude argument in hopes that it will further and deepen discourse. This paper aims to be the brick which inspires contemporary Chinese designers and scholars, as well as designers of other cultures to start constructing and participating critically in design discourse.

1. Wendy Siuyi Wong, ‘Detachment and Unification: A Chinese Graphic Design History in Greater China Since 1979’, Design Issues 17 (2001).

To call something ugly suggests you have an established range of preferences… This, as ever, returns us to the etymology of the world ‘ugly’ in the Norse ugga, meaning aggressive. Steven Bayley, Ugly: The Aesthetics of Everything

Ugliness Contextualised

The definition of ugliness, like its counterpart beauty, is subjective to a significant extent. In this chapter, I will establish my definition of ugliness through different methodologies, and further contextualise how it manifests in the New Ugly.

Cult Of The Ugly

It would be an understatement to say that the contemporary design world still favours order, clarity, purity, minimalism, and function over everything else. This assertion is not unreasonable at all: the Transport for London railway map presents itself in an orderly manner so passengers know how to get around its service; the 1964 Summer Olympics pictogram symbols clearly communicate their meaning that their legacy remains today; Apple’s founder’s posthumous principle of minimalist design still attracts a cult following... While minimalist and utilitarian styles dominate the field, I believe ugliness, dissonance, and disruption hold unique potential for future evolution.

Intuitively, the idea of ugliness should be in opposition to those aforementioned dominant traits in the graphic design industry. When contemporary design practice is dominated by the strong Western influence of the clean and orderly Bauhaus and Swiss international styles, one could only imagine ugly graphic design to be chaotic, disorganised, and unruly. Rule-breaking and rebellion against the authority of aesthetics is a pattern of postmodernist graphic design. An example is Swiss designer Wolfgang Weingart, a leading figure of The New Wave movement predating the postmodernist graphic design movement.2 Trained as a typesetting apprentice, Weingart was taught the ‘right’ and ‘correct’ ways of typography, which he saw as obstacles against his artistic expression:

It seemed as if everything that made me curious was forbidden: to question established typographic practice, change the rules, and to reevaluate its potential. I was motivated to provoke this stodgy profession and to stretch the typeshop’s capabilities to the breaking point, and finally, to prove once again that typography is an art.3

Like other creatives, postmodernist graphic designers have transformed the stylistic element of the ugly into a critical tool, attesting to the Frankfurt School’s idea of aesthetic violence, that ugliness is an important defence against the commercialisation of beauty in modernist aesthetics. To be ugly is to be critical, to be dissonant is to challenge the status quo of harmony. Or, in the words of literary theorist Peter Uwe Hohendahl:

The autonomy of the artwork depends on its oppositional force, a quality that is enhanced by the ugly. It is precisely the violation of the traditional aesthetic code that separates the advanced artwork from the threat of the culture industry.4

An appropriate manifestation of Adorno’s aesthetic violence might be the postmodernist graphic design popular during the 1980s to the early 2000s, as seen in the interconnected yet different aesthetic attributes of the works of students of the Cranbrook Academy of Arts [Fig. 05-06], British graphic designer David Carson, and French graphic artist collective Grapus, with their fragmented collage of chaotic imagery and irregular types. Many critics of postmodern graphic design, as well as its predecessors such as the New Wave movement, saw the stylistic innovations as ‘obstacles to the lucid transmission

2. Rick Poynor, No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (London: Laurence King, 2003). 19.

3. Ibid, 20.

4. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, ‘Aesthetic Violence: The Concept of the Ugly in Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory”’, Cultural Critique No. 60 (Spring, 2005) (2005): 171.

Fig. 05 Katherine McCoy, Cranbrook Graduate Program in Design Poster. 1989.

Fig. 06 Je ery Keedy, Cranbrook Graduate Studies in Fiber Poster

of the client’s message,’ and they often called movements like this as ‘a passing fad.’ Many believed in the pure commercial and utilitarian essence of graphic design, while others felt tedious from the constant dissonance revoked in those designs.5 ‘Designers used to stand for beauty and order. Now beauty is passe and ugliness is smart,’ wrote design critic Steven Heller in his famous 1993 Eye article, ‘Cult of the Ugly’, ‘How did we get here and is there any way out?’ Heller used Output, a desktop publication designed by Cranbrook Academy of Art students a year before, as a prime example of the genre of ugly designs he was commenting on:

Output is eight unbound pages of blips, type fragments, random words and other graphic minutiae purposefully given the serendipitous look of a printer’s make-ready. The lack of any explanatory precis leaves the reader confused as to its purpose or meaning, though its form leads one to presume that it is intended as a design manifesto, another ‘experiment’ in the current plethora of aesthetically questionable graphic output. Given the increase in graduate school programmes which provide both a laboratory setting and freedom from professional responsibility, the word experiment has come to justify a multitude of sins.6

Heller’s description is a good summary of what this school of ugly design looks like. Closely related to the New Wave movement of graphic design, posters of Cranbrook students and alike often include elements like freeform collages of photography, overlapping and distorted text, often set in various typefaces and sizes, which all became technically easier to accomplish with personal computers replacing phototypesetting at the end of the twentieth century. With technological advancement came ideological change. The grid system, legibility, structuralism, and other principles that symbolise the order of Modernism could no longer represent the ever-changing new ideas of the new world. Designers took inspiration from postmodern literary theorists such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes, and they attempted to reinvent graphic design as a practice in itself, rather than a tool solely for instrumental and commercial use.7

Heller criticised this aesthetic by saying it was not justified by a certain motive. ‘While the proponents are following their various muses’, he wrote, ‘their followers are misusing their signature designs and typography as style without substance’. As a response to Heller’s critique, in the following issue of Eye, Joani Spadaro of North Carolina State University wrote a letter to the editor defending and explaining the importance of Output:

[...] Output was created to establish a dialogue among voices who are not often heard in the design field: students creating experimental/ personal work with the context of their culture, but outside the prescribed construction of design for commerce.

[...] Only after a sufficient amount of information had been transmitted and discussed via fax machine, video and ‘care packages’ could an appropriate visual language be determined to convey the ideas and information that had been exchanged. Students have designed the piece as a collaborative effort, not only among their own student groups, but also between each institution.8

In Spadaro’s opinion, Output matters not only for its pedagogical significance but also for innovation in the discourse of graphic design. The seemingly careless visual style was actually produced with much attention, and it offers an opportunity for young designers to express their creative freedom outside of a commercial or professional setting. Seeing how trends like anti-design and digital brutalism flourished and continue to grow in the year 2022, as well as how higher education institutions are encouraging more experimental explorations, Heller’s critique certainly seems like reactionary commentary on such a movement with new possibilities, and we can conclude that dissonance, or opposition against the standard of beauty, has revolutionary potentials.

The Ugly And The Ordinary

On some level, the New Ugly is similar to postmodernist graphic design. They both show defiance towards capitalism-specifically the commercialisation of graphic design as a tool. Western critical graphic designers demonstrate this by creating something not applicable or profitable to the market of their specific time period, while Chinese graphic designers re-appropriate something that is already in the market in an ironic fashion. However, the visual styles of the two should also be differentiated. While the elements of impurity and deconstruction are significant components of postmodern graphics design, the New Ugly is geared towards a slightly different kind of ugliness.

Historically, the discussion of beauty is often related to two other conceptsthe grotesque, and the sublime. However, the ugliness in the concept of this dissertation is almost the opposite of those things. Instead of the overwhelming feeling invoked by the greatness and transcendence of the artistic property,

5. Poynor, No More Rules, 26.

6. Jarrett Fuller, ‘How Cranbrook’s Design Program Redefined How We Make and Talk About Graphic Design’, Eye on Design, 22 July 2021, https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/ how-cranbrooks-designprogram-redefined-howwe-make-and-talk-aboutgraphic-design/

7. Steven Heller, ‘Cult of the Ugly’, Eye, 1993.

8. Joani Spadaro, ‘Output Explained’, Eye, 1993.

Fig. 07

The hardback and paperback version of Learning from Las Vegas

Fig. 08 Some ugly and ordinary stickers on a wall.

Fig. 09 A ugly and ordinary advertisement on the subway handle.

the ugly is a mundane and vernacular experience. It is ordinary, proletarian. In their book Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi, Brown, and Izenour offered an inspiring insight into what is considered ‘the ugly and the ordinary’ (‘U&O’) in architecture:

Architecture may be ordinary-or rather, conventional-in two ways: in how it is constructed or in how it is seen, that is, in its process or in its symbolism... Artistically, the use of conventional elements in ordinary architecture-be they dumb doorknobs or the familiar forms of existing construction systems-evokes associations from past experience. Such elements may be carefully chosen or thoughtfully adapted from existing vocabularies or standard catalogs rather than uniquely created via original data and artistic intuition.9

While the authors explained in detail their understanding of U&O in the context of architecture, their central idea may be applied elsewhere: one is considered ordinary and ugly if both its substance and image remain conventional. When translated into the realm of graphic design, this idea manifests as a work which both uses common, cheap materials or techniques, and appears commonplace or mundane. We can also understand this through an anecdote about the publishing of the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas. The book featured a clean and modernist cover designed by MIT’s Muriel Cooper, and was a largeformat hardback completed with a translucent glassine wrap. [Fig. 07] With its sophisticated design and refined production choices, Learning from Las Vegas quickly sold out and became a collector’s item. However, the authors found it ‘too monumental for a text that praised the ugly and ordinary over the heroic and monumental,’ and later offered a redesigned paperback version as a more affordable and appropriate vessel for their argument.10

This idea of the ordinary and the ugly is more compatible with the kind of ugliness the New Ugly refers to-the badly designed stickers scattered throughout the city, the flyers with bad typography thrown on the streets, the simple text and stock images on the subway handle... It is the ordinary and the ugly. [Fig. 08-09]

Tu The Earth, Soil, And Dust

One significant concept highly related to The New Ugly is the Chinese term of Tu [土]. Literally translates to ‘soil,’ ‘earth,’ or ‘dust,’ the word refers to a specific Chinese notion that could be described with rustic, unsophisticated, uncouth, vulgar, tasteless, or uncultured.11 When it is specifically descriptive of visual qualities, it refers to the visual style connected to lower-tier China with bold colours and loud patterns.

Many of the works related to the New Ugly, could be described with Tu. In the past, the use of the word was inherently pejorative and established a clear class difference: the speaker assumes their superior taste, commenting on something supposedly of a lower-tier origin. However, several factors have contributed to the revival of this aesthetic. First, some attributed it to the younger generation who grew up around and after the 2000s. Not having to see China in a chaotic and economically deprived state, they are generally more proud of the local aesthetics of China, rather than the older generations who might assume an intrinsic negative connotation to Chinese culture, that it is worse in quality than designs and aesthetics from the West.12 Second, the prevalence of video-based social media such as Douyin (TikTok) and Quaishou made interactions between classes and regions of China more easily accessible than traditional text or image-based social media. These two phenomena play a significant role in making the disruption of power, region, and class dynamics possible.

A derived concept from Tu is called Tuku [土酷], which simply extends the word with Ku, meaning cool. The term is also a wordplay, since it sounds like ‘too cool,’ and indeed, it refers to an opulent use of Tu aesthetics, that it almost becomes too cool. Tuku is particularly popular amongst younger generations, especially those who identify themselves with a non-mainstream culture

Tu is a beautiful concept If we look at this word in a purely metaphorical aspect. The kind of ugliness it implies is like soil-it is ordinary; it is everywhere. While some consider Tu negligible, in the eyes of others it holds fertile potential-an opportunity for creation of the new.

9. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, 17th print (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000). 128l129.

10. ‘Learning from Las Vegas, Facsimile Edition’, The MIT Press (The MIT Press), accessed 1 June 2022, https:// mitpress.mit.edu/books/ learning-las-vegas-facsimileedition

11. ‘土’, in Wiktionary, 19 March 2022, https:// en.wiktionary.org/w/ index.php?title=%E5% 9C%9F&oldid=66174964

12. ‘Balenciaga’s 2020 Qixi Campaign: Another Cultural Misstep by a Luxury Brand or Deep-Rooted Understanding of Chinese Gen Z Subculture?’, Yuzu Kyodai (blog), 9 February 2021, http://www.yuzukyodai. com/2021/02/09/balenciagaqixi-china/

Fig. 10 Feng Chengsu, Copy of Preface to The Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion. 639 C.E.

Fig. 11 Front page of Diamond Sūtra, the oldest known dated printed book in the world. 868.

Fig. 12 Two name seals demonstrating the idea of positive and negative through printmaking.

A Brief History Of Chinese Graphic Design

Little is written about Chinese graphic design compared to the profound history and discourse of Chinese art that it closely approximates. According to Chinese graphic design historian Dr Wendy Siuyi Wong, this could be attributed to a few reasons such as the lack of foundation studies, the overlook of the significance of design history, and methodological challenges.13 Additionally, the conventional idea of graphic design as a profession entered China during the beginning of the 20th century, a time of political and social instability. Since then, China has been caught in the painful turbulence of Colonialism, civil and interstate war, natural and artificial catastrophes, and political and ideological upheavals, putting limitations on both the development and documentation of graphic design.

Perhaps the most notable material on this matter in the Anglophone world is Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century by designer and scholar duo Scott Minick and Jiao Ping, published in London. Unfortunately, even less writing is dedicated to the subsequent development of Chinese graphic design, shamefully, in both Sinophone and Anglophone discussion, even though the climate both inside and outside of the design world has changed drastically since. This chapter will hopefully summarise and contextualise how graphic design situates in the history of China under a limited word count.

The famous Meggs’ History of Graphic Design and many other graphic design history books written by Westerners alike, often mention China for one reason only: it is the birthplace of some of the first variations of paper making, woodblock printing and movable type printing. Yet, despite China’s potential contribution to the industry's hardware, influence from China and other regions of the world is barely recognised in the Anglophone discourse. In Meggs’ specifically, there are two chapters dedicated to pre-modern writing and printing traditions around the world, the rest are mostly about Euro-American graphic design history. Such textbooks tend to have a limited definition of graphic design as a practice highly entangled with modernism and the Industrial Revolution, and overlook the fact that people all over the world had been ordering, marking, writing, and making for millennia.

In his recent Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design and How to Escape from It, Dutch designer Ruben Pater examined the relationship between graphic design and capitalism throughout the history of humankind, and stated that ‘financial records are clear examples of early graphic design.’ According to Pater’s research, the oldest message ever found are financial records written on clay tablets by scribes, whom he recognised as one of the earliest forms of graphic designers:

Scribes had to master skills such as consistent mark making and the ordering of information on small surfaces [...] for thousands of years scribes were responsible for creating trustworthy documents that guaranteed authenticity and authority in large societies [...] Until the invention of the printing press, scribes and clerks were the only source of written communication, being typographers, lay-out specialists, and printers combined.14

Indeed, what does the job of a graphic designer entail if not organising information, formulating the message, presenting it in an appropriate manner with the material available, and then redistributing the outcome to the target audience? According to Pater’s definition, it can be easily concluded that many

13. Wendy Siuyi Wong, ‘Design History and Study in East Asia: Part 2 Greater China: People’s Republic of China/Hong Kong/Taiwan’, Journal of Design History 24, no. 4 (1 December 2011): 375l95, https://doi. org/10.1093/jdh/epr034

Methodological challenge refers to the specific difficulty scholars face as they are required to have an extensive knowledge on both Chinese art and culture and Western theories to participate in the discourse.

14. Ruben Pater, Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design and How to Escape from It (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021).

Fig. 13 Tao Yuanqing, Wandering cover, 1929.

Fig. 14 Chen Zhifo, Modern Student cover, 1931.

Fig. 15 Qian Juntao, The Dividing Line in Love, 1929.

Fig. 16 The Ark cover design, 1935.

Fig. 17 Qian Juntao, The Muddy Stream, 1931.

artefacts or ephemera, although made premodern and long before the concept of graphic design was formed (certainly before William Dwiggins coined the term), could and should be included in the discussion of graphic design The practices of printing, calligraphy, type design, book design, pattern and ornament design, have existed for a long time-not only in pre-modern China but in most other civilisations before industrialisation-and these practices have a tremendous influence on how designers visualise ideas.

However, this is not to eliminate the significance of graphic design entering China as an alien concept. As we can see throughout the following sections, Chinese designers are constantly pursuing an ideal equilibrium between foreign and local ideas, no matter what time and space they reside in. We should also understand that Chinese culture is not a homogeneous whole, as the illusion of it was caused by the incomplete documentation of history and artefacts.

Chinese Traditions

All in the world know the beauty of the beautiful, and in doing so they have the idea of ugliness; they all know the good, and in doing so they have the idea of what is the bad.-Lao Zi, Dao De Jing

It is certainly impossible to cover the entirety of all premodern Chinese design practices in one section. Instead I will briefly explain one of the key concepts of Chinese fine art, which is most relevant to the theme of this dissertation.

Books written on Chinese art often have a central idea: that Chinese art traditions are based on the concept of harmony. Chinese art and design focus on the negatives of shapes and form just as much as Western design traditions focus on the positives.15 Heavily influenced by interwoven ideas of Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, Chinese art-for the most part-is abstract, symbolic, and conservative. Many noticed that Chinese art tends not to depict graphic horror and violence, unlike the art of Medieval Europe and onwards.16 Chinese traditional art principles such as harmony of elements can be seen as an expression of complacency in the formal realm, a sign of conservative and reactionary ideology. Note that this pattern does not encompass all of Chinese art, but is a dominant phenomena nonetheless which affects Chinese art production to this day. Nevertheless, I decided to emphasise this idea, since one of the most important characteristics of the New Ugly is that it is deliberately dissonant, which when examined side-by-side with the pattern of harmony, is indicative of the revolutionary essence of the New Ugly. This concept of harmony can be seen manifested in all forms of Chinese art and design: delicate handscroll ink paintings, calligraphy, name seals, intricate woodcut prints, to mention a few. [Fig. 10-12] This is not to say that harmony is an intrinsically bad artistic quality, but rather that the long history of harmonious tendency makes the New Ugly even more significant as a rule-breaking innovation and political enunciation, which will be discussed in the next section.

The Shanghai Modernists

Art represents the thoughts of a period and the ideas of the nation. In other words, it is the outlook of a nation’s spirit. If the spirit changes direction then art will follow the change as well.-Lu

15. Scott Minick and Ping Jiao, Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1990). 11.

16. Lorraine Justice, China’s Design Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: The MIT Press, 2012). 17.

17. Minick and Jiao, Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century. 26. This is a very figurative translation, however Minick and Jiao did not provide the original quote in their book. I believe the original to be ‘文艺是国民精神 所发的火光，同时也是引导国 民精神的前途的灯火’, literally translates to ‘Art is the flare of the national spirit, and also the torch leading it forward.’

18. Haruhiko Fujita and Christine Guth, eds., Encyclopedia of East Asian Design (London: Bloomsbury visual arts, 2020). 78.

19. The translation of Asian names used in this dissertation will prioritise the individual’s preferred format (e.g. they have published work with it, or they identity themself on their portfolio with it). If there is no known preferred format, it will be based on the Chinese system in which the family name goes before the given name. The Romanisation of the names will be based on the conventions of the region where the individual is from.

20. Minick and Jiao, Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century. 26.

Xun,

On Opening Our Eyes And Seeing17

Following its defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Qing government and later Republican China began a modernisation process that included sending its best art and design talents to receive Western or Japanese education. It was during and after the New Cultural Movement, where students criticised traditional Chinese values and proposed a progressive reform of culture with a combination of Western ideas, that the Shanghai Modernists emerged in an attempt to form the young country’s new identity.18

Lu Xun, a medical student turned writer and designer, is one of the founding figures of the movement.19 As a great admirer of Western printmaking techniques and a believer in traditional Chinese aesthetics, Lu encouraged his peers and younger generations of designers to look for inspiration from Chinese folk art patterns in order to incorporate them with Western techniques.20 Many of the first design organisations and schools established during these formative years followed this idea of not blindly imitating Western styles but focusing on reflecting a modernised China.21

Following Lu’s idea of assimilation, young practitioners such as Qian Juntao, Tao Yuanqing, and Chen Zhifo revolutionised Chinese book cover design Before the Republic, books were simply stitch-bound with the title written calligraphically on a plain cover. In contrast, the Shanghai Modernists created naturalistic and organic patterns and illustrations for the covers. Mentors of these designers are either of Japanese or Western origins or have received education overseas and had similar beliefs as Lu. And indeed, the Shanghai Modernists’ works usually show a combination of Chinese heritage such as

21. Fujita and Guth, Encyclopedia of East Asian Design. 78.

22. D.J. Huppatz, Modern Asian Design (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). 89.

23. Minick and Jiao, Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century. 44.

Fig. 18 This is an excerpt of a guidebook that teaches students how to create visual propaganda.

Fig. 19 Long March Poster. Highly inspired by Chinese folk paper-cutting techniques.

ancient cave drawings, bronze patterns, seal carving, calligraphy and Western stylistic influences such as formal characteristics of Dada, Constructivism, and Art Deco.22 A diversity of magazines were established during this time, appearing in the new Shanghai style while embracing a mix of literature, art, philosophy, education, politics and culture, such as La Jeunesse, Modern Student, and The Ark [Fig. 13-15]

Because of increased cultural movements locally and globally, Chinese people's need for political self-determination and technological modernisation upsurged during the 1930s. Designers aspired to Western mathematics and geometry, the idea of rationality and logic they embodied, as well as Russian Constructivism and the progressiveness it represented. [Fig. 16-17] Graphic design from this era, termed the Progressive Movement, is formally characterised by geometric shapes, abstract symbols, flat colour planes, mechanical and industrial motifs, and most notably, modern typographic experimentations and the use of dynamic photography.23

Unfortunately, many design activities were halted, and the Shanghai Modernist and Progressive movement scenes were cut off in 1937 due to the Japanese invasion. The invasion led to the Second Sino-Japanese War, after which the post-war effect and communist disfavour of ‘capitalist print culture’ set back the development of graphic design as a profession in mainland China for years.24 However, the commercial Shanghai-style design continued to thrive under British-Colonial Hong Kong’s capitalist economic system.25

The Revolutionary Style

There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent from politics.

Mao Zedong, Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art

After the Communist Party of China (CPC) took over the country in 1949, leader Mao Zedong recognised the instrumental value of art, craft, and design in economic development and ideological formation. In his ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’ in May 1942, he criticised the art of the past for only serving the ruling class and bourgeois. In Mao's vision, the new revolutionary art and design should be by and for the proletariat and should prioritise serving political purposes. The idea of political art is nothing new. However, Mao’s extremely progressive attitude meant that those not up to his standard were doomed:

[Marxism-Leninism] will definitely destroy feudal, bourgeois, pettybourgeois, literalistic, individualist, nihilist, art-for-art’s sake, aristocratic, decadent, pessimistic, and other kinds of creativity that are alien to the popular masses and the proletariat. Should mentalities like these be destroyed among proletarian writers and artists? Yes, I think so, they should be thoroughly destroyed, and as they are being destroyed, something new can be established.26

The first generation of workers of the People’s Republic of China, around their thirties or forties during this time, experienced the hardship in the past and therefore excitement of the formation of a new nation.27 However, the new regime did not allow too much enthusiasm of the workers to be imputed: the only valid forms of graphic design were publication and advertising, which both served mainly propaganda purposes, and some form of packaging design.28 Former art workers, designers or managers of design agencies noted that 70% of their work from the 1950s to 1960s was political, and a striking 100% during the Cultural Revolution, many of which did not allow creative freedom at all, since the posters were already finalised by official publishing houses, and the job of the agencies was to merely copy the design onto billboards. [Fig. 18] Commercial graphics were considered part of ‘Western lifestyle’ and encouraged ‘unnecessary purchasing and waste of national resources.’ Packaging also remained very simple, since the tradition of premodern packaging in China was to merely wrap the product in paper and strings.29

Whilst early USSR propaganda was heavily influenced by Russian Avant-Garde designers like Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, propaganda art under CPC steered towards the later visual Socialist Realism as its predecessor meanwhile seeking references from other origins. In order to reach a less literate rural population that mainly worked in agriculture, the formal aesthetic of the revolutionary style drew inspiration from Chinese folk art, such as papercuts and painting techniques of non-Han, ethnic minority art. [Fig. 19] Thematically, the images focused on the struggle and plight of the Chinese proletariat in rural settings in hopes of inspiring them to fight for change. Mao also endorsed Lu Xun’s idea of vernacularism and preference for woodcut printing. Woodblock was affordable, portable, easily concealed during the Japanese invasion, and made mass production easy. Its production process also led to bold and rough textures, which highlighted the laborious hardship of the working class.30

24. Huppatz, Modern Asian Design. 93.

25. Wong, ‘Detachment and Unification: A Chinese Graphic Design History in Greater China Since 1979’. 52.

26. Zedong Mao, Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art’: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary, trans. Bonnie S. McDougall, Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, no. 39 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies; University of Michigan, 1980). 83.

27. Justice, China’s Design Revolution. 39.

28. Shou Zhi Wang, ‘Chinese Modern Design: A Retrospective’, Design Issues 6, no. 1 (1989): 49, https://doi. org/10.2307/1511577. 66.

29. Ibid, 67.

30. Minick and Jiao, Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century. 89l93.

31. Ibid, 101l107.

20

Criticize the old world and build a new world with Mao Zedong Thought as a weapon. The olive text at the top is a quote from Mao: ‘All erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds, all ghosts and monsters, must be subjected to criticism, and must not spread freely.’

Fig.

The new Yan’an artistic ideal differed significantly from the aforementioned Shanghai style, which was reasonably less popular amongst the art commissions under CPC. Suggestions were made to approve ‘a hybrid style which would merge the ideological strength of Yan’an with the technical and visual advances of the Shanghai-style.’ However, the 1950 Korean War put a stop to the hybrid proposal as all foreign materials and ideas were prohibited from entering China.31 Because of the absence of Western influence during the subsequent Great Leap Forward, propaganda art showed an increased inclination towards Soviet Socialist Realism, and they shared subject matters of unity, representation, production, and advancement in an optimistic light.32

During the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, schools and universities were closed and many professors were sent to the rural area to be reeducated, hindering the education of those who had just come of age at the beginning of the revolution. Students during this decade were thus known as the lost generation of PRC. Fearful, overwhelmed individuals had little freedom to produce art or design that was not pro-CCP.33 Propaganda art, or Dazibao [大字 报], ‘big-character posters,’ on the other hand, usually appeared in an optimistic tone, with happy and muscular workers looking into their bright future or surrounding Mao. The archetype of the Dazibao is one with a Socialist-Realistic illustration on the top, and underneath it, a black or bright red slogan set in a usually elongated typeface, either vertically or horizontally. [Fig. 20]

One of those typefaces is Yaoti [姚体]. Named after the designer as well as the technician who first used it in CPC’s official newspaper Liberation Daily, Yaoti is a condensed typeface compared to the conventional squared shape of Chinese characters.34 From an aesthetic aspect, the elongated silhouette stands out from the traditional ‘Square-Block Characters’ [方块字 Fangkuaizi]; from a utilitarian aspect, the condensed shape makes it possible to compact more information into a limited space. On top of the overall shape, Yaoti emphasises the vertical strokes by making them bolder than the horizontal ones. This stylisation sharpens and radicalises the characters since there are usually more vertical strokes than horizontal ones in each character. The typeface also retains the serif equivalent of Chinese characters, so it does not look overly avant-garde or Western Bourgeois, compared to other typographic experiments from earlier in the 20th century.

Mao’s life, along with the Cultural Revolution, ended abruptly in 1976. However, the overall idea of utility over beauty still affects the life of Chinese people generation after generation.

Open Doors and Beijing Spring

We want political democracy! We want artistic freedom!-The Stars Art Exhibition

In a 1982 Creative Review article, packaging designer Robert Williamson shared his experience of being invited to Shanghai to lecture local designers. He deemed Chinese packaging design to be ‘too fussy for [British] market with an obsession to red and gold.’35 This is an interesting insight into the early 80s design scene, since Williamson obviously had not taken into account the history of China. As stated in the last section, less than a decade before his visit, Chinese package designs were still minimal, archaic, and mostly existing for protection for exporting. The ‘obsession to red and gold’ is mostly probably remnants of Maoist aesthetics. Concepts like corporate identity design were ‘unheard of,’ since state media was the only thing accessible to the public.36

After Mao’s death, then-Chairman Deng Xiaoping implemented his ‘Reform and Opening Up’ policy to reconstruct the economy. The policy aimed to shift China away from a state-dictated economy and allowed foreign businesses to invest in China, providing opportunities for designers to rehabilitate themselves from decades of centralised governmental media:

In order to understand the problems inherent in the rebuilding of Chinese design and visual communications during the Seventies, it is important to realise the immensity of China’s internal and external isolation. Publishing had fallen into a serious decline during the Cultural Revolution: editors were jailed and paper was diverted for the creation of propaganda posters. Aside from the radio, the communication links within the country immediately following the turbulent years were severely limited. The real use of modern mass-media techniques only came with the growth of individual television ownership during the midSeventies.37

The relative commercial and political freedom rippled across fields of fine art and design. Underground artist groups such as No Name Group and The Stars formed and held avant-garde art exhibits. These movements were grouped as the ‘85 New Wave Movement of China, signalling a new Chinese art that was ‘neither western modern nor historic Chinese.’38 However, Chinese people’s

32. Ibid.

33. Justice, China’s Design Revolution. 50

34. Guo Changxi, ‘姚志良与“ 姚体” [Yao Zhiliang and Yaoti]’, 国学网 guoxue.com (blog), 2015, http://www.guoxue. com/?p=32603

35. Robert Williamson, ‘A Slant on China’, Creative Review, 1982. 30.

36. Wang, ‘Chinese Modern Design’. 73.

37. Minick and Jiao, Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century. 131l132.

38. Justice, China’s Design Revolution. 54.

39. Ibid, 53.

40. Minick and Jiao, Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century. 134.

Fig. 21 Chen Shaohua, Graphic Design in China 1992 Thematic Poster. The intertwined legs with respective Western and Chinese traditional attire form a gestalt that resembles the Chinese character for people, ‘人.’It served as a metaphor for Chinese graphic design of its time: combining Eastern tradition and Western modernity.

Fig. 22 Henry Steiner, Poster for Morisawa Type Foundry. The capital letters ‘T’ and ‘E’ in the word ‘TYPE’ are replaced respectively by their Chinese ‘lookalike’ characters, ‘十’[ten] and ‘三’ [three].

pursuit of freedom was met with much state oppression: many progressive art exhibitions were shut down by police, and the waves of student movement advocating for democracy concluded with the carnage of 1989. Universities and schools started to open up as well after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and students, especially those in art and design, were sent abroad to study again for the potential economic value.39 The sudden influx of new culture, ideas, and design theories created great confusion for the small number of designers of the late 70s, who resorted to copying any imported design despite its aesthetic quality.40

With consumer market growth after ‘Opening Up’, the demand for advertising, corporate identity design, packaging design, design agencies and studios, as well as in-house design departments of big corporations, emerged accordingly. Posters surfaced as the most studied area of graphic design, possibly due to their commercial use before PRC and political significance during Mao’s era; the spotlight on posters remains today. Propaganda posters were still produced until the 90s, but by then they were no longer the main channel of political communication.41 The growth of the industry is also reflected in printed matters: magazines focused on design, such as Applied Arts, Chinese Journal of Design, and Design Exchange, were established. As political censorship declined, these magazines also allowed designers to access international art and design news.42

Although the late 80s and early 90s bred many stylistic norms such as a Chinese derivative of the New Wave, interpretive illustrations, and the modern folk revival, the most prominent theme was still the mix between Chinese and foreign ideas. This time, the modern concept of graphic design finally arrived. Contemporary Chinese graphic design embarked mostly in Shenzhen because of its geographical and cultural proximity to Hong Kong, which had more access to knowledge of contemporary Western design. Proximity to Hong Kong also meant more access to business opportunities with the West at the time, benefiting as well from the territory's Special Economic Zone status. Famous Hong Kong designers like Kan Tai-Keung and Wucius Wong among others visited the Guangzhou Academy of Arts to teach Western design fundamentals such as Bauhaus theory. The first graphic design exhibition, Graphic Design in China 1992 (GDC) [Fig. 21], was also held in Shenzhen, settling down the official use of Pingmian Sheji [平面设计] as the official Chinese translation of ‘graphic design’, and leading to the founding of the Shenzhen Graphic Design Association (SGDA), the first non-profit professional organisation on graphic design in China.43 Organisations like the SDGA are crucial to stimulating the local design industry as well as building international connections, which is why cities in the south like Shanghai and Ningbo-both Open Coastal citiesparalleled this trajectory of hosting design exhibitions and establishing organisations in the industry.44 In 2001, Beijing was elected as the host city for the 2008 Summer Olympics. The iconic ‘Dancing Beijing’ emblem marked a climax of the dynamic of mixing Chinese and Western ideas.

This dichotomy of Eastern and Western ideas is especially compelling when it comes to the discussion of Hong Kong design. However, it is important to note that the cliched claim of ‘East meets West’ often ignores the effect of colonialism in its multitude of forms, especially in Hong Kong. Graphic design works by Western designers that fall into this category of juxtaposing elements from two cultures, although commercially successful, need to be examined and critiqued under a broader cultural context. [Fig. 22] Some of the juxtaposing analogies lack critical reasoning, historical consciousness, and cultural considerations. For example, the Shanghai Modernists and their aforementioned Hong Kong successors had already started exploring the idea of “East meets West” decades ago, but it was only given attention when Western designers joined the discourse. Additionally, many of these works are designed for corporations established by British traders during the 19th century.45 The influx of Western ideas and design is crucial to the Chinese and Hong Kong graphic design scene, but we should understand that ideas and culture no longer flow unidirectionally in our highly globalised world.

China Design Now

Everyone is a designer. Everyone can design. Let the masters be narcissistic!-Ou Ning, Get It Louder Manifesto

In 2008, Victoria and Albert Museum published China Design Now to coincide with its homonymous exhibition. The book acknowledged the profound economic, cultural, and creative impact China has achieved since Deng’s reform. It also emphasised Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, which were and still are the largest cities in the country. The V&A exhibition is certainly not the whole picture, but 2008 did mark Chinese designers’ international success.46

Today the design scene in China is a melting pot of many influences, alike many multicultural nations around the world. It is hard to rule out certain styles that Chinese designers exclusively follow, perhaps because the

41. Fujita and Guth, Encyclopedia of East Asian Design. 85.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Wong, ‘Detachment and Unification: A Chinese Graphic Design History in Greater China Since 1979’. 63.

45. D. J. Huppatz, ‘The Chameleon and the Pearl of the Orient’, Design Issues 22, no. 2 (2006): 64l76. 65l66.

46. Hongxing Zhang et al., eds., China Design Now (London : New York: V&A Pub. ; Distributed in North America by Harry N. Abrams, 2008).

23 Jiang Jun. Magazine cover for Urban China 2005. It is a collage of the logotypes of other Chinese magazines, forming a cityscape.

Fig. 24 Jianping He, Poster, China Image. 2004.

Fig.

Fig. 25 Guang Yu & Nod Young, Poster for TDC Tokyo Selected Artworks in Beijing. 2019.

exponential technological advances which allow design to become a much more individualistic practice. But one thing is certain: Chinese designers never stopped exploring the potential of Chinese traditions as inspiration

Jianping He is known for his creative incorporation of materiality in the digital design age. He has done many posters that explored the idea of Chinese characters as both the theme and stylistic element. [Fig. 24] On the other hand, designers like Guang Yu and Nod Young have mastered a style that both explored the deviant qualities of postmodern design and retains a clean and orderly fashion for commercial possibilities. [Fig. 25]

Although China’s graphic design has gained international recognition, official government propaganda has never improved in terms of style or substance Maybe because the idea of utilitarianism from the Mao era still lingers; maybe a better art and design education still faces challenges from the immense population. Perhaps both are true, and the most disaffected rural population are simply the target demographic of traditional propaganda.

Fig. 26 Package design of the most iconic Yeshu product, 2019. The large text on the right reads, ‘31st year of making freshly squeezed coconut milk on Hainan Island.’

The New Ugly & Case Studies

To discuss the New Ugly, we need to first look at what its prototype, the old ugly-or just ugly, is. The vernacular, ugly design has but is not limited to the following stylistic characteristics:

I. Message

A. Informal language

B. Sometimes not concise

II. Composition

A. Crude, simple composition

B. Compacted, full composition

III. Colour

A. Default, primary & secondary colours

IV. Typography

A. Default typefaces, such as Heiti, Songti, and Kaiti

B. Stretched type, often different degrees of stretch in one work

C. Multiple, different typographic rules

D. Justified, centred text

V. Images

A. Little to no use of photography or illustration

B. Generic, stock photos

VI. Production

A. Cheap materials, such as glossy paper and stickers

B. Mass-produced, usually overproduced and thus overcrowding whatever space it takes

A famous case of ugly design entering the public lens is the package design of Yeshuyezhi [椰树椰汁], a type of coconut milk drink and one of the most famous canned beverages amongst not only Mainlanders but also international Chinese diaspora. [Fig. 26] Yeshuyezhi is beloved not only for its flavour but also for its unique packaging. Allegedly, the company's CEO, Wang Guangxing, former Meigong [美工, applied art worker] in the 1960s, designed it himself in Microsoft Word.47 The large and bold, sometimes stretched type in combination with crude composition and the exclusive use of the primary colours indeed show traits of amateurism-at least according to a traditional, conservative sense of design discipline. As a result, this comedic and quirky lack of professionalism in the package design made the drink a hot topic among netizens.

In this respect, Yeshuyezhi is also a perfect example of the ordinary and the ugly: a simple and cheap design, possibly not cost anything since it was produced in-house by the company CEO, taking the form of mass-produced stickers on aluminium cans. Perhaps Wang Guangxing’s experience could provide an insight into where the aesthetics of the ugly design came from: the influence from CPC aesthetics and amateurist improvisation.

We can see a lot of overlap between the visual styles of U&O design and Dazibao from the Mao era: notably, strong contrast, bright, primary colours; brutal, straightforward compositions; stretched typefaces; generic photographic elements. Maybe the similarity could be attributed to the lack of systematic art and design education during the 50s-70s: without the influence

47. ‘椰树集团 1 号美工 王光兴：设计界的泥石 流、专注低俗文案30年 [Number 1 Meigong of the Yeshu Corporation: ‘Mudflow’ of a designer, vulgarly copywriting for 30 years]’, 资讯咖 iNews, accessed 8 June 2022, https://inf.news/zh-my/ design/1c23fdeaaf2e 055eb39ae77981af3c29. html

Fig. 27 Mud shield behind a moped in Taipei City.

Fig. 28 Takada Yui, Diving flyer, 2018.

Fig. 29 A newspaper advertisement column.

Fig. 30 Bofeng Liao, Liao flyer, 2018.

of Western ideas, it is natural that the art workers responsible for propaganda could not produce designs up to the Western design standard, relying only on their intuition instead.

In the article ‘Megastructure, Repetition, and Uniformity-Rereading the “Communist Aesthetics” Around Us,’ Chinese Journalist Shell Long notes that many structures that followed the Communist aesthetic, whilst symbolising monumental expectations of China as a strong industrial country, almost only focused on their utilitarian and public aspect: structures were brutally simple with little to no decoration, and infrastructure like water taps were communal and not private. Long writes, ‘since when we were little, teachers and even parents constantly indoctrinate us with [the idea of utilitarianism], just as the fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper”-hardworking is the only way to life, and those who shamefully pursue art and beauty deserve to starve.’48 Elements of homogeneity, repetition and monumental aspirations manifest in graphic design in a similar way, and we can still see the influence of Maoist aesthetics and ideology in the daily life of Chinese people. This also corresponds with the contemporary resurgence of propaganda messages all over the country, especially those in rural and underdeveloped areas.

There are definitely other styles that inspired the U&O design, whether or not the amateur designers are aware or not, such as ‘POP’ hand lettering, or contemporary Chinese calligraphy. But the influence of CPC’s tight control during the second half of the twentieth century was immeasurable, both aesthetically and ideologically.

The New Ugly

So what is the New Ugly? And how is it different from all the aforementioned attempts to translate ugliness into something else? Chinese graphic designer Guang Yu addressed the following:

[The New Ugly] is derived from Pretty Ugly, a book published in ‘12 by gestalten. It documented works with bold forms, and also differed from the aesthetically pleasing, or rational design. After that, designers from many countries made a lot of formally brutal works, with ugly forms based on digital-brutalism, and we call these works the New Ugly...

[The New Ugly] originated from those [designs] made by nonprofessional designers, and that formal quality is then again consumed by professional graphic designers [...] like the ugly stretched text on the signs we see alongside roads or the cramped texts on those small flyer cards scattered through the streets. The ones who designed those are not necessarily trained professionals; they make the text as big as possible and everything as clear as possible solely as their clients instruct. However, it is in those ugly works that we experience an unexpectedly unique visual effect. These ‘new’ and ‘ugly’ experiences immediately caught the eyes of some professional designers. They imitate these works, going against the ‘disciplines of design’ to create something more expressive. I am unsure of their intentions for doing so. It might be a rebellion against authority; it might be mockery or satire; it could be just for fun. The only thing I am sure of is that [The New Ugly] has become a trend consumed by a lot of people.49

The book Pretty Ugly mentioned by Guang mostly consists of selected design works that utilise unusual visual forms and presents the unique visual identity of the designers. The book was published a decade ago in 2012. Just as the editors had expected, much of the ‘aesthetic rampage’ discussed in the book had since entered the mainstream with widespread public acceptance. Throughout the book, the editors categorised the design they included in the publication, which included: deviant, mundane, de-constructed, impure, mishmash, deformed, and neo-artisanal. Each category comes with manifestolike short writings of their explanation of the keyword. The following three are especially applicable and important to the discussion of the New Ugly:

Deviant - Against established criteria of what good design is. Embracing what is disliked and considered incorrect. Mistakes become virtues. Create authenticity and humanity.

Mundane - Converting ordinary into extra-ordinary, old into new. Elevating ugliness to a new kind of beauty by changing its function or message. The mundane attracts the attention of those who find perfection boring.

De-constructed - De-constructing our cultural heritage: Breaking it down to its basic elements until it can be constructed as something new. Authorship as a process of deconstruction and construction.50

While the aforementioned qualities can be all seen in many of the works related to the New Ugly, the style embodies more than just visual innovation.

48. Shell Long, ‘巨大 化、重复、统一——重 读身边的“共产主义美学”’ [Megastructure, Repetition, and UniformitylRereading the ‘Communist Aesthetics’ Around Us], 歪脑 WHYNOT, accessed 8 June 2022, https://www.wainao.me/ wainao-reads/aesthetics-ofcommunism-04222022

49. Yu Guang, ‘新不新，丑 不丑，又如何 [New or not, ugly or not, so what?]’, Social Media, Weibo, accessed 8 June 2022, https:// weibo.com/1871658703/ HwTJMigK3?type=repost

50. Twopoints.net, ed., Pretty Ugly: Visual Rebellion in Design (Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, 2012).

Fig. 31

Fig. 32

Fig. 33 Bofeng Liao. Name Card for AGI in China

Affirmation

In an interview with British new media It’s Nice That, designer Ivy Yixue Li explained the what she finds attractive in the ugliness of amateur designs:

I am fascinated by how the visual culture truthfully depicts the living needs, desire and daily activities [...] and how stretching and squashing fonts is not a type crime but a reasonable choice to use space economically.51

The trend of breaking the rules of design conventions has become increasingly common since the postmodern movement. Designers are no longer satisfied with the arbitrarily limited toolbox they inherited which tells them what is wrong and what is right, abandoning an arborescent top-down model of design in favour of rhizomatic expressions.52 They relinquish their preconception of everyday objects and vernacular visuals, in order to see a new possibility than what is culturally imprinted on them.

Japanese designer Takada Yui made perhaps some of the most prominent translations of ugly ephemeral design into experimental graphic design work. Famous for his brutal use of vibrant but jarring colours, simple geometric shapes, and fluctuating sizes, Takada has been obsessed with busy composition and compacted information such as those on supermarket promotion flyers. For his 2018 solo exhibition in China, Takada designed the flyers to resemble the waterproof mud shield hanging over the back wheel of a motorcycle or moped. [Fig. 27-28] This is a utilitarian object seen everywhere in China and Taiwan where the use of such vehicles is common, but for Takada, it is an unusual spectacle he finds new. He wrote on his website, ‘This might not seem curious for [a Chinese audience], but I found it refreshing. ‘This is it!’ I thought so as I happily finished the design.’53

Chinese designer Bofeng Liao made a similar statement with his advertising flyers. He included his name, work, achievements, and contact in a compacted space with a whimsical tone. [Fig. 29-30] Liao’s appreciation for the ugly design is also evident in his Name Card for AGI in China [Fig. 31-33] Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), based in Europe, is one of the most prestigious clubs for graphic designers. In his work, he made a business card for each one of the 32 Chinese members of AGI. Rather than do it completely by himself, he commissioned a local print shop in the capital city of each of the Chinese provinces. Liao brought together the elite and intellectual side of graphic design with the perceived lower-end printer shop design. He did not execute it in a pejorative manner, but rather with a 6-metre-long careful analysis dissecting all the cards in an anthropological sense to objectively present ‘the status quo of Chinese folk design,’ in his own words.54

For some, this might seem problematic because of the different power dynamics between the appropriated and the appropriator. A formally trained graphic designer certainly has more resources, industry backing, and academic knowledge. They can potentially profit off using the style, whereas the amateur designer might have always worked with the style, or might simply take it for granted. Guang Yu addressed this issue as well: ‘The New Ugly is different from true ugly. A real intriguing visual is different from the actual design on the streets. Not everyone could choose what to left out and what not to, to achieve an effective image.’55

For others, these works might seem like pure replicas of the kitsch design that already saturates everyday life. However, the New Ugly as well as its origins should not be rendered kitsch with unconsidered prejudice. Let us take a look at art historian Gustav E. Pazaurek’s definition of Kitsch in his ‘Good and Bad Taste in Applied Arts’:

The absolute antithesis of artistically inspired work of quality is tasteless mass rubbish, or kitsch: it disregards all the demands of ethics, logic, and aesthetics; it is indifferent to all crimes and offences against material, technique, and functional or artistic form; it knows only one commandment: the object must be cheap and yet still attempt to create at least some impression of a higher value.56

Pazaurek’s idea of Kitsch is simple and almost analogous to the ugly and ordinary by Venturi, et al, which states that a U&O object is cheap and presents itself as low value. In this sense, it is clear that the original ugly design certainly does not fall in the category of Kitsch, since they neither hide the reality of their material value nor allude nostalgically to the past.

One can argue that those aforementioned works by Takada and Liao took an already existing style or object, and attempted to make them appear ‘better’ or ‘avant-garde,’ inadvertently hollowing their intrinsic significance into Kitsch. Like Greenberg argued, Kitsch uses ‘the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture,’ ‘vicarious experience and faked sensations,’ as well as ‘pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money.’57

51. ‘Who Made the Objects in Your House? Ivy Li Explores the Vernacular Visual Language of Chinese Migrant Workers’, accessed 20 May 2022, https://www. itsnicethat.com/articles/ivyli-on-being-a-factory-workergraphic-design-280820.

52. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

53. Yui Takada, ‘Diving Graphic’, accessed 23 May 2022, https://takadayui.com/ Diving-Graphic

54. Bofeng Liao, ‘Name Card for AGI in China’, GDC Awards, accessed 23 May 2022, http://gdc. sgda.cc/op/before_works/ detail?id=258&bo=6&backurl =http%3A%2F%2Fgdc.sgda. cc%2Fbefore-works%3Flang% 3Dcn%26bo%3D6%26 pagenum%3D5&lang=en

55. Guang, ‘新不新，丑不丑， 又如何 [New or not, ugly or not, so what?]’.

56. Stephen Bayley, Ugly: The Aesthetics of Everything (London: Goodman Fiell, 2012). 136-137.

57. Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in Perceptions and Judgements: 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brien, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 1 (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1988), 5l22. 12.

Fig. 34 Ivy Yixue Li, On Being a Factory Worker. 2020.

Fig. 35 Ken-Tsai Lee, Celestial Dragons House. 2021.

But the works discussed above differ from this definition. Kitsch always finds its way of recreating beauty, but Diving flyer, Name Card for AGI in China, or the New Ugly to a large extent do not simulate something of more beauty or cultural significance, but rather that which is overlooked and regarded as ‘lower tier’ aesthetics. They are not deceptive about their origins-conversely, the significance of these works lies within the genuine usage of the ‘ugly’ aesthetics. Both Takada and Liao studied at art and design academies, and their institutional identity highlights the discrepancy between the aesthetics of the Chinese masses and those being taught at design schools, which are predominantly of a Western origin. Their works are stylistically and historically demanding: it is challenging to learn how to use grids, hierarchy, and colour theory among other principles, only to see prominent designers conspicuously abandon conventional discipline in favour of a textbook ‘bad design.’

Their affirmation of ugly design also suggests a postmodernist approach to embracing new and unexplored visual styles: Why couldn't these amateur attempts be part of the discourse, especially if graphic design existed way before the profession was formed? Why should there exist this hierarchy between ‘Western’ and ‘Chinese’ design? What would ‘Chinese'' graphic design look like free from those influences? If the Cranbrook aesthetic represented postmodern graphic design that illustrated new possibilities in design language, then the New Ugly goes one step further in exemplifying a contemporary and critical graphic design practice which simultaneously explores new approaches to visual styles while questioning and revealing aspects of their material, spatial, and political origins. The stakes are higher in the cultural context of China, as such a graphic design style is immanently critical and holds a sociopolitical significance, and those will be further discussed in the next section.

Critical Commentary

Repeating texts in stretched and angled typefaces and jarring colours, advertisements for internet cafes, lottery tickets, prostitution, and pawn shops, disproportionate price tags that show a low cost of living contrasted with giant iPhone barcode labels are all pasted on a crowded wall for Li’s thesis work, On Being a Factory Worker. [Fig. 34] She emphasised the huge disparity between labour and product, the producer and the consumer, and the exploited and the privileged through her ‘unconsciously anti-designed visual outputs of migrant workers in China.’ Migrant workers, or Mingong [民工] in China face a twofold abuse: On one hand, companies from the global north take advantage of the cheap manual labour in China by overproducing in a country with poor labour laws. On the other hand, coming from mostly rural and underdeveloped areas, migrant workers lack access to many rights-including medical care, education rights, and pension-like locals of the area, due to China’s outdated Hukou system.58 On Being a Factory Worker is a fierce critique of China’s modernisation process that values capital over capita, but it also reminds designers to acknowledge their source of inspirations and financial privilege.

Likewise, in his collaboration with a few Taiwanese NGOs, Ken-Tsai Lee art-directed Celestial Dragons House to protest the high housing price in Taiwan that disproportionately affected young and marginalised groups due to housing agencies' hoarding and selling tactics. [Fig. 35] Accompanying the critique was the demand for the Taiwanese government to fix this issue.59 The campaign had a similar approach as Li’s work: taking the formal qualities of ugly design, while executing on a larger scale. The team rented an actual store front as a faux housing agency, to further present the irony of using a hyper commercialised form for a problem caused by the agencies in Taiwan. The text content of the posters mostly came from the negative experiences of buyers and renters that the team collected. The campaign also featured one-day lectures on civil justice, and local politicians were invited to be oneday managers as an attempt for them to interact with and better understand citizens.60 ‘The artwork is not only the echo of the suffering, it diminishes it; form, the organon of its seriousness, is at the same time the organon of the neutralization of the suffering.’ Li and Lee’s works, although impossible to offset all the difficulties that they mentioned, are at least firm and bold echoes of those in need, and in Adorno’s sense, art.61

The critique of capitalism is a common theme in works related to the New Ugly, understandably because of the intrinsic, commercial qualities of the ordinary and the ugly. Designers aim for the hyper-economic attribute of the style, and take advantage of it with satire and irony to criticise the commercialisation and the detriment of capitalism. In his poster for Foudertype Beijing, Jianping He discussed a multitude of topics with a simple technique. He made a collage of Chinese calligraphic writing, ‘The East Wind Prevails Over the West Wind,’ with irregular, black and white rectangles. [Fig. 36] Zoomed in, the shapes appear to be almost microscopic advertisements of loan sharks, pawn shops, job openings, and property selling which he gathered and possibly reformatted from Chinese newspapers. The hypocrisy of the Chinese government's performance of communism through state capitalism in a capitalist world reveals itself through the crippling debt crisis of Chinese citizens. Alternatively, in He’s own words, ‘Eastwind wins against Westwind. Communism against Capitalism’.62

58. The Hukou system is a household registration system that officiates an individual as a permanent resident of a certain area. Migrant workers, usually coming from rural areas that already have less resources allocated to them, have very little access to health care, ethical contract, and education rights for their children in the new city they settle in.

59. 想要一个家－天龙房屋 [Just Want a HomelCelestial Dragons House]’, Facebook, accessed 8 June 2022, https://www.facebook.com/ justwantahome/

60. Ken-Tsai Lee, ‘Celestial Dragons House’, Behance, accessed 8 June 2022, https://www.behance.net/ gallery/123403581/CelestialDragons-House

61. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Situation’, in Aesthetic Theory, Paperback ed., repr, Bloomsbury Revelations (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

62. Jianping He, ‘The East Wind Prevails over the West Wind’, hesign, accessed 8 June 2022, http://hesign. com/projects/the-east-windprevails-over-the-west-wind

Fig. 36 Jianping He, The East Wind prevails over the West Wind. 2019.

Fig. 37 Balenciaga’s Qixi Campaign Image. 2020.

Appropriation

Some corporations see the success of the New Ugly and Tuku aesthetics as an opportunity to monetise the style, either directly or indirectly. Many luxury brands have attempted to do so, only to execute it in a manner that borders on caricature. Take Balenciaga’s 2020 Qixi [七夕, Chinese Valentine’s Day] campaign for example. [Fig. 37] The campaign photos feature models surrounded by tacky, saturated and dated imagery. These images-digital ‘found objects’ likely sourced from the 1990s to 2000s Chinese social media-represent the aesthetics of older rural populations and retro media in general. It is clear that this campaign is designed to appeal to the younger generation who identify with the TuKu trend. Because of its unique aesthetics, as well as the questionable design of the product itself, this campaign stirred controversies on the Chinese internet. Netizens pointed out that to release such images on a traditional Chinese holiday is a mockery of Chinese people’s judgement of beauty; some even called the brand racist.63

We should note that this campaign is not an anomaly. Different luxury brands have done campaigns or events that in some way combine the low-end of the common people and their high-end luxury products. In a similar attempt, Prada also held a special event: in a wet market in downtown Shanghai which operated as usual, the brand provided a Prada-branded packaging along with the produce. The microcosm of this tone-deaf event highlights an internal contradiction of China, the highly unequal distribution of wealth. While many still live in poverty, some are wealthy enough to incentivise a brand to aestheticise and commercialise the proletarian lifestyle.

Luxury brands’ entitled appropriation of these motifs is insidious. It is certain that Balenciaga’s creative direction misjudged its audience. No matter how well the sales of the actual products were, the aesthetic style that the brand borrowed was and continues to belong to the masses. While some wrote that Balenciaga stays true to itself by embracing ‘weird,’ ‘other,’ or ‘ugly’ styles, a deeper examination of Chinese graphic design history leads me to conclude that the brand attempts to appropriate a style that they have no history or connections to.64 The New Ugly and its predecessor were born from sociopolitical strife and economic chaos, and those who actually created and participated in the formation of style are unlikely to afford the product. It is deeply hypocritical and insincere for elite high-fashion brands to adopt proletarian imagery in order to promote their haute couture. While this does reflect the general capitalist tendency to incorporate any innovation into the market, it is even more exasperating when luxury brands attempt so.

It is fair to argue that what graphic designers did was also appropriation to an extent. To be able to afford an education in design and become a graphic designer is certainly a privilege inaccessible to most who live in more rural areas. Nevertheless, we must remember that designers are also individual workers, and the profits that luxury brands make are simply incomparable with the salary of an average designer anywhere in the world. Graphic designers mentioned in the previous sections all provided their unique insights into the special socio-economic situation that China is experiencing, while Western luxury brands and the corporations behind them do the exact opposite.

63. ‘Was Balenciaga’s Qixi Festival Handbag Campaign a Tasteless Insult to China?’, South China Morning Post, 15 August 2020, https:// www.scmp.com/magazines/ style/luxury/article/3097416/ was-balenciagas-qixi-festivalhandbag-campaign-tasteless 64. Ibid.

Conclusion

In this dissertation, I have defended the revolutionary potential of the New Ugly, a graphic design style which has gained popularity in recent years. First I established the complex meaning of ugliness in terms of the specific style, in relation to its Western counterparts-namely, the style associated with postmodernist graphic design. While the two models have certain similarities, the New Ugly came from an existing visual predecessor indigenous to China. I then provided a brief survey of Chinese graphic design history since the beginning of the twentieth century, and posited that the New Ugly takes its inspirations from Maoist and communist-era propaganda based on their overlapping visual elements. Having clarified what the New Ugly refers to, I explained its visual and political significance for the Greater China area through a few case studies. Through this essay, graphic design practitioners and artists should have a better understanding of Chinese design history, which in turn deepens the historical, cultural, and political significance of their work-regardless of where they create-for a more informed, critical practice.

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