Style combination · Pairs well

Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement × Minjung Woodcut Graphics

MMCA names it as a source; keep its self-cut black line but trade the gouged diagonal shock for Minjung's frontal, dancing figures.

From the research on Minjung Woodcut Graphics (Korean People's Art)

Mix them and make something Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement Minjung Woodcut Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Minjung Woodcut Graphics, their arrangement from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement, the finish from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement Minjung Woodcut Graphics (Korean People's Art)

Type from Minjung Woodcut Graphics: Hand-lettering
Colour from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement: Monochrome
Form from Minjung Woodcut Graphics: Stylised figuration
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement: Diagonal axis
Visual tension
Surface from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement: Carved line
Paper & letterpress bite

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Minjung Woodcut Graphics

Rise

Black Han Sans, standing in for Hangul titles and slogans carved into the woodblock

Text · Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement

The leftist print movement launched by Lu Xun's 1931 Shanghai woodcut workshop, which made the self-cut black-and-white woodcut China's art of national crisis and revolution. Young artists learned from Käthe Kollwitz, Frans Masereel and Soviet woodcuts to gouge close-up, diagonal images of workers, refugees and resistance for journals, books and travelling exhibitions; in Yan'an after 1942 they adopted New Year print outlines and colour for peasant audiences.

Shippori Mincho; Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement used Hand-cut Chinese characters carved into the block and Brush-written kaishu titles on journal and book covers

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement, with a counter-accent from Minjung Woodcut Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement Minjung Woodcut Graphics (Korean People's Art)

#efe7d4 ground · 36%
#141414 ink · 14%
#e0b23a accent · 18%
#b8312f accent · 14%
#8c7b62 accent · 10%
#7a5a3a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe7d4;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #e0b23a;
  --accent-2: #b8312f;
  --accent-3: #8c7b62;
  --accent-4: #7a5a3a;
  --font-display: "Black Han Sans", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

Use it with care

Minjung Woodcut Graphics (Korean People's Art): Minjung prints were made for a living movement and many record the dead of the Gwangju Uprising; their makers or estates hold the rights, and the movement's exhibitions met police suppression (The Power of People in Their 20s, 1985). Their borrowings from shamanic gut, mask dance and Buddhist painting carry ritual meaning in Korea: do not lift those motifs as decorative 'Korean folk' texture, do not turn Gwangju imagery into generic protest branding, and credit the artists by name. The genome describes the reproducible woodcut branch of a wider movement that also painted, made banners, comics and photomontage.

The two styles

A black-and-cream woodcut-style illustration shows a tightly packed group of armed people advancing through rubble, led by a large foreground figure gripping a rifle. A woman carrying a child appears at upper left, while soldiers, an artillery piece, smoke and ruined buildings recede beneath the Chinese lettering “前進”.

1931–1949 · East Asia Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement The leftist print movement launched by Lu Xun's 1931 Shanghai woodcut workshop, which made the self-cut black-and-white woodcut China's art of national crisis and revolution. Young artists learned from Käthe Kollwitz, Frans Masereel and Soviet woodcuts to gouge close-up, diagonal images of workers, refugees and resistance for journals, books and travelling exhibitions; in Yan'an after 1942 they adopted New Year print outlines and colour for peasant audiences.

A woodcut-style poster shows a group of workers beneath a large raised fist, with red flags, an industrial skyline and an ochre sun behind them. Grain stalks and small white flowers fill the foreground, and large red lettering reads “TOGETHER FURTHER.”

1979–1994 · East Asia Minjung Woodcut Graphics (Korean People's Art) The reproducible graphic branch of Minjung misul (people's art), South Korea's art of the 1980s democracy and labour movements. After the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980, artists such as Oh Yoon and Hong Sung-dam took up the woodcut for the movement: bold, succinct black-line figures of workers, farmers, miners and dancers, cut in wood and reused on poetry-book covers, pamphlets, posters, chest badges and enlarged painted geolgae banners for rallies.

More combinations

With Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement

With Minjung Woodcut Graphics

Every style combination