Stylogeny combining Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement × Shanghai Modern

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Style combination · Contrasts

Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement × Shanghai Modern

Same city, same decade: airbrushed calendar glamour against gouged black refugees shows two opposite promises of modern China.

From the research on Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement

Mix them and make something Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement Shanghai Modern

ActChinese Modern × Shanghai Modern1931 · 1910
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Shanghai Modern, 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.

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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 Shanghai Modern & Yuefenpai

Type from Shanghai Modern
Colour from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement
Form from Shanghai Modern
Composition from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement
Surface from Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement

02

The type

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

Display · Shanghai Modern

Act

Limelight; Shanghai Modern used Meishuzi and Songti

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

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The colours

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

Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement Shanghai Modern & Yuefenpai

  • #efe7d4 ground · 36%
  • #141414 ink · 14%
  • #e0b23a accent · 18%
  • #b8322f accent · 14%
  • #8c7b62 accent · 10%
  • #1f5f5b accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe7d4;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #e0b23a;
  --accent-2: #b8322f;
  --accent-3: #8c7b62;
  --accent-4: #1f5f5b;
  --font-display: "Limelight", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

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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. An ornate vintage-style illustration shows a woman in a floral qipao resting her chin on her hand beside a teacup and a vase of blossoms, with a waterfront city and Chinese pavilion behind her. Floral borders, birds, geometric corner ornaments, a small landscape panel, and the Chinese heading “春曉” surround the portrait. 1910–1949 · East Asia Shanghai Modern & Yuefenpai The commercial art of treaty-port Shanghai. Calendar posters (yuefenpai) given away by tobacco, pharmaceutical and cosmetics firms took over the New Year print's place on the wall, pairing glamorous women in qipao, softly modelled in Zheng Mantuo's rubbed-brush watercolour technique, with ornamental borders, calendars and products. In the 1920s–30s pictorials, cartoons and 'art lettering' (meishuzi) absorbed Art Deco geometry into a cosmopolitan Chinese modernism.

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More combinations

With Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement

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All 12 combinations with Shanghai Modern

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