ANCIENT AESTHETICS
Chinese winners of Leipzig’s Best Book Design awards draw attention to traditional beauty
We have all been told to not “judge a book from its cover,” but if you’re one of the judges for Germany’s Best Book Design from all over the World competition, this is probably the worst advice imaginable.
During the 2018 competition held in Leipzig, Germany, earlier this year, two Chinese books stood out for their beautiful and unique looks. Winning a silver medal and honorary appreciation award respectively, The
Art of Gardening and Tea Canon were crowned along with 12 other competitors as some of the best designed books of 2017 from among more than 600 works from 33 countries and regions. This success at one of the most influential events in the publishing world has drawn renewed attention from around the globe to the sophistication of Chinese book design aesthetics.
Chinese elements sparkle
“A book is a comprehensive carrier of arts that can fulfill your artistic pursuits in multiple layers. What I did was to revive the beauty of ancient Chinese simplicity and classical elegance,” Zhang Wujing, designer of
The Art of Gardening, a new edition of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) book on horticulture theory, told the Global Times.
Published by China Architecture and Building Press, the book looks like something that could have been published more than 300 years ago. The text is in Traditional Chinese while subheads and chapter numbers use characters taken from the scripts used in ancient woodcuts. Black-andwhite photographs of famous Chinese gardens, such as the Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou, have been printed with light colored ink on fold-out pages made from Xuan paper (traditional Chinese rice paper), which results in the photos looking like ancient ink paintings. Woodentextured covers top off the design by delivering a sense of toughness and the simplicity of nature. A brown cardboard slipcase was also designed to protect the book – a typical practice in ancient book-making.
“The first thing I thought about when I started the design was how to make the key elements, plants and nature, stand out. The entire design surrounds this theme,” Zhang explained.
“The hardest part was reproducing the ancient Ming Dynasty characters and giving them a woodcut effect, as well as printing the original horticulture diagrams,” Zhang said.
It took the designer months to research and restore the documents published in the Ming original, but all his efforts paid off in the end.
“Western criteria of the economy and displays of splendor have no validity here. The entirety is so harmonically linked in itself in terms of its asymmetry, color shades and materials,” the international jury panel wrote in the competition’s official booklet.
While The Art of Gardening focuses on nature, the other Chinese book, Tea Canon, presents a different aesthetic taste.
“The book is a ‘bible for tea-lovers,’ so I wanted the design to create a poetic and relaxing reading experience, clarifying people’s minds through tea culture in a bustling modern world,” the designer of the book, Pan Yanrong, told the Global Times.
Published by Nanjing Amity Printing Co. Ltd, Tea Canon is based on eight historical books on tea found in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) book collection Siku Quanshu, or Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, the largest collection of Chinese books ever made. Nine traditional Chinese calligraphy and paintings printed on Xuan paper are included in the book as foldouts, giving a sense of ancient tradition. The book is also printed on soft paper, so that the reader may easily hold it half folded in one hand while reading, just like the ancient scholars of old.
“I tried to hide the traces of design and make everything connect naturally and harmoniously as a whole, creating a quality of gentleness, elegance and tranquility, just like tea culture itself,” Pan explained, echoing the jury panel’s comment that goes the book “feels like Chinese tea culture in concentrate form.”
‘Worth collecting’
“A book is not only something for you to read, but also can be an artwork worth collecting,” said Shen Yuanqin, head of China Architecture and Building Press, stressing the importance of book design and the art of printing.
As China’s economy grows and quality of life improves, people are paying increasing attention to the aesthetics of books which has in turn fueled market demand and raised the standards for book design, according to Shen. Beautifully designed and printed books have become necessities for many households.
“We have been paying a lot of attention to book design as most of our books are about architecture and horticulture, which involve rich visual elements. We have already established a visual art center to improve the design of our publications,” said Shen.
The publishing house has also begun working closely with the top fine arts academies in the country and celebrated independent designers around the world in order to explore all the untapped potential of book design and how it can move past the flat page.
According to Shen, The Art of Gardening is currently being translated into English. This version is expected to reach readers by 2019 Frankfurt Book Fair, which is scheduled to be held in October.