Heroic and Everyday: Jiang Xin's Book Cover Design and Modern Art in Republican China (1911–1949)

In 1925, China’s foremost modern writer and intellectual Lu Xun (1881–1936) lamented the superficial nature of modern book design, writing: “It seems that one is only capable of drawing a soldier on a horse dashing forward, as if this is the representation of the so-called ‘revolution, revolution!’”[1] For Lu Xun, unsophisticated revolutionary visual tropes failed to represent