This dissertation analyzes Lu Xun’s book design within the historical context of East Asian modernization and the development of various enlightenment movements, with the aim of interpreting the enlightenment-oriented meanings and critical ideas emb...
This dissertation analyzes Lu Xun’s book design within the historical context of East Asian modernization and the development of various enlightenment movements, with the aim of interpreting the enlightenment-oriented meanings and critical ideas embedded in his visual practice. Modern Chinese design history has often tended to follow a Western-centric narrative, a tendency rooted in the uncritical adoption of Western standards of modernity in the historiography of Chinese design. Based on a critical awareness of such Western-centered modernity, this study seeks to examine the enlightenment thought and critical ideology articulated through Lu Xun’s book design.
From the late nineteenth century onward, the rapid development of modern printing technologies and visual culture accelerated the growth of mass media, forming a public arena in which diverse agents disseminated their ideas and ideologies. This dissertation conceptualizes modern Chinese visual culture as a visual field where multiple discourses intersect, and investigates—through a design-historical approach—how Lu Xun’s book design related to his enlightenment thought within social, cultural, and historical contexts. To this end, the study analyzes Lu Xun’s design activities from the 1900s to the 1930s alongside visual and textual materials from contemporary newspapers, magazines, and books that reflect the visual culture of the period.
Chapter 2 theoretically examines the development of modern Chinese enlightenment activities and the role of the modern printing and publishing industries in disseminating enlightenment discourse. Chapters 3 through 5 constitute the main body of the dissertation, analyzing Lu Xun’s design practice by dividing it into three phases. The first phase, covering his study abroad in Japan (1902–1909), marks the period when Lu Xun began to recognize design as a visual language for practicing enlightenment ideals beyond mere artistic sensibility or personal taste. The illustrations used in his book designs during this phase shifted from images explaining concrete situations to Art Nouveau-style female figures after 1906, a visual change closely linked to the transformation of his enlightenment orientation from “national salvation through science” to “national salvation through literature and art.”
The second phase spans the mid-to-late 1910s through the mid-to-late 1920s, when Lu Xun worked at the Ministry of Education under the Nationalist government. His design activity intensified in the 1920s and was characterized by the active use of traditional visual elements, including rubbings of Han-dynasty pictorial bricks (畵像塼) and pictorial stones (畵像石). Although Lu Xun criticized revivalism as a contributor to New Youth in the late 1910s, he came to reassess traditional artistic elements in the 1920s under the influence of the “Reorganization of National Heritage” (整理國故) movement. This shift is consistently manifested from his cover design for Guoxue Jikan (國學季刊) to his commissioned book designs by the artist Tao Yuanqing. His use of traditional visual elements was not a nostalgic return to the past, but an active attempt to reconstruct tradition through modern artistic techniques and to explore a modern form of Chinese art appropriate to new social and political conditions.
The final phase covers Lu Xun’s Shanghai period (1927–1936). Two major changes can be observed in his book design during this time. First, he moved away from the constructivist tendency of employing geometric forms prior to 1930 and shifted after 1930 toward using woodcut prints as central visual elements on book covers. Second, features of New Typography emerged in aspects such as typographic arrangement, page layout, and standardized cover composition. These characteristics are clearly distinguishable from the Art Deco style and constructivist design trends prevalent in Shanghai at the time, and can be understood as Lu Xun’s design practice grounded in his conception of “art for life.” He argued that art should contribute to building the material foundations of a new society based on productivism and pragmatism, and accordingly maintained a stance against formalist art detached from social reality.
By analyzing Lu Xun’s book design across multiple phases in relation to distinct socio-historical contexts and concrete social agendas, this study expands upon previous scholarship and moves beyond the limitations of form-centered methodologies. It thereby illuminates the internal logic of Lu Xun’s design and the enlightenment meanings embedded within it. Just as Adorno and Horkheimer emphasized enlightenment’s self-reflection and critique, this dissertation demonstrates that Lu Xun’s enlightenment thought was not fixed but continuously transformed through criticism and reflection amid changing socio-cultural contexts.