Selina and I finished this book together as a group project.
The topic of this book is Chinese Culture, which is also the title of the book. We took the pictures mainly in Chinatown and red is the color we used as a connection for all the talking pictures, including the design of the book.
In order to create new experience for reading the book, we decided to fold the page in an irregular way. The titled shape of pages was referred from a zine we saw on the New York Book Fair. What we want is trying to more innovative on our book. The title of the book is made into three dimensional, so it is much more obvious to get readers’ attention. Each page has one side of captions and one side of pictures. Reading the words first and then focusing on the pictures may bring a different feeling of those photos.
The whole book is designed to look like a lotus. The angles of those paged are composed of petals of a flower.
Two inserts
One of little details in our book is the name tag. We got the inspiration from the name tag on the clothes. It is small piece of paper and also can catch people’s eyes when they read the book.
The other one is about the individual paper inside. We did not decide to glue it with other pages because it is a different one which is much more serious. We want to explain our own deep think about Chinese culture. Also, the picture behind is printed with risographmachine. It can be taken out as an individual piece to give an introduction or bring a meaningful way to think about the Chinese culture.
What we wrote is:
Different places inherit different cultures. China is one of the biggest developing countries in the world. The whole word is staring at the quick growth of China. It is true that China still has some trite habits in some ways, but China is trying to remove the old-styled concepts from its centuries-old and preserved history, which is difficult and really takes time. We all know that the ancient cultures in China are various, traditional and typical. However, these significant cultures are fading gradually through the time tide. What’s more, we also want to the young generation notice the losing culture and begin to protect it from fading. We took some pictures mostly in Chinatown, which have some special elements of China culture to convey people some feelings in a direct way.
As Chinese, we are proud of our own culture. We appreciate that Chinese elements are wonderful and worth remembering, and also there are something which need to be improved. For example, the environment in Chinatown is kind of messy and unclean. Many people know China from Chinatown. I cannot deny that Chinatown represents the Chinese culture, but it is also influenced by the location. It can be regarded as a “fake” China, because compared to our hometowns, they are still quite different. There are all kinds of ways to learn about China, and certainly Chinatown is one of the ways, but people should not only learn from the Chinatown. There are many other ways to know about China and appreciate the Chinese culture.
