Ren Wei

Bio

Ren Wei is an assistant professor of art history at Dickinson College. Her research focuses on modern Chinese art and design and she is completing a book manuscript on book cover design in Republican China.

Contributions

Peer Reviewed
Print Plus Exclusive
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 the new visual culture brought on by China’s dramatic political transformation from a dynastic empire to a modern...