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Books > Arts & Architecture > Industrial / commercial art & design > Graphic design
This is a comprehensive introduction not only to the world's most
important graphic designers but also a look at various styles,
movements and processes. It particularly concentrates on the ideas
and contributions of 50 of the world's most influential graphic
desigenrs, and at 10 of the major movements in the field and their
place in history. The book includes pieces on Eric Gill, Adrian
Frutiger and Alphonse Muchta and on topics such as Politics and
Propaganda in poster art, Futurism, New Wave and the Digital Age.
All in all, this is a compact, easily accessible, quick guide to
the field of graphic design.
Iconographies of Occupation is the first book to address how the
"collaborationist" Reorganized National Government (RNG) in
Japanese-occupied China sought to visualize its leader, Wang
Jingwei (1883-1944); the Chinese people; and China itself. It
explores the ways in which this administration sought to present
itself to the people over which it ruled at different points
between 1939 (when the RNG was first being formulated) and August
1945, when it folded itself out of existence. What sorts of visual
tropes were used in regime iconography and how were these used?
What can the intertextual movement of visual tropes and motifs tell
us about RNG artists and intellectuals and their understanding of
the occupation and the war? Drawing on rarely before used archival
records relating to propaganda and a range of visual media produced
in occupied China by the RNG, the book examines the means used by
this "client regime" to carve out a separate visual space for
itself by reviving pre-war Chinese methods of iconography and by
adopting techniques, symbols, and visual tropes from the occupying
Japanese and their allies. Ultimately, however, the "occupied gaze"
that was developed by Wang's administration was undermined by its
ultimate reliance on Japanese acquiescence for survival. In the
continually shifting and fragmented iconographies that the RNG
developed over the course of its short existence, we find an
administration that was never completely in control of its own
fate-or its message. Iconographies of Occupation presents a
thoroughly original visual history approach to the study of a
much-maligned regime and opens up new ways of understanding its
place in wartime China. It also brings China under the RNG into
dialogue with wider theoretical debates about the significance of
"the visual" in the cultural politics of foreign occupation more
broadly.
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