An influential figure in 20th‐century Chinese graphic design, Shanghai designer Tao Yuan‐qing drew heavily on traditional motifs drawn from a wide range of indigenous Chinese historic sources. His work of the 1920s included the book Token of Depression (1924) and Wandering (1929), a collaboration with the writer Lu Xun (1883–1936) that began with the cover for Depressed Symbol (1924). Lu Xun did much in the 1920s and 1930s to promote Chinese graphic design and was knowledgeable about Western art and design, especially the work of the German Expressionists. A blend of the Western and the indigenous was apparent in Tao Yuan‐qing's flat, almost primitively conceived designs for book covers and magazines, characterized by the limited colour range and wood‐block like forms for his 1926 cover for Hometown, edited by Lu Xun and published in Beijing.
