Chai-na book

Chai-na is a book-essay by Brazilian professor and philosopher Otília Arantes on the erasure of traditional Chinese neighbourhoods to make way for European-style urbanisation, published by Edusp in 2011. Arantes commissioned me directly to lead the full art direction and book design, translating the ideological weight of her text into every formal decision. The square format, vertical title treatment, and inverted page numbering were each conceived as visual echoes of Chinese typographic and spatial conventions — not decoration, but argument. The cover pairs an expensive silk-screen process with deliberately rough paper stock and a metallic Pantone finish: a material tension that mirrors the book's subject. The word chai-na (拆哪) — stencilled on walls across China to mark buildings slated for demolition — also happens to be the Mandarin transliteration of "China." Rendering it in white for the Latin-alphabet cover introduced a second layer: in Chinese culture, white is the colour of mourning. You can download the whole book here: tinyurl.com/chai-na-download