Xinyu Chen

This is a book design project based on private family images. Through dozens of rolls of old film photos taken by two brothers for their sister, the trivial fragments of growth are made into a visual time map. I chose an old film camera as a narrative tool to simulate the texture of darkroom printing and build a triple perspective dialogue between hand-bound pages. The book is made in the form of coptic and hardcover books. Tracing paper is interspersed between chapters to simulate the physical touch of film reeling.

As a triple identity practice of editor, art director and designer, the project explores the contemporary possibility of handmade books as emotional carriers. When the instantaneous images of the digital age encounter the delayed development of analogue media, the family album is no longer a one-way record, but an ongoing visual dialogue. The final book and digital archive together constitute two tenses of memory, completing the dissection of the brothers and sisters in the resonance of content and form.

This project ‘Click'k’ takes the evolution of ‘signal’ as the core narrative, exploring the challenges of dialect survival as a carrier of cultural memory in the contemporary context. As a gradually disappearing language symbol, the inheritance dilemma of Wenzhou dialect reflects the impact of technological changes and social changes on traditional forms of communication. I abstractly deconstructed the meaning of Chinese characters, recoded dialect pronunciation and visual symbols, and constructed a modular learning system—the combination of Bauhaus-style minimalist geometric forms and high-transparency acrylic layers, which not only gave the teaching aids a modern aesthetic texture, but also allowed children to perceive the structure and rhythm of language through physical superposition, light and shadow interaction and other designs.

I also made a derivative animation of this project. This animation is to let different audiences understand the disappearance of Wenzhou dialect. Through the re-combination and design of acrylic sheets at different angles, I let the audience have different pictures from each angle. But these pictures all express the same meaning. It can also make their memory of Wenzhou culture more profound.