Renhua
Spring 2021
Renhua is a reflection and celebration of my life growing up in an interracial family; it is an exploration of heritage, community, and belonging through a historically informed lens.
I never learned how to speak mandarin, although I tried for years. For this book I made a set of type from my mothers handwriting, hundreds of little pictograms I couldn’t understand. From them I wanted to make something of my own. The creation of this typeset was inspired by the curious history of moveable type, for the method was actually invented in China hundreds of years before Gutenberg rediscovered it, using a writing system that could properly take advantage of its efficiency. This printing method, with roots in both the east and west, felt the most meaningful way I could not only recreate my mom’s handwriting, but interpret and transform it into something wholly new and of my own identity as a mixed race Asian American woman.
The first step of making the modular type set was to acquire the type in the first place, which meant pestering my mom with some worksheets. They were then printed onto film in preparation for making the photopolymer plates.
All 900 plates were individually cut and assembled in one grueling weekend, ready to be assembled on the letterpress. With an assortment of 1x1 and .5x.5 inch type blocks, the entire set was built to mimic the moveable type systems invented in ancient china, while also drawing inspiration from the character “chops” that are still used today as seals and signatures.
The type was then assembled into blocks and printed onto a fine kozo paper using a letterpress printer. The pages were then stab bound using a silk thread.
