The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2024–2025
A book on 36 young Chinese photographers uses the 36 heavenly generals as its catalog
MOMOSENSE orders 36 post-1985 Chinese photographer profiles under the 36 heavenly generals, cover characters of 'gadabout' redistributed across the pages
MOMOSENSE DESIGN INSTITUTE
What it had to solve
Thirty-Six Faces collects a 36-month column dialogue between its author and 36 young Chinese artists that ran in People's Photography. Their 'monsters and demons'-like trendy ideas and personalities made them feel like heavenly generals wandering the sky of photography art, and the design had to give 36 fiercely individual characters a structure that did not flatten them.
How it works
Thirty-Six Faces: Post-1985 Profiles of Chinese Young Photographer collects a 36-month column dialogue between its author and 36 young Chinese artists that ran in People's Photography. The subjects' 'monsters and demons'-like trendy ideas and personalities felt like heavenly generals wandering the sky of photography art — each was emphatically his own force.
The design's answer was to give that wild energy an order drawn from the same cultural imagination. The catalog is built on the thirty-six heavenly generals, so every artist is matched to a celestial archetype; the three words behind 'gadabout' are reorganized on the cover and their pieces assigned across each artist's page, and the type is shaped as if it has its own trajectory.
What results is a book where structure is content: page order, cover and letterforms all say that these 36 photographers are a vibrant force in today's society rather than a tidy school. D&AD kept the work in its awards archive, with MOMOSENSE DESIGN INSTITUTE credited for the design and Best Print as production company.
Why it lands
- Matching 36 profiles to the 36 heavenly generals turns a catalog into a cosmology, giving each artist a mythic place instead of a number.
- Characters broken apart on the cover and scattered across the pages make the book's theme physical before a reader opens a single interview.
- Letterforms drawn with their own trajectories let typography carry each artist's personality, so design and content say the same thing.
- The structure comes from the culture the artists belong to, which keeps the ordering meaningful rather than imposed from outside.
What it did
The result is a book whose structure describes its subjects: 36 wandering, unruly young artists each take a place in an ordered pantheon without being filed away as a tidy school. No print or sales figures appear on the record; D&AD kept the work in its awards archive, with MOMOSENSE DESIGN INSTITUTE credited for the design and Best Print as production company.
What you can take
An ordering system borrowed from the culture's own mythology can hold wild, individual energy: cataloging 36 artists as 36 heavenly generals gives each a place without flattening any of them.
Since then
The D&AD archive page records the book as a design entry credited to MOMOSENSE DESIGN INSTITUTE with Best Print as production company, and carries no print-run or sales figures. The transferable idea is that an ordering device can be part of the argument: when subjects refuse to be a school, assigning each one an archetype from a shared pantheon organizes the book while celebrating the very individuality that resists organization.
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