“Like seeing through a kaleidoscope”: Peng Cheng on how ancient crafts inspire her masterful typographic posters

The secret behind Peng Cheng’s masterful typographic posters is the way she balances a respect for tradition with ingenuity and imagination. She is fascinated by ancient crafts, citing the weaving and dyeing techniques of the Dong people in Guizhou, the Dongba script of the Naxi people in Yunnan, Chinese paper-cutting, shadow play and New Year paintings. At the heart of all her studies, though, is a fascination with Chinese characters, which she describes as “pictograms” – “a symbolic graphic summary of things in nature”. With the respect to the illustrative nature of the language, Cheng aims to exaggerate the innate storytelling power of Chinese characters through her work. “Simply changing how the patterns are combined and how the colours are matched together yields thousands of new possibilities,” she explains, “like when you are seeing through a kaleidoscope”.

Unsurprisingly, Cheng’s skill for boldly updating traditional typography has garnered her a roster of major clients such as Apple, Coca-Cola China, UPS and Adobe. Alongside this commercial work, Cheng nestles away on personal projects, increasingly honing her storytelling skills and trying out different aesthetic combinations. For her Year of the Tiger poster series, she looked to the depiction of tigers in Chinese embroidery, bronze sculptures and New Year paintings. In these myriad interpretations, the tiger fascinates Cheng not least because of its powerful symbolic value in Chinese culture, but also for the way in which the patterns on the tiger’s body are derived from the natural world, like clouds rocks and flowers – “the beautiful phenomena in nature are represented with simple and symmetrical patterns.” Her own artistic vision of the character design is inspired by the cloth tiger – “an indispensable toy in Chinese people’s childhood”. Cheng notes how this ubiquitous little figurine generally looks the same wherever it's sold throughout China. So for her posters, she attempted to transform it into a “concept”, giving room for more “vitality and creativity” in its interpretation. “I hope it would be like a Lego tiger that can be randomly combined to keep the 'old' image while adding a little bit of freshness.”

As Cheng describes her creative process, it becomes clear why her typographic posters possess such a vivacious quality. For her, typography is a “record and expression” of her life and each poster is like a “visual diary”. She adds, “The text is a part of the diary, not a tool to seriously convey messages, but to intermingle with the graphics in the picture, with each character drawing the audiences’ attention to the content, inspiring endless imaginations.”

As well as reflecting her own thoughts and experiences through her work, she is also interested in telling the stories of others through type. Her poster, Quinyan, is inspired by one of her favourite books about a woman living during the period of the Qing Dynasty. One of the difficult subjects the book touches on is the painful tradition of foot-binding which women were subjected to in this period. Using typography to communicate the complex feelings which she felt in response to this part of the book provided Cheng with a challenge. Inspiration came to her one day when she was taking a walk and noticed the roots of a banyan tree growing by the side of the road. “The roots of this big banyan tree should have grown freely and wildly, but the sidewalk tiles beside the road bound it, making it twisted and becoming deformed.” This vision became the key inspiration for her characters which twist and struggle within the borders of a square frame.

Though her passion for research and literature undoubtedly play a role in bringing Cheng’s typography to life, the visual power of her work is easy to appreciate regardless of context. This is a fact beautifully summarised by the illustrator herself: “When the audiences see the character, they don’t have to consider and compare the importance of the shape and meaning behind, but just to feel and accept it through the five senses without limitations.”