THREE CHINATOWN POSTERS

I love good informational design with bold and minimal elements. And I also love Chinese food, and the color palette found in the Chinatown districts and bulletproof Chinese restaurants of America.

For these posters, I’m combining chunks of body text, reminiscent of magazine-style layouts, with the starkly graphic strokes of Chinese characters that serve as both translations for the chunky American English words beneath as well as a foil for their difference. (I got both the characters and the food descriptions from Wikipedia, so please argue with them people about authenticity and accuracy! But also please tell me if it says something wild.)

I started with one poster (the soup dumpling), and was inspired to make two more for a series of three. This helped to exploit the color palette, which I confined to an iconically Chinese four color palette (red, yellow, white and black) for the exciting contrast both between and among them — I think they stand well alone and together. I’m thinking of printing them as both posters and postcards.

I’m not gonna lie — creating the Peking duck poster felt a bit gruesome. Researching photographs of them strung up in Chinatown shop windows, and then rendering that image seemed insensitive. But if you ask me if I gets down on some roasted duck, Peking or otherwise, I’m also not gonna lie. I GETS DOWN!

Another note: I rarely talk about the audio pairings on these illustration posts, even though it’s an integral feature of my work, particularly in Small Black Stories, my ongoing video series. But it’s also an important aspect of the behind-the-scenes videos I share below. It’s just that for publishing and copyright purposes (I want it here on my site before I share it with Meta’s greedy ass), I will upload these illustrations posts before posting to social media, and I often retrieve the music from their vast (but not infinite) libraries. I’m going to go back and update those older illustration posts with the music I eventually chose to pair with it.

I’m going to make a post dedicated to exploring some of my audio selections across the work I do. But just know that I have always done and always will use music to layer meaning onto my work. So I encourage you to watch my videos with sound so you can get my drift even deeper! In this instance, I used the track Buckeyes, an instrumental of MF DOOM’s illustrious Special Herbs series. (Buckeyes was used in the production of the song Fazers by King Geedorah, one of MF DOOM’s many alter egos.) I chose it because it uses a sample that sounds vaguely Chinese in that 80s Dynasty kinda way (no I will not elaborate but go listen), and starkly brusque like the energy you get from the proprietors of those bulletproof Chinese restaurants. I could go on, but I’ll save it for the music post. The first one will look back in a survey-style kinda way, and then I think I’ll make this aspect of audio exploration a regular feature of each individual post going further, for my music heads and for those who appreciate that part of my art-making practice.