A designer’s journey to where the writing is
Trailing the Written Word — The Art of Writing Among China’s Ethnic Minorities

After spending four months in the border regions of China looking for the scripts of the minority peoples and photographing specimens of these written languages as they were used in their original contexts, Cindy Ho asked us to help share the work with a wider audience.
By showcasing the aesthetic qualities of the written word, Ho wished to dispel the misconception about China as a cultural and ethnic monolith and to enforce a process of systematic and careful study essential to the kind of appreciation that is necessary to preserve Chinese minority cultures.
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
Our task was selecting the photographs and culling the massive printed material Ho collected on her journey. These included books, newspapers, and calligraphic artwork, etc., in the different scripts.
It became apparent that a more comprehensive catalogue documenting this body of work was needed to complement the various exhibitions we had lined up. The complexity and vastness of the material called for a more thorough exposition.
The resulting catalogue includes forewords by a prominent Sinologist and a professor of graphic design, maps, factual data and descriptions of encounters with the people who wrote the words. Though not intended to be a scholarly in-depth study in linguistics or ethnicities, we exceeded the goal to show that writing is not only a tool of communication and artistic expression, it is also a means to introduce the lives and cultures of these little-known minority groups — a segment of the world’s most populous country.