One Club Member shares how she created her award-winning book Dancing in Utopia

Dance classes filled ten years of my childhood– I took tap, jazz, ballet, and modern until I went off to college at 17 and joined the dance team for a year or so. I even took ballroom dance classes (Friday Night Assembly) once a month with my friends from fifth to eighth grade. And most recently I went to a very sassy hip-hop-esque Diva Dance class in New York City.

Now, when it comes to the Chinese Public Square Dance, One Club Member and graphic designer Selina Kehuan Wu is the expert. Selina grew up watching her grandmother square dance with her friends in the public courtyard, and this experience inspired her to put together a beautiful book titled Dancing in Utopia. 

Selina filled us in on the square dance culture and the process she used to create her book.

You were inspired to make this book by modern and traditional Chinese culture and the movement of dancing. What is your personal relationship with the Chinese cultural Public Square Dance?

When I was little, my grandmother moved to my city to take care of me while my parents were both busy working. I grew up watching my grandmother participate in various elderly pastime activities in the public square by our apartment building. I witnessed her building a community with women in the neighborhood, excitedly gossiping after dancing and exchanging greetings in the elevator. The dance routines were simple enough for anyone to follow, so sometimes, when I walked past the public square, I would happily join in for a brief two-minute dance at the back.

“I grew up watching my grandmother participate in various elderly pastime activities in the public square by our apartment building... this book is dedicated to her.”

As I grew older, my grandmother moved back to her hometown. She went out less frequently for these activities as she grew older until she was bedridden. She passed away last year, but the memories of her exuberant face when dancing will remain with me forever. This book is dedicated to her.

As a Chinese person living in the US, I’ve always sought out and captured tokens of home to carry abroad with me. I find the greatest sense of home in the vernacular, especially those who carry the memories of my own. So, I decided to carry my camera with me as I strolled along the River Qinhuai in Nanjing in the summer of 2019, capturing images of elderly people dancing coordinately in public squares in the evenings. The photos lay quietly in my camera roll until one day, I realized I could design something with the materials I had collected. The more I researched this seemingly innocent pastime, the more I unearthed the deep political, social, and historical layers it reveals about 20th-century China. My repository of second-hand research materials continued to grow, and they all ended up in the book that we see today.

Dancing in Utopia won a TDC certificate of typographic excellence in 2023, and an award for Publication Design and the Capstone Project in Young Ones ADC 2023. How do you feel winning these awards has helped your career as a graphic designer?

Winning these awards with a batch of other talented designers has been an extremely humbling experience. It’s not only a validation of the hard work and creativity that went into my work but also a recognition of my skills that boosted my confidence as a designer. I’m thankful for the chance to increase my visibility in the creative field. These awards have also opened up new opportunities for collaboration and projects. The One Club for Creativity asked me to design the brand identity for their competition, Next Creative Leaders, which celebrates gender expansive talent in creative leadership—a cause that deeply resonates with me.

Living in such a social media and digital driven world, what is it about the printed medium that draws you in?

Every time I buy a physical book, the first thing I do is smell it– even if the book simply smells like toner, I would still describe it as a “good-smelling book.” The highly sentimental and intimate experience of touching the texture, smelling the toner, seeing the light leaking through pages, and hearing the paper turn is something a digital medium will never fully translate.

There are also design experiences that can only be delivered through a printed medium. A book I admire is Che Pi by PAY2PLAY Studio from Beijing. Che Pi is a Chinese phrase that figuratively means chitchatting, and the book is a collection of interviews with an artist. To read the book, you need to tear away the cover, which is the literal meaning of the phrase Che Pi, as to reflect the artist’s unconstrained character. The interaction with the book and clever play on the material reveals that the unique charm of the printed medium lies in its tactility.

What was the most challenging and rewarding aspect of working on Dancing in Utopia?

I think the most challenging aspect of this project is to contextualize such a niche topic to a broader audience. The selected texts discuss public square dance in reference to specific 20th-century Chinese histories unfamiliar to many, as well as mindsets deeply rooted in Chinese culture that may seem illogical to Western audiences. Therefore, I sourced materials, translated, or wrote notes to ensure accessibility and understanding for the audience of my book. After the book was produced, people from various backgrounds expressed how moved they were by the narrative and deeply appreciated my work. I believe my work has successfully conveyed the story I wanted to tell, and this is incredibly rewarding.

“A quick fact is that the main body text is set in Freundschafts-Antiqua, the first Latin typeface ever designed by a Chinese designer.”

A quick fact is that the main body text is set in Freundschafts-Antiqua, the first Latin typeface ever designed by a Chinese designer. This choice serves as a tribute to the late designer Yu Bingnan and his legacy. My Chinese name, Kehuan, was given to me by my grandparents, meaning “being capable of imagination.” I hope that with this book, I have imagined and constructed a human lens through which people can see a more vernacular, modern China.

This book is 200 pages. You did research, interviewing, editing, writing, translating, photography, and design. This is not your first book project, either. Do you have any advice for those looking to start a book project of this magnitude?

Not having encountered any designed works on public square dance, I was inspired to create an encyclopedic book on the topic, breathing in my intimate storytelling. I realized that in order to give a full picture of this subject matter, I needed extensive research on top of the primary sources I collected, and I didn’t want to sacrifice any nuances for a shorter length. I certainly experienced that overwhelming phase, especially when I was wearing the hats of designer, photographer, editor, author, translator, and producer all at once. It occasionally left me feeling stretched thin.

However, one nostalgic night, as I scrolled through the photos and videos I took in 2019, tons of joyful and peaceful memories came flooding back. It instantly reignited a sense of home and familiarity and reminded me of the passion that initially drove me to explore this topic that’s so close to my heart. This helped me remain sane yet excited throughout the bookmaking.

When starting on a significant research-based book project, my first piece of advice is to consider research and design simultaneously. The concepts of the subject matter and the design forms should inform and reinforce each other– neither exists in a vacuum.

“My first piece of advice is to consider research and design simultaneously.”

On one hand, when I was designing Dancing in Utopia, I spent my first month researching while jotting down notes of concepts that could serve as motifs or metaphors for the design. For instance, I discovered that public square dance steps primarily move in four perpendicular directions. This insight later influenced my design decision to position specific typography and images in these four directions. Additionally, dancers take one step at a time to move back or forth, so I structured the main body text paragraphs on a grid so that they progress left or right one column at a time. These decisions let readers dance with the book as they read.

On the other hand, I continued to research throughout the entire design process. In the last week of production, I remember continuing to uncover more historical and political facts about the dance and adding them to the footnotes. I kept conducting surveys and interview calls, one of which was with my great aunt back in China. This interview, which I initially had little expectation from, ended up being a 30-page short-sheet booklet bound into the book.

Another piece of advice when designing a big book is to make initial rules for the design– knowing you can deviate from them later. Especially when working with lots of materials, I start with a design dump, placing the undesigned texts and images onto the pages to map out the general structure. Then, I set up a checklist of design decisions on how specific typography, images, or margins should be treated. This is similar to my experience of starting to design a typeface. I would say don’t be afraid to create a sense of structure initially. Even if you choose to bend, break, or depart from these rules later, the structure can quickly kickstart you into the making mode.

What are you currently working on?

Currently, I’m exploring and challenging myself with various visual languages such as installation, typeface design, and web experiences. However, book design holds a special place in my heart, and I frequently find myself drawn back to print.

One of my recent projects involves curating an archive of internet comments that evoke sentiments incongruent with their context or platform. This collection comprises about three hundred comments gathered over two years of casual data collection.

Towards the end of last year, I also completed a collaborative publication. In my contribution, I wrote about and designed around the concept of progressive nostalgia — the emotional experience of yearning for moments as they unfold in the present.

KEHUAN.WORK

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