CALENDAR OF 2021

At the end of 2020, I had been living in Kunming for two years. After gradually settling into my home, I still wanted to create something I found genuinely interesting. A single greeting card format no longer satisfied me, so I considered designing a calendar. It was again based on the Chinese zodiac, this time for the Year of the Ox in 2021. Just like before, it involved screen printing, multi-color overprinting, line strokes combined with solid fills, and the simplest geometric forms. The difference was that I designed twelve different ox figures—each month had a distinct shape. Oxen give people an impression of honesty and diligence, but their horns, bullfighting associations, and massive bodies also evoke a sense of fierceness, at least to me. I wanted to make the ox appear younger, more adorably simple, and more approachable. So I exaggerated and graphically reinterpreted the ox’s body, limbs, and tail. Apart from the clearly recognizable head, the body became a plump, round ball. This design was also meant as a gift for my soon-to-be-born baby, though he might not necessarily be born under the sign of the Ox—if he arrived a little earlier. I didn’t focus much on reinventing the functional aspects of the calendar; instead, I chose a typeface called “FUTURA.” I’m not sure if it was because I had recently bought a book titled Never Use Futura, but I think the main reason was that this typeface perfectly matched the geometric aesthetic I was aiming for. This time, each set consisted of fourteen sheets: twelve months, a cover, and a greeting card. The months were printed in red and black as a two-color overprint. I intentionally allowed misregistration between the filled ox mouth and its outline—some were actually aligned—to better capture the feel of screen printing. The cover was printed in red and gold, while the greeting card was printed in red alone. The paper used was 300g Kaskad paper, slightly off-white but with a smooth surface. I was very excited during the design phase, but the printing process brought me immense pain. To save on screen-making costs, I put the numbers 1–12 on a single screen and the semicircular ox mouths on another. The cover, greeting card, and the twelve monthly sheets each had their own screens, making a total of sixteen screens. During printing, the cover required two impressions per sheet, each monthly sheet required three impressions, and the greeting card required one. That meant a full set of the calendar plus greeting card involved changing screens and printing thirty-nine times in total. It took me about 1.5 to 2 hours to complete each set. By the time I finished, I had only produced forty complete sets before New Year’s Day.