Cover Design | Going Home is a Journey with No Straight End: The White Terror and My Leftist Grandfather

Co-creation with Print & Carve Dept. for Spring Hill Publishing.

Design Concept Author Rongying Fan wrote her grandfather’s life story. In the process of digging through the drawers of life’s memories, piecing together the historical paths of three generations became a journey with a nonlinear destination.

Print and crave dept. combines intersecting paths with scenes written in the book. Using the simple, direct lines of woodblock prints, they sketch a portrait of “White Terror and the Leftist Grandfather.”

Inspired by “class consciousness growing from the land,” they use an earthy yellow base and add relief printing to recreate the tactile feel of the engraving.

At the bottom lies an open filing cabinet drawer. The composition includes: the author at center; the grandfather’s student cap from the Japanese colonial era; Chiayi’s rice paddies, sugarcane fields, and water buffalo; the great-Uncle boarding a bus to escort the grandfather from prison; the mending of the mother-daughter relationship; the grandfather’s clothes for his final journey; and the silhouettes and tombstones of White Terror victims.

The pages of writing resemble soaring birds, symbolizing the author’s discovery of the power of freedom through understanding the intertwined history of her family, Taiwan, and its politics.

Orignal woodcut block

We visited the old Relief printing press factory in Taiwan to confirm the printing effect.