Book design for ‘the Battlefield of Fathers’ and ‘the Battle of Forefathers” .
'The Battlefield of Fathers’, written by Dongpan Zhang (2009, Shanxi People Publishing House), is a fieldwork about survived veterans who fought the Yunnan-Burma War, which is a vital battle for China to defeat Japanese Army in the World War II. Few mainland Chinese know the event and an army called Chinese Expeditionary Force now due to political reasons. I found this book on my grandfather's shelf and was driven to finish it right away by curiosity; one of the historical sites of the battle is literally beside my grandparent's house. How come I know nothing about the battle and those many who devote their lives for it while it's so close to me? I decided to take this event as the subject of my final project for bachelor degree, carried out a fieldwork to visit all the main battlefields in Yunnan Province to find those survived remnants of the war. All the materials I gathered from this trip are edited into the book ‘the Battle of Forefathers’ (?????), which is written by myself as a memorial of the event as well as an echo to Dongpan Zhang’s book: I can only find monuments’ remains of the battle as very few veterans are still alive, but stones can’t talk.
The two books are from views of two generations, the cover of the former is in solid black while the later is faded into gray and flaked away, suggesting the battle has been wiped and forgotten. The inner page employed a look of document file, implying the historical value of the event.