Graphic & Design
Toad (Lexicon of Banned Words)
In March 2019, ZEITmagazin published an encyclopedia of Chinese internet censorship: a lexicon of banned terms. In the course Illustration at the University of Arts Linz, I explored questions of censorship together with my fellow students and chose a banned term from the lexicon to illustrate. As a group, we agreed on a shared colour palette of red, yellow and black, so our individual illustrations would still read as one publication. The results were collected into a book.
I illustrated the term Toad, a nickname for former president Jiang Zemin, who was said to resemble an amphibian.
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TOAD: A nickname for former president Jiang Zemin, who is said to bear a certain resemblance to amphibians. Although most young internet users can no longer remember Jiang’s time in office, he has had a remarkable career as an internet cult figure in recent years. Videos have been shared millions of times online showing Jiang playing the ukulele, dancing the waltz, and singing Elvis Presley’s Love Me Tender. When Jiang met Spanish King Carlos in 1996, he took a comb out of his pocket and fixed his hair in front of the king. In a 2000 interview with CBS, he began singing Chinese folk songs in the middle of a conversation about the Tiananmen massacre and Falun Gong. After unknown persons set up a 21-metre inflatable toad in Beijing in July 2014, the nickname „Toad“ was banned.
– Translated from: ZEITmagazin, Enzyklopädie der Internet-Zensur, March 2019.
