His Album Designs Earned Four Grammy Nominations, But He Never Quite Fit Taiwan's Record Trends

"They probably don't know we're not making albums anymore — we're doing all sorts of strange things."

There are always a few young people standing outside Xiao Qingyang's door. "Master Xiao, I want to make an album with you," they say.

This industry veteran has designed more than 1,000 albums over the past three decades. In 2005, 2008, 2009 and 2011, four of them — Floating Accordion (《飘浮手风琴》), I Ride a White Horse (《我身骑白马》), The Sweet Burden: Wu Sheng's Poems and Songs (《甜蜜的负荷：吴晟诗．歌》) and Island of Stories (《故事岛》) — were nominated for the Grammy Awards' Best Recording Package and Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package.

None of these designs followed the trends. Su Tongda released I Ride a White Horse himself in 2007, after four record labels had turned him down in a row. The producer and singer, who grew up in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, wanted to work with the Taiwanese opera troupe Chunmei to make "an album grandma could understand." The songs came from an old folk tale about a pair of lovers, Xue Pingui and Wang Baochuan; Su mixed in jazz, Latin and electronic music and turned it into electronic Taiwanese opera. Xiao Qingyang had to design the packaging on that basis. At first he worried that an ancient Chinese story would be hard for Western judges to follow — especially since the Grammys were still a very commercial, mainstream award.

But there was a way around it: "It's a love story — and when you talk about love, it's easy to understand." Xiao didn't put that into the cover design, though. He bet on cultural elements instead. Carrying on the music's mashup idea, he used a stone-rubbing effect to rework images of generals, court ladies and white horses. For three months he collected horse imagery from temples across Taiwan and pored over paintings of men and horses from different eras and schools in Chinese history. He designed the packaging in black and white. The album went on to be nominated for Best Recording Package at the 50th Grammy Awards in 2008.

Xiong Ruxian, founder of the independent label Wildfire Music Collective, put Xiao's success at international awards this way: "Under the tide of 'globalization,' 'localization' is what wins." Like Xiao, Xiong lived through the peak years of Taiwan's record business. Xiao used to hesitate about putting culture into a design — he worried the flavor would be too strong, the distance from the star too great — but now he sounds certain: as long as it looks "entertaining" enough, "there is absolutely nothing wrong with it."

And yet, as you'd expect, this kind of album design was never mainstream in Taiwan. From the time Xiao started out in the 1980s, the "localized" design popular here meant that the cover of any important album was almost always a big close-up of the star's face. A-Mei's 1990s albums Sisters (《姊妹》) and Bad Boy sold more than 10 million copies across Asia between them at the time, and both covers were built around the singer's portrait. The same went for CoCo Lee's early albums Love Now While You Can (《爱就要趁现在》) and the self-titled CoCo (《CoCo 李玟同名专辑》).

Designers worked hard to polish these instantly recognizable, wildly popular faces so they would pull harder on fans. The enthusiasm held until the late 1990s.

That wasn't what Xiao had in mind when he went into album design. What moved him in the 1980s were Western covers he "couldn't understand." He pulls out a few original cassettes from his collection: the American rock band Grateful Dead's American Beauty, the Canadian singer Joni Mitchell's The Hissing of Summer Lawns, the British group Art of Noise's In No Sense? Nonsense! The covers are abstract, strange, full of imagination.

In Taiwan, though, Xiao couldn't make that kind of "art." "Before 2000, even I felt the pressure. The idol baggage was especially heavy then — design was forever circling the idol's big face," he said. "But I was born in Taiwan, and I had to accept that."

Things turned after 2000. Singers appeared on television more often, and the way people "listened to" music changed: they liked staring at elaborately styled singers on screen, but they also wanted the record in their hands to be worth keeping. Xiao found that listeners were splitting into three kinds — those chasing idols, those who listened purely to the music, and a large group in the middle, who loved the idol and also wanted some atmosphere.

Designers faced a new question: "With a big star's album, should you drop the big face or not?"

The band Sodagreen has released 10 albums since 2001, and you can't always find the members on the covers.

As a rule, covers for well-known singers still lead with a portrait, but there is the occasional experiment. Jay Chou's eleventh album, Exclamation Mark (《惊叹号》, USB edition), released in 2011, broke with habit by not blowing up his own image as the selling point. Chen Zhengshou, who designed the cover, chose an American comic-book style and "shrank" Jay Chou down to a tenth of the cover; the album came with a gold-coin USB drive shaped like a J anchor and a three-dimensional ship. It won Best Album Packaging at Taiwan's 23rd Golden Melody Awards in 2012.

For Xiao, this stopped being a question long ago. Most of the album designs that earned him Grammy nominations in the seven years after 2000 don't have the singer on the cover at all — only the first one shows a singer's profile. "Packaging isn't only there to serve local audiences," Xiao said. It was also an international tactic: unfamiliar Asian faces don't excite American judges, while an abstract "Oriental atmosphere" draws them in — the same foreign appeal the Western records in cassette shops once held for a young Xiao.

Even the stars aiming at the Chinese-language market haven't stopped coming to him. By now he is practiced enough to choose among them. If you divide musicians into idols and singer-songwriters, he prefers the latter, and prefers to come in early — planning, art, photography, every stage where ideas are at stake. Sometimes that happens while the singer is still recording, and it can shape which songs make the final tracklist.

In 1998, when Cheer Chen was still an unknown "amateur" singer preparing her debut album, Let Me Think About It (《让我想一想》), Xiao designed the cover. His daughter was born that year, and he found a fitting likeness between a debut work and a new life: he scanned the floral print of his wife's maternity dress and worked it into the inner-sleeve design. He also designed the cover for Sandee Chan's Leaving on a Jet Plane (《乘喷射机离去》); watching her work, he noticed she liked to doodle with crayons, and in the end drinks, straws and her drawings all ended up in the design.

Xu Wei came to Xiao in 2008 to ask for the cover of Love Like Youth (《爱如少年》) — the first album cover Xiao made for a mainland Chinese singer. His habit was to meet the singer, watch what state they were in, and build the cover around both the person and the music. This time, "before we worked together, I'd never even met them; flying to Beijing might not have gotten me a meeting either." Even so, when Xu Wei saw the cover, he thought Xiao understood his music deeply and was a real "artist." Xu Wei stands in a Qinghai landscape, as he usually does, with much of the cover left empty.

Young people who want into this business all plan to study under the "artist." For the past few years they have been turned away, leaving this studio in New Taipei City disappointed.

In the 1990s, at his busiest, Xiao had 16 projects a month. Now it is about three albums a year. "They probably don't know we're not making albums anymore — we're doing all sorts of strange things," he said. When QDaily interviewed him at the studio, Xiao had just designed a "picnic set" — a picnic mat, a commemorative picnic flag and a picnic bag — for the "New Taipei Picnic Day: Dear ____, Let's Go on a Picnic" event.

Xiao turned largely because live events were rising and more people were listening online. The record business was no longer doing well.

In the 2015 music industry report released recently by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), revenue from physical records and digital downloads keeps shrinking, while streaming (YouTube, Vevo, Spotify and the like) has become the single largest source of music revenue for the first time — up from 7% in 2010 to 34.3% in 2015, more than $2.4 billion. Over the same stretch, the live-event market grew from $4.25 billion in 2010 to $6.8 billion.

Taiwan looks the same. Jay Chou's album from late last year, Aiyo, Not Bad!, sold 150,000 copies. The singer's popularity has shifted, yes — but Common Jasmine Orange, released a decade earlier, sold 3.5 million, and a gap of more than 22 times is still strong evidence.

"There's no getting around it: anyone still making records now does look like a fool," Xiong Ruxian said. "This is an age when the 'audience' outnumbers the 'listener.' Every singer is fighting it out on stage, and there are almost no pure listeners left who taste music with their ears and eyes alone."

Xiao knows perfectly well that listeners no longer buy records, yet they will hand over large sums to get into a concert. In 2000 he took on the key visual for the Gongliao Ho-Hai-Yan Rock Festival, which formally opened his turn to event design. He took the record's standard shape — six songs on side A, six on side B — and blew it up into an event, turning it into something three-dimensional. "Even the local street food can be matched to my design," Xiao said.

After that came event design for the Yilan International Children's Folklore and Folkgame Festival and the Simple Life Festival. Last year he handled the poster visuals for Karen Mok's "Looking at the World" tour. Xiao put Karen Mok inside a church, light from the stained glass on her face, shot from below looking up — "like a Madonna." The idea came from a Madonna statue Karen Mok had fallen for while traveling in Italy.

Xiong Ruxian worries more. "An 'amateur musician' can of course turn out music that's unusual and moving, but carrying the title of 'singer' or 'creator' still takes real craft and seasoning," Xiong said. "There's too much bubble music now, made only to serve short-lived commercial gigs. It feels to me like a slide from the 'boutique record shop' down to the 'commercial-gig corner store.'"

Below, Q = QDaily, X = Xiao Qingyang

Q: You've loved drawing since you were a child. Why album design, rather than another field that would also show off your drawing?

X: When I was small my family lived by a night market. I'd go browsing in record shops and often stop at cassette covers I couldn't understand. For me that was a pleasure. But I never imagined it would become my trade.

In the '80s there was no such thing as an "album designer" — even the title came about gradually. Design-related work back then was called "art labor." Art labor, electrical labor, plumbing labor: these were really just job categories, and in short it meant being a laborer. Art laborers in those days painted movie billboards and made shop signs. I didn't dare tell my family I wanted to do "art labor," because for a man going out into society, whether he can make money is a major decision — my family would want to know what I'd live on. Hardly anyone specialized in album design then; most of it was farmed out to advertising companies.

I set up my own studio around the time of my military service. I remember hearing there was a crowd of "SoHo types" in New York's SoHo district with studios of their own, taking mainly design work that had to do with aesthetics. That's when I decided to define myself as a "studio" doing album art. More than 30 years later I still call myself a studio.

Q: Your relatively varied design style — what tests did it face in Taiwan's early music market?

X: Before 2000, Taiwan's music environment was fairly conservative and design style was mostly about depicting the singer. Even if I made something outrageous, nobody might care. Luckily I had years in the album business behind me, so after 2000, as the market began to change, my designs could get more inventive, more unbridled.

Back then, in the '90s, I could have as many as 16 projects a month. I'd sort them by category and try different packaging for different genres of music. Switching moods sometimes made me feel possessed (laughs) — folk culture one moment, fashionable the next, then artistic. Some people find my work fierce and ever-changing.

Q: How many projects a month on average now?

X: About three albums a year now. I've shifted my focus — I'm not locked onto the album itself anymore. Releasing an album now is mainly for the concert that follows, or other marketing. And Taiwan doesn't really have new idols; the idols who are popular at the moment are still mostly from the middle generation.

Q: How do you read this generational gap among idols?

X: People listen to music through the internet now, not records. The new generation never picked up the habit of listening to albums. It's not a matter of good or bad, just a change of medium. Like my own passage from vinyl to CD — it's evolution. But because of this trend, the amount of music being created has dropped sharply, mainly because the act no longer shows up immediately as a sale, so fewer people put themselves into it.

Q: Do you think Taiwan's music industry has changed a lot in recent years?

X: Listening habits have changed. After 2000 material life got much more comfortable, and this era stresses texture and the feeling of being there. Music now is face to face; fans want to hear the singer sing to them with a guitar in hand. That's why live houses and concerts sell so well. Plenty of music festivals and music markets have appeared. We know perfectly well that fans don't buy records — but they'll come to listen, even though getting in costs more than buying the album. (Laughs)

Q: The record business is less prosperous. Has that affected you?

X: I wouldn't call it decline; it's a collective transformation. There used to be no concerts. Now people are happy to spend money on them, 10,000 or 20,000 New Taiwan dollars for a ticket. What counts now is the "live event" — marketing as a whole has become three-dimensional. My design has naturally changed with it. It isn't just the album; it's the event, from the key visual all the way to the merchandise.

Q: You've also worked in other design fields, including book packaging and co-branded products. What's different there?

X: It's only a change of medium. Book design, product design, event design — I have just one principle: I want every design to carry music in it, not only visuals. When I design a marathon event, I start by writing the theme song, then think about traditional elements, then connect the two. After this long in design, I've slowly got the hang of making a feeling concrete. I'm still doing design, but it's more like producing an event.

Q: Have you noticed people moving around inside the album-design trade?

X: The steps of making a record used to be finely divided. The recording person's specialty was recording; the printing person cared about printing. Now that it has shifted to live events the work is different: you have to turn your attention to the sound in the room, or to printing event merchandise. The same backstage people, on a different track.

A while ago I went to Xiamen, where three locals invited me for tea. Before the tea they asked me to scan a QR code. Then music played while I drank. I thought that transformation was exciting — in a way it goes past the live moment; it's an expression across regions.

Q: Has the pool of album-design talent shrunk a lot?

X: Of course. This isn't part of mainstream production anymore, so young people don't go near it. But these past few years some still come to me: "Master Xiao, I want to make an album with you." I turn them down, because they probably don't know we're not making albums anymore (laughs). We're doing strange things now — a pot of tea, that sort of thing.

Q: Speaking of talent, what do you make of design education in Taiwan?

X: Schools have opened a lot of design-related programs in recent years, but the market simply doesn't have that much work that needs design. That has produced one result: design talent going out to the countryside. So local traditional industries have begun to take design seriously. I think it's a good cycle — it has genuinely raised Taiwan's overall sense of aesthetics, and a lot of small objects in back-alley shops have started to look beautiful.

Q: What do you think of the "small, certain happiness" design trend?

X: My own observation is that Taiwanese design has tipped one way in recent years, with an obvious taste for Japanese culture. From one angle you can see why: Japan is the country Taiwanese people travel to most often, and they want quality, finely made things. Frankly, the back alleys of Japan are the source of our "small, certain happiness" — the feeling inside "a cup of tea, an object, a pastry."

I do have reservations about this trend. It's still a case of following the crowd. For the past few years I've been arguing for remaking Taiwan's traditional aesthetics. So I think "small, certain happiness" is only a short-term fad.