17 Years of Theater Posters: She Is Both a Participant in Chinese Theater and Its Chronicler

"A poster is an art of three seconds. It has to jump out at you. Nobody stands there studying it — it's one glance, and maybe a second look over your shoulder."

Nie Jingzhu graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, but 80 percent of her friends come from the Central Academy of Drama. From her student years until now, over 17 years, she has been designing posters — and most of them have been theater posters.

2017 was the 10th anniversary of the Beijing Fringe Festival. On opening day, September 5, an installation exhibition of Nie Jingzhu's posters went on show at the Beehive Theatre as part of the festival, curated by Meng Jinghui.

The show was called "The Second Stage." Its promotional poster carried a line of Latin: Ut pictura theatrum — "What you are painting is, in fact, also theater."

The line comes from the ancient Roman poet Horace, whose original ran Ut pictura poesis: "What you are painting is also poetry." In Italy people have long rewritten the phrase to make new points, and for this Second Stage exhibition it was borrowed again.

"Theater and painting share the same way" is a formulation Nie Jingzhu likes very much. A poster compresses a play, and its director's ideas, into a single image. It is theater made on paper: the performers act inside the house, the poster works outside it, which makes it theater's second stage.

The "Second Stage" installation showed 16 theater posters in all, among them The Stranger, Turandot, Mother Courage and Her Children, the Pessimism Trilogy, The Ring of the Nibelung and Letter from an Unknown Woman — plays of different kinds, made between 2005 and 2017 by different companies and different directors.

In 1999, Nie Jingzhu was a second-year student in the visual communication department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. That year Rhinoceros in Love, written by Liao Yimei and directed by Meng Jinghui, had its premiere at the China Youth Art Theatre in Beibingmasi Hutong.

The screenwriter Shi Hang has described the scene on opening night: the street outside the theater was full of people waiting to get in, and an old man from the hutong, fed up with the crowd and the noise, marched into the theater to shout at everyone. In the confusion Liao Yimei ran out to argue with him, assuming a crowd of people was right behind her. She looked back and there was no one. She had run out alone.

Nie Jingzhu was at that performance too. When she was preparing for the college entrance exam, her art tutor was Zhao Hai, a graduate of the stage design department at the Central Academy of Drama. At the time he was Meng Jinghui's set designer; later he was art director for Zhang Yimou and Feng Xiaogang as well. Through Zhao Hai, Nie Jingzhu met Meng Jinghui and many friends from the Central Academy of Drama.

For the premiere of Rhinoceros in Love she made a lot of little booklets — no formal arrangement, she simply produced them and sold them herself in the lobby, a volunteer helping to promote the show. The play ran inside; outside, she and her friends could recite the lines along with it.

A year later, Nie Jingzhu took her first paid poster job. Liu Wei, a producer at the Beijing People's Art Theatre, asked her to design the poster for the play Boundless Romance, directed by Lin Zhaohua and starring Pu Cunxin and Xu Fan. She jokes that she was born lucky: her first commission came from a famous director. But it was also a matter of demand. Those were the years when plays started selling tickets and needed promoting.

By then Xu Fan had already appeared in the New Year comedy Be There or Be Square, which took 43 million yuan and topped the national box office in 1998. In 2000, Boundless Romance ran more than 100 performances in Beijing and was held up as a success story for the theater market. The next year, cities outside Beijing began bringing the play in. When it played Chengdu in 2001, the top ticket price was pushed as high as 980 yuan, which made the local news.

In 2002, Nie Jingzhu designed the poster for Chicken Poets, a film directed by Meng Jinghui. In 2003, working with Su Hang, a close friend from college, she designed the poster for the stage version of Rhinoceros in Love. Bit by bit, she built up a large body of theater posters.

The National Centre for the Performing Arts, the National Theatre of China, the Beijing People's Art Theatre, the Beijing Fringe Festival, the Wuzhen Theatre Festival and the Hangzhou Contemporary Theatre Festival all became regular clients, and she has worked with directors including Lin Zhaohua, Meng Jinghui, Stan Lai, Edward Lam, Tian Qinxin, Wang Chong, Chen Peisi and Tadashi Suzuki.

Film was commercializing over the same years. As her theater work grew, films came to her too: Liu Jie's Courthouse on Horseback in 2006, Peter Chan's Bodyguards and Assassins in 2009, John Woo's Reign of Assassins in 2010.

Nie Jingzhu says there was never a moment when she decided to become a poster designer. She was pushed along. She finished one poster, another job came looking for her, and she kept going.

Guo Qi, a playwright who teaches in the theater management department at the Central Academy of Drama, says the past decade has been the decade in which Chinese theater turned commercial. Tickets used to be handed out free; only in these ten years has a market formed. That is what made posters necessary. Productions have to attract audiences, and the poster became the bridge between a play and the people who might come to see it. For the Beijing Fringe Festival, that is a second important meaning of the "Second Stage" show.

On the exhibition's promotional page, the Beijing Fringe Festival introduced Nie Jingzhu this way: her "graphic design work covers nearly every layer of contemporary Chinese theater culture. As a longtime partner of national performing institutions such as the National Centre for the Performing Arts, the National Theatre of China and the Beijing People's Art Theatre, she has built stable working relationships with the country's leading theater artists, and through her distinctive design thinking has constructed the recognizable symbols of contemporary theater aesthetics."

The director Tian Qinxin, in an interview with Caijing Tianxia, once looked back on how the Chinese theater market changed over the past ten-odd years. In September 2003 she staged The Orphan of Zhao, and theaters began selling tickets. She knew the market was coming and could not be stopped, but for the industry the change was also a shock.

She said she had no time to think it through before she was in the middle of it: "From the beginning, when nobody watched theater, to when people watched but didn't pay, to when people bought tickets to watch — I went through the whole process together with several other directors of my generation. Call us lucky or unlucky; whether we were dragged in or pushed it along ourselves, we were plainly participants."

The same goes for Nie Jingzhu. As a theater poster designer, she is both a witness and a chronicler.

Q: QDaily

Nie Jingzhu: Poster designer

Q: Why have you been willing to keep designing posters all this time?

Nie Jingzhu: I'm a person who has held onto her curiosity. Poster design isn't the kind of work that never changes, the kind you can do forever without getting any better. As a poster designer I meet a new story every day, I have to put my brain to work every day, and it never gets dull. If it isn't dull, it's fun.

There was no decision behind becoming a poster designer. I've always been pushed along. I do one job and the next comes looking for me. A lot of people talk about how to keep work and life apart. For me they've never been apart.

I also like what you'd call working to a set subject, because the material already has a solid literary foundation underneath it, and standing on the shoulders of masters makes the work more interesting.

Q: When you started out, was your schedule already full?

Nie Jingzhu: In the first few years it wasn't full. It's only in recent years that it has been. But I didn't find those early years hard either. Artists are produced in the process of wasting time.

Q: Presumably not everyone who studies visual communication at the Central Academy of Fine Arts can design posters. Where did you learn it? Was the training at the academy important, for instance?

Nie Jingzhu: In this line of work you can learn something from anyone; the main thing is to keep your antennae out. At school, teachers teach you on one side and classmates teach each other on the other. At a school that doesn't drop the ball, everyone around you has a formidable mind.

I actually learned a lot from the Central Academy of Drama too. At the fine arts academy everyone is an "artist" and likes to fight alone. At the drama academy everything is done as a group. People really stick together.

The reason I've always liked hanging around theater is that it isn't cold. It's warm. Whenever you set out to do something, a crowd of friends turns up to help.

And when you put on a painting show at the fine arts academy, there's a distance between you and the audience. With theater posters there's nothing cold about the relationship with the audience at all. I love that feeling of being part of a group.

Q: What about film — is it warm too?

Nie Jingzhu: Of course film is warm too, but theater is more formidable. Look at the big names in film abroad: they all had to act in theater first. It's the same here — look at Huang Bo, Sun Honglei, Yuan Quan. They all performed in theater. Think about acting in a play for an hour and a half without getting a single line wrong. It asks much more of an actor's craft; without real presence and real command of the text you simply can't carry it. Never mind a piece like The Ring of the Nibelung — one performance runs seven hours.

Q: Is Meng Jinghui's studio the theater organization you've worked with most?

Nie Jingzhu: The one I've worked with most is probably the National Centre for the Performing Arts. But I like working with studios; the avant-garde side of theater is more interesting. Over time you build an understanding, too. The director — Meng Jinghui — has influenced me a great deal. Look at how much work I've done. He follows me everywhere like a shadow, except he isn't a shadow, he's light. What he has given me is beyond summing up.

Underneath it all I was the delicate, arty type. Meng Jinghui is more masculine, and the theater he likes is German, theater with force in it. It's also a coincidence that Tan Ping, the dean of the design school at my academy, studied in Germany as well. You see that line of Latin in the introduction to this exhibition — that's what "theater and painting share the same way" means.

Q: That red-background Rhinoceros in Love poster has been used many times. Why did you design it that way?

Nie Jingzhu: The poster for the premiere of Rhinoceros in Love was made by my teacher Zhao Hai, out of a photograph of Guo Tao. The red-background rhinoceros is from 2003, made with Su Hang, a close friend from college — a strong red field with one small rhinoceros against it. I liked that tension of "a big world and a small figure."

The rhinoceros was drawn in crayon. As I remember it, we were in a very small studio at the China National Opera House.

Black, white and red: Meng Jinghui uses those three colors constantly, because they're strong, hard-edged colors. They're colors I favor too, from the German influence. A poster is an art of three seconds. It has to jump out at you. Nobody stands there studying it — it's one glance, and maybe a second look over your shoulder.

Q: Who else has influenced you?

Nie Jingzhu: Zhao Hai. When I was still in middle school he drilled one idea into me: if I agree to do something, I finish it. Don't drop the ball at the critical moment. That's responsibility, and it's the baseline of any job. Plenty of young people in this field can't take it, give up and leave. I stayed with it, and time pays you back.

Another teacher who influenced me was Zhang Xinhua. He drew comics, and once drew one about digging wells — it was even used in a college entrance exam. A man digs one well after another and never hits water. But every well he abandoned would have given water if he had dug a little deeper, just a few strokes more. In this line of work I've probably watched a lot of people more talented than me give up and quit. I think you have to stay with your own thing. Though if you truly stop liking it, switching to something you do like is fine too.

Q: In these 17 years as a poster designer, when did you improve fastest, and when were the turning points?

Nie Jingzhu: Honestly, I improve a little every day. If I have to name turning points, one was designing a series of productions for the theater director Zha Mingzhe. After that, in 2009, the publicity department of the National Centre for the Performing Arts came to work with me. They gave me all their big opera projects to design, and a lot of other design work followed, including the posters for their productions abroad.

The other was theater festivals. In 2011 I started designing for the Beijing Fringe Festival, which is not like designing for one play. For one play you only need to understand the artist's career and the story, and you can do the design. A festival is a large project, a whole identity. You have to design it as a whole, and there are many plays inside it. After that I took on a lot of festivals — the National Centre for the Performing Arts alone has plenty of them that I work on.

Q: Only those two?

Nie Jingzhu: Only those two turning points. Life is long, but the decisive part is two or three steps. My life has only just started; two or three is enough for now.

Q: Is the pay for theater posters very different from film posters? By how much?

Nie Jingzhu: Think about it. One performance here, one evening, is 375 seats, while a small cinema screen holds 300-odd people. And films sell prints.

I've heard that Huang Hai, the poster designer, gets 1 million yuan for a single poster. I can't confirm it, but it's possible. A million yuan is already enough to stage two plays.

In film, though, even if that million brings in only 2 million yuan of extra box office, people think it was worth it. Films routinely take more than 100 million yuan, and people are willing to spend.

Film posters do come with far more constraints than theater posters. A film poster has too many mothers-in-law: the distributor has a say, the production company has a say. An actress's face goes through review after review — is it thin enough, has every blemish been retouched away? If it isn't fixed up they won't let it out. Theater actors are tougher. Film actors are protected far too well.

The reason someone like Huang Hai stands out is that film posters are basically head counts: line the stars up and you're done.

So theater gives you more freedom than film. (Would you take film poster work, then?) Of course. Who turns down money when there's money to be made?

People keep thinking Chinese design is bad. Really they've been led astray by film posters. Chinese posters are very good. It's just that film is a public medium, so when its posters are bad they mislead everyone.

China has a great many good designers, and the posters they make are very good. I have classmates who make excellent posters, but they enter poster biennials, working on grand-love subjects — the environment, that kind of theme. What I was lucky in is finding a relatively public platform. My job from here is to make this work more artistic, more interesting. Young people have always been the main audience for theater, and posters are the bridge between theater and them. I think I still have a long way to go.

Q: How does it get more artistic, more interesting?

Nie Jingzhu: I want to bring theater, contemporary art and posters together. I heard Li Xiaolai say something interesting about crossing between fields. If you work in one field only, reaching 100 points there is 100 points. With two lines you get a plane: reach 50 on each, and 50 times 50 is 2,500. Add a third line and you get a solid — even at 50 each, multiplied together that's 125,000.

Many of the pieces in this show are second creations, using the media and materials of contemporary art. The Turandot poster is a mirror, which comes from the plot: Calaf sets Turandot a riddle whose answer is his own name. I was also thinking about what kind of poster makes a viewer think, I like this, I want to photograph it. Most people pay more attention to themselves than to anyone else, so I thought of turning the poster into a mirror.

The poster for The Stranger has a big pink hand with a handful of earth beneath it. It lets people feel the absurdity in Camus's work. In the afternoon, where that poster hangs, light pours in through the window above it, and it takes on a sense of pursuing freedom.

After this I'll bring these ideas into design for actual productions. We're about to perform in Egypt, and I want a design that makes the audience feel the play has already begun the moment they walk in. There's a lot you can build in the space — installations, things that extend outward, so everyone can feel the atmosphere of the whole play.

Q: Who in this industry do you most want to become?

Nie Jingzhu: In this industry I just want to become myself. Our field does have its founding masters, of course: Mucha, the Czech theater poster designer. Some of his work is very light and soft, some of it has great force. And Beardsley, also a designer. I think a designer has to be a knotted-up sort of person, at odds with herself. I'm like that myself, very much so.

Images provided by the interviewee.