Yang Liu – illustratör

Imagine a setting in which a man wearing a dress might be as habitual as a woman in trousers. Where a woman exposing herself in public wasn’t sexy, but as creepy as a male flasher. Where professional status and success presented the same prospects for both sexes.In this volume in her series for TASCHEN, leading graphic designer Yang Liu tackles one of the hottest, and one of the oldest, topics of all: he and she. Drawing on the experiences, challenges, and many perspectives on men and women she has encountered in her own life, Yang Liu distills the vast, swirling question of gender into bold, binary pictograms.Dealing with a whole host of situations from the bedroom to the boardroom, Yang Liu’s designs are as simple and accessible in their presentation as they are infinite in the associations, evocations, and responses they elicit. Combining age-old stereotypes with topical discrepancies, this fresh approach to the roles and relationships of men and women is, above all, an effort to synthesize a notoriously thorny issue into a fun and refreshing graphic form, and thus to lighten and enlighten our mutual understanding and tolerance.

Leading graphic designer Yang Liu brings the way we were face to face with the way we are. Reissued in four languages, Today meets Yesterday deploys vivid pictogram pairings to explore the transformations, and the challenges, of our ever-evolving world. Liu has made her name with a combination of graphic precision and incisive observation of behavior patterns. In Today meets Yesterday, her eye for tastes and trends takes ambitious scope, juxtaposing past with present to explore fundamental shifts in society. Along the way, we encounter the tussle between competing ideologies, historic and current global dangers, our interaction with the environment, and the wholesale impact of technology on our ways of living, learning, and loving, from online retail to the rise of the “smombie.” With an eye on everything from geopolitics to concentration spans, Liu’s panorama incorporates the details of daily experience as much as the momentous happenings in history. Through Facebook, food waste, collectivism, and much more, Today meets Yesterday casts the familiar situation in a crisp and discerning light, bringing fresh awareness, as well as some ironies, to who we are and where we came from.