Dream Labor Press is a self-publishing collective founded by a group of Chinese female graphic designer-authors who are based in the United States and China. Our work focuses on storytelling and fiction-making in the liminal space between places and identities.
By means of zines, artist books and other small publications, we play with objects, symbols and memories. We endeavor to communicate layered narratives that resonate with different walks of audiences and to push the boundaries of design.
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Doris Liu
Zia Qian
Lexi Xu
Lihao Zhu
Zhenyu Zhou
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Detroit Art Book Fair, 2023
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Lines of Control:
Railroads, Resistance, and the Reordering of Semi-Colonial Space, 1898–1905
Zia Qian
2025
6.25 x 9.25 inch
Naked binding with semi-attached jacket
124 pages
This Book traces how railroads became a contested symbol of modernity in late Qing China. Through the 1898 Hankow–Canton Railroad Contract between the Qing government and the American China Development Company, this project examines the intersection of imperial capitalism, fiscal reform, and provincial resistance.
Drawing from archival contracts, engineering surveys, and historical writings, it reinterprets infrastructure as both a physical system and an ideological apparatus that reshaped colonial space. The visual design—restrained, archival, cartographic—mirrors the bureaucratic logic of control while revealing the tensions between modernization and subjugation embedded in these historical documents.