IS THE WORLD
A CAN OF SARDINES?

Role: Package Designer
Tools: Adobe Creative Suite
Size: 120 mm Dia * 50 mm Thick

Client: Self-initiated
Timeline: 4 Weeks Spring 2022

Is The World A Can of Sardines? is a concept album of the Beijing rap trio, in3, featuring members ijapa, Jahjah Way, and krazyman. Their thick Beijing accents, lyrics about inner-city ghetto life, and social commentary from the perspective of lower-class kids made them uniquely bold. Given the group’s outspoken nature, in3 was criticized by the government in 2015, and their discography was swiftly wiped from the Chinese internet.

With deliberate song selection and visual design, the album considers remediation of music as an aesthetic and narrative form, telling the personal tragedies underneath the culture with a collectivist orientation. Facing the oppression of any dissidence, the individual is like a sardine in the can.

Inspired by Andy Warhol’s famous appropriation of Campbell’s Soup Cans, the package design uses cans of sardines as a metaphor, overlapping the great quantities of a single standardized commodity in mass production with the specific set of social standards in collectivist society.