21 Funny Illustrations That Show The Cultural Differences Between The East And The West
There’s a 13-year-old girl standing at a Berlin bus stop in 1990, freshly arrived from Beijing, watching people queue in a perfectly straight line. She finds it both baffling and oddly funny. That girl is Yang Liu. Thirteen years later, those observations became “East Meets West.”
Liu, now a graphic artist and professor of Communication Design at UE Berlin, spent her formative years constantly comparing every aspect of life between China and Germany, and rather than write about it, she did what designers do best: made it visual. Forty-seven posters, two colors, zero words. Blue for the West. Red for the East. Everything else left to the image.
“East Meets West” isn’t a sociological study — and that’s precisely what makes it so good. It’s a personal visual diary, built from years of lived confusion, occasional culture shock, and the kind of hard-won perspective you can only get from genuinely inhabiting two very different worlds. Liu wasn’t documenting cultures — she was processing her own life.
The pictogram is one of the oldest communication tools humans have ever used — pre-linguistic, pre-borders, pre-algorithm. Liu draws on a tradition where reduction is not just an aesthetic choice — it is the point. Each image isolates a single behavioral observation and holds it up for comparison, without commentary or judgment. What you make of it is entirely up to you.
Yes, some people will take these too seriously. Any time you compress an entire culture into a single pictogram, someone will object — and they’re not entirely wrong to. But Liu herself has been clear that “East Meets West” is a personal diary, focused on her own experiences rather than what others have codified as stereotypes. The goal, as she put it, was to help people laugh at themselves a little — and to make cross-cultural understanding feel less like a lecture and more like a conversation. When talking about cultural differences, there’s often a fear of saying the wrong thing, and Liu’s graphics lighten up the discussion. Take them in that spirit.
The project was first exhibited at Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later published as a book by Taschen in 2007, with all 47 posters. Here are our favorites from the series.
