What happens when design is encountered as a boundary form? As a space defined by an improvisational fluidity that pushes outwards, across lines of culture and nature, as well as tugging inwards, towards feelings and sensation? What do designs from early twentieth-century China teach us about movement, connectivity and its failures, within the diffuse space between those boundary lines? Each of the three case studies in my book project Boundary Forms: Science and Design in Modern China take up these questions. This talk will explore Chen Zhifo’s textile and journal cover designs at the Shangmei Design Studio (Shangmei tu’an guan 尚美圖案館) in the mid 1920s in Shanghai. Chen was a cultural vagabond of sorts, from his formal study of textile design under the supervision of a Japanese teacher at the Hangzhou Industrial School (杭州高等工業專科學校), to his degree in design at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo bijutsu gakko 東京美術学校), where he also informally studied at the nearby botanic gardens. His graphic designs pose questions about the imaginative escape to fictional worlds he pictured on literary journal covers, and the ways that they draw close to and away from the plants he rendered on clothing textiles.