Selling Happiness : Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century Shanghai

From the early twentieth century until the Communist takeover in 1949, Shanghai commercial artists created thousands of colorful posters and black and white advertisements that formed an essential part of modern life in the city. This visually appealing and richly illustrated work describes the origin and evolution of modern commercial art in China, focusing on colorful advertisement calendar posters that featured distinctive feminine images. It makes clear how essential commercial art and its institutional backing were to the development of modern art and even modern society in China over the past century. __Selling Happiness__ discusses not only advertising art but also the production and marketing of the calendar poster. These posters, like other advertisements, were rendered in a Western realistic technique and were wildly and widely popular. Ordinary people throughout China often acquired them to decorate their homes. Laing outlines how the Chinese commercial artist, who rarely attended formal Western art classes, gained skills in Western representational art. In the final chapter of the book, she explains how the styles developed by the commercial poster artists during the 1920s and 1930s became the basis for certain types of propaganda art under the Chinese Communists in the 1950s and 1960s.

From the early twentieth century until the Communist takeover in 1949, Shanghai commercial artists created thousands of colorful posters and black and white advertisements that formed an essential part of modern life in the city. This visually appealing and richly illustrated work describes the origin and evolution of modern commercial art in China, focusing on colorful advertisement calendar posters that featured distinctive feminine images. It makes clear how essential commercial art and its institutional backing were to the development of modern art and even modern society in China over the past century.

Selling Happiness discusses not only advertising art but also the production and marketing of the calendar poster. These posters, like other advertisements, were rendered in a Western realistic technique and were wildly and widely popular. Ordinary people throughout China often acquired them to decorate their homes. Laing outlines how the Chinese commercial artist, who rarely attended formal Western art classes, gained skills in Western representational art. In the final chapter of the book, she explains how the styles developed by the commercial poster artists during the 1920s and 1930s became the basis for certain types of propaganda art under the Chinese Communists in the 1950s and 1960s.

Contents Acknowledgments Chapter One. Introduction Chapter Two. Chinese Popular Prints in Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Shanghai Chapter Three. Production and Marketing of Advertisement Calendar Posters in China Chapter Four. Early Calendar Posters and Zhang Zhiying Chapter Five. Shanghai Beauties and Fresh Starts in the Second Decade of the Twentieth Century: Zhou Muqiao Chapter Six. New Techniques and Themes: Zheng Mantuo and Xu Yongqing Chapter Seven. Newspaper Advertisements, Advertisement Calendar Posters, and Chinese Paintings: Xie Zhiguang Chapter Eight. Artists at British American Tobacco: Liang Dingming, Hu Boxiang, Ni Gengye, and Zhang Guangyu Chapter Nine. The Zhiying Studio: Hang Zhiying, Jin Xuechen, and Li Mubai Chapter Ten. Calendar Poster Artists under the People’s Republic of China 1949–1980 Notes Glossary Bibliography Index About the Author "As the first substantial investigation of commercial art in China, Selling Happiness explains how the early twentieth century Chinese public came in accept Western style art as mainstream and the heretofore ignored process by which the Chinese art world became (in some sectors at least) thoroughly cosmopolitan. A monumental study of the most important genre of modern Chinese commercial art, this volume will appeal not only to historians of Chinese art but also to those interested in literary, economic, and social history. It will be an essential resource for comparative studies of visual culture."--BOOK JACKET.