Advertising in pre-communist China
Before the advent of the Communist regime in 1949, China, and especially Shanghai, began to experience forms of advertising borrowed from the West. The colorful and vibrant ads for cigarettes or perfumes became very popular. Like nowadays, the ads focused on female beauty. In major Chinese cities today it is easy to buy this kind of reproductions.
The Rise of the Yuefenpai (月份牌)
This genre of commercial art is known in Chinese as yuefenpai (月份牌), literally “calendar board,” because each poster combined a large painted image with a printed calendar grid for the coming year. The format is generally traced back to 1896, when the Shanghai Hongfulai Philippine Lottery Company (上海鸿福来公司) printed what is considered the first example, “Shanghai Scenery and Fortune,” a design that already blended Chinese line drawing with Western pictorial perspective. Companies, above all cigarette and cosmetics manufacturers, gave these posters away to customers as free gifts or premiums, which is one of the reasons they hung in so many homes and shops across the city, doubling as both a household calendar and a piece of decoration.
From Classical Beauties to Modern Girls
Among the earliest recognized yuefenpai painters was Zhou Muqiao (周慕桥), who worked in a more traditional idiom, portraying women in classical dress drawn from figures in older novels and paintings. The style that made the genre famous, however, was developed by the Hangzhou-born artist Zheng Mantuo (郑曼陀), who perfected a technique known as tanfen cabifa (碳粉擦笔法), or “charcoal-stump watercolor,” in which carbon was rubbed onto the paper to build soft shading before layers of watercolor were added, giving the skin of his figures a moist, lifelike glow. Zheng worked extensively for tobacco companies and helped push the yuefenpai firmly into the commercial mainstream.
By the 1920s and 1930s the leading figure in the field was Hang Zhiying (杭稚英), whose Zhiying Studio (稚英画室), staffed with associates such as Jin Xuechen (金雪尘) and Li Mubai (李慕白), produced an estimated two hundred commercial artworks a year, many of them signed simply “Zhiying.” The studio’s posters shifted the ideal of feminine beauty toward the fuller-figured, fashionably dressed “modern girl” in a qipao, reflecting the changing image of urban women in Shanghai society. Other prolific names associated with the genre include Xie Zhiguang (谢之光), later known for film posters, and, in British Hong Kong, Kwan Wai-nung (关蕙农), celebrated as the territory’s “Calendar King” for his Two Girls series created for the cosmetics firm Kwong Sang Hong.
Decline After 1937
The genre’s fortunes changed with the outbreak of full-scale war with Japan. Hang Zhiying stopped producing yuefenpai in 1937, the year Japanese forces occupied Shanghai, and according to his son he was later pressured by Japanese officials to produce propaganda imagery instead. Many calendar-poster artists went on to adapt their skills to wartime and resistance propaganda through the 1940s. The genre as a commercial form effectively ended in 1949, when the new Communist government viewed its glamorous, consumerist imagery as a symbol of the bourgeois, semi-colonial Shanghai it had set out to replace. The original prints nonetheless remain highly collected today, and reproductions of the best-known designs are still commonly sold in Chinese cities.
Related articles: Shanghai on the eve of the communist liberation (1949)
Images of Chinese advertising posters of the 1930s
Source: Webarchive
Topics: Chinese advertising posters,advertisign,republican China,shanghai,cigarettes ads,perfumes ads,chinese ads,yuefenpai calendar posters
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