The Spectacle of Representation:

The Spectacle of Representation:

[SHS:LITT] Humanities and Social Sciences/Literature

[SHS:ART] Humanities and Social Sciences/Art and art history

art-representation-China-calendar-literature-Shanghai-Hong Kong

Martha Huang examines how the Westernized pictorial gaze was, at times painfully, assumed by China's cultural producers in the first half of the twentieth century. <br />Hang Zhiying 杭穉英 (1900-1947) trained at the Commercial Press in Shanghai, but left in the early 1920's to open his own atelier, the Zhiying Studios. Specializing in promotional art and packaging, the Studios, with their stable of talented artists,soon held a large share of the commercial art market2. Their range of posters ran from the most expensive, with calendar (sometimes including both Western and lunar dates), decorative frames, optional smaller landscape insets above or below the main image, poetic inscriptions, reproductions of the product advertised, and<br />sometimes an overlay of gilt; to the cheapest-- a "hanger", in which the design of a pretty girl was printed on a plain background with a thin metal strip attached at the top for hanging. Such prints advertised nothing except perhaps a certain aesthetic, but were popular as a cheap form of interior decoration.

Huang, Martha

Transtext(e)s Transcultures : JOurnal of Global Cultural Studies

ISSN:1771-2084

2007

ENG

article in peer-reviewed journal

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00188591

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/18/85/91/PDF/M._Huang_Calendar_Girlsrevu.pdf

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/18/85/91/IMG/calendar_girl_new.jpg