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Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai. By ELLEN JOHNSTON LAING. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. x, 305 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
The latest book by Ellen Johnston Laing on visual commercial advertising in the Republican period is a timely and essential contribution. Calendar posters (usually termed yuefenpai) have acquired tremendous visibility in recent years, appearing on a wide variety of items from T-shirts to coasters, and they have contributed to the revival of an aesthetic nostalgia for Shanghai's "roaring" 1930s. While lavishly illustrated catalogues dealing with cutting-edge contemporary Chinese art have been published by the dozens over the past few years, research dedicated to any kind of modern antecedents to contemporary visual phenomena is still extremely scarce. This book significantly advances our understanding of the visual practices of twentieth-century China.
Emerging in the late nineteenth century to address the practical necessity of combining solar and lunar calendars for use by the emerging class of treaty port merchants, the genre of calendar posters-yearly calendars decorated with bright colors and striking images that were displayed for decoration and used for chronological reference throughout the year-became highly sought after items of commercial advertising in Republican Shanghai and were distributed across the whole country. More significantly, in promoting the consumption of new commercial products, these posters also became vehicles for the dissemination of new notions of glamour, fashion, and social practice in...