Cutting Through the Haze:

Reassessing Images of Shanghai Girls in Cigarette Advertisements, 1910-1940

Sunday, 30th July 2023

11:00 am to 2:00 pm (option for lunch)

Shanghai calendar posters or yuefenpai (月份牌) featuring images of the Modern Girl (摩登女子) as well as the New Woman (新女性), from the early twentieth century, have captured the imagination of viewers past and present as an iconic symbol of Shanghai's glamourous and nostalgic past. Ravishingly attired - often in tightly qipao - and presenting a beguiling smile, the colorful illustrations of young Chinese ladies evoke a well-recognized orientalist images that continues to circulate to this day. Due to their popular appeal, much has been written and published about this genre of posters that formed an important part of Shanghai's visual culture.

Yet, might there be more than what we have come to understand? In the decades of 1920s into the 30s, in the aftermath of the British American Tobacco Company's entry into China, the barrage of calendar posters and ads dominated the public consciousness. These decades were also a time of social, economic and political instability fraught with ambivalence within China's society with tensions arising from foreign encroachment and domestic ideological shifts. Previous studies of yuefenpai positioned the stylish Chinese women wielding a cigarette as a primary advertising strategy to push cigarette sales for male consumption. Yet, how did these same images affect the women?

This is the line of inquiry that is examined by the Art Historian Julie Chun in the light of new scholarship that have emerged in the fields of social sciences and corporate history. Moreover, by revisiting overlooked information and casting a renewed gaze upon the historical images, this lecture problematizes the images portrayed in the yuefenapai with expanded discussions to reframe the ways in which modernity operated in the context of the tobacco industry through unexpected encounters of contestation and subversion by women who were agents of their choice as well as fodders for gender profiling and construction of stereotypes.