Organizer: Julia F. Andrews, Ohio State University
Chair: Kuiyi Shen, University of Oregon
Discussant: Wen-hsin Yeh, University of California, Berkeley
The cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, with its collectors, dealers, schools, clubs, and exhibition spaces, provided fertile ground for the development of art between 1900 and 1950. An essential element in the development of art in Shanghai, and throughout China, was the modern publishing industry, which stimulated new forms of commercial art, made possible new ways to commercialize fine art, and created a new artistic profession comprised of artists of previously distinct social classes.
The four papers on this panel will explore the varied roles that Shanghai publishing assumed in the Chinese cultural world before 1949, touching upon the commercialization of fine art, commercial art produced in conjunction with literature, and popular literature. Shen will look at studio practices, styles, and contents of two distinctive genres of illustration, xiaorenshu and lianhuan tuhua. Andrews will discuss modernist book cover designs, including those commissioned of Qian Juntao and Tao Yuanqing. Laing's paper, centering on the 1947 China Art Yearbook, will discuss the function of modern art publishing in promoting both fine and commercial art. Link will explore aspects of publishing that affected the production of fiction. Panelists will consider the following questions: How did artists, intellectuals, investors, and the public interact to create new forms of art? What styles and functions characterized this new art? In what ways did the introduction of Western or Japanese styles, formats, or technologies play a role in the development of new forms of art? What parallels, links, or contrasts may be found between publishing in the fields of literature and art?
Judging a Book by Its Cover: Book Cover Design in Republican Shanghai
Julia F. Andrews, Ohio State University
This paper aims to fill a gap in our art historical understanding of Republican China by exploring a new form that emerged in response to technological, commercial, and cultural innovations-the individually designed book or magazine cover. Mechanically reproduced and presumed at the time of their making to be less permanent than paintings, many of these book covers have outlived their counterparts in the fine arts and can provide a glimpse into the vanished visual world of modernist Shanghai.
The best-documented book designers of the era, Tao Yuanqing and Qian Juntao, were strongly influenced by the ideas and encouragement of Feng Zikai and Lu Xun. Qian Juntao, for example, studied with Feng Zikai before entering Shanghai Normal Art School. Immediately upon his graduation, he began his career as house designer for Kaiming Bookstore, where he attracted Lu Xun's attention. He went on to design magazines for Commercial Press and other publishers. Using books at the Lu Xun Museum in Shanghai and covers from Qian's design portfolio, an attempt will be made to identify, based on style, various forms that the interactions of Japanese, European, or American magazine design prototypes took in Shanghai book design. The surviving body of books and magazines, even those by a single designer, may span the range from up-scale to plebeian. Further suggestions will be made regarding functions for different kinds of design by contrasting elegant book covers with somewhat more popular magazines, such as Liangyou, Meishu shenghuo, and various manhua and movie magazines.
Comics, Illustrations, and the Cartoonist in Republican Shanghai
Kuiyi Shen, University of Oregon
Along with the development of publishing in Shanghai in the early twentieth century, one form of commercial art, lianhuantuhua, became very popular. Although lithographed illustrations appeared in the late nineteenth century, two distinctive genres of serial illustration, comics and xiaorenshu, developed quickly in Shanghai of the 1920s and 1930s. The contents, styles, production methods and distribution systems of these two genres reflected the different tastes of contemporary social groups. A new group of artisans, which continued earlier styles of illustrations, men like Zhao Hongben and Qian Xiaodai, designed xiaorenshu-storybooks. They painted in workshops, illustrating historical stories and dramas. This form of illustration, with its special distribution system, including rental, targeted lower-class consumers. Comics, however, which were first published in newspapers and journals and later in professional cartoon magazines, such as manhuazazhi and manhuashijie, were mostly drawn by better educated commercial artists, such as Feng Zikai, Ye Qianyu, and Cai Zhenghua. Society and politics were their favorite subjects; four to eight sections for each story was the normal format; the styles emulated western comics; and the readers were usually educated people.
In this paper, I will, through examining the studio practices, styles, and contents of these two distinctive genres of illustration, try to put the production and development of lianhuantuhua of the time into the cultural context of commercialized Shanghai in the Republican period.
Commodification of Art Through Exhibition and Advertisement
Ellen Johnston Laing, University of Michigan
One of the first systematic compilations of its kind, the 1947 China Art Yearbook (Zhongguo meishu nianjian), published in Shanghai in 1948, documents exhibitions, master-disciple studio relationships, histories of major urban art groups, and biographies of famous fine and commercial artists. Taking an analysis of this volume as a starting point and supplementing it with other evidence, this paper will discuss the function of modern public relations, particularly as evident in magazine features, exhibitions, exhibition catalogues, advertisements, and exhibition reviews, as tools for marketing art. With the advent of modern advertising, it was not uncommon that artists promoted their careers by publishing their price lists in mass circulation or specialized art periodicals. In some cases, new types of non-profit activities, such as art exhibitions with sales to benefit schools or other charities, were well-documented in popular publications, and served to increase the visibility and reputations of the artists involved. Many of the phenomena to be observed have sources or parallels in the art worlds of Japan, Europe, or the U.S., but others are evidence of a blend of artistic, social, and commercial norms that was particular to Shanghai in the period. All were made possible by new trends in the Shanghai publishing business.
Money and Fiction in Shanghai, 1900-1920
Perry Link, Princeton University
The arrival of modern newspapers and printing technology in Shanghai in the early twentieth century led to changes in the ways popular Chinese fiction was written, published, and distributed. Many of these changes involved increased commercialization: manuscript fees, publishing contracts, copyrights, book sales and rental, advertising, newspaper serialization, and use of fiction for radio broadcast and film all were commercially negotiated, although not always stably or reliably. New professional roles of newspaper editor, commercial author, modern publisher, and book distributor arose, each fraught with both opportunities and dangers. New groups of readers, educated in the "new schools" that used Western and Japanese curricula, bought, borrowed, read. and discussed fiction in ways that in some ways resembled the uses of fiction in cities such as London and Tokyo.
These changes had major effects on both the form and content of the popular fiction that arose in Shanghai at the time. I will seek to identify the precise ways in which commercialization affected literary features, and will try to relate these patterns to those that affected the visual arts as reported by other members of the panel.