Pictorial Shanghai (Shanghai huabao 上海畫報, 1925-1933) and Creation of Shanghai’s Modern Visual Culture

by Julia F. Andrews

《藝術學研究》
2013 年 9 月,第十二期,頁 43-128

Original paper with a Chinese version of the abstract:
Julia F. Andrews, Pictorial Shanghai (Shanghai huabao, 1925-1933) and Creation of Shanghai’s Modern Visual Culture

Abstract (from the above link)

This paper examines the seductive images of China’s new culture and society that emerge from the pages of the tabloid periodical Shanghai huabao (Pictorial Shanghai) from 1925 to 1933. The newspaper, published every three days, printed a photographically illustrated mix of celebrity and society news and gossip, bringing the latest information, fashions, and rumors about art, theater, literature, music, education, athletics, publishing, photography, and, occasionally, politics, into the homes of its readers. Many of the newspaper’s editors, designers, photographers, cartoonists, and columnists were closely associated with the Shanghai Art Academy, either as professors or as alumni. The new cultural world created on the pages of Shanghai huabao reflected not only the social connections and life experiences of its editorial staff, but also the artistic sensitivity and highly personal imaginativecreations of the city’s constantly changing visual imagery and emotional tenor.

Closely connected to Shanghai Art Academy, Shanghai huabao, by featuring in words and images the exhibitions, performances, and personal lives of both China’s artistic elite and its aspiring youth, created a complex and richly textured lifestyle into which its readers were lured. The appearance on its pages of photographs, gossip, publicity and reviews offers vivid material for better understanding artists, both male and female, of the formative decade of the 1920s. Over time the publication created a vision of a new Chinese modernity, demarcating those areas of traditional social and artistic practice that might suitably merge with elements from an imported lifestyle. Shanghai huabao offers vivid insight into the cultural psychology of the late 1920s, when writers might be both classically- educated and European-trained, and simultaneously speak in a tone of Neo-Daoist escapism and European ennui. Yet, this paper will finally argue that Shanghai huabao, despite the seeming randomness of the articles and images it juxtaposed, served effectively to create and to document the new tastes of a cosmopolitan Chinese culture, a culture that has left its traces in that of Shanghai’s cultural world today.

Leave a Reply

Scroll to Top

Discover more from Xuying Art Gallery

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading