Calendar Poster for Anker Beer

Posters fostered the people’s longings for fashionable imported goods while Shanghai boomed as a new and prosperous international city during the 1920s and 1930s. China had a long tradition of ‘New Year Picture (Nianhua),’ a form of woodblock print with felicitous images used as interior decoration during the new year season. These simple prints then developed into prints with attached calendars and their mass-produced forms flooded Chinese towns. Advertising posters used this combined calendar new year’s print format, adding hints of the fantastical images of ‘modern lifestyles’ to awaken the longings and desires of the masses. The models for these posters were popular stars of the silver screen, and the Chinese style of dress seen here was the latest fashion around 1925. This poster is thought to have been made by the most popular printing studio of the day, the ‘Zhiying Studio.’ This workshop employed dozens of artisans who mass-produced 80 or more calendar new year’s prints per year. This world of mass production and mass consumption and its related advertising then led to birth of new heroines symbolizing the new age.