Stylogenyin the style of Shanghai Modern & Yuefenpai

Pictorial & machine age · 1910–1949 · East Asia

Shanghai Modern & Yuefenpai

Also known as Yuefenpai (calendar posters), Haipai commercial art, Shanghai Art Deco

The commercial art of treaty-port Shanghai. Calendar posters (yuefenpai) given away by tobacco, pharmaceutical and cosmetics firms took over the New Year print's place on the wall, pairing glamorous women in qipao, softly modelled in Zheng Mantuo's rubbed-brush watercolour technique, with ornamental borders, calendars and products. In the 1920s–30s pictorials, cartoons and 'art lettering' (meishuzi) absorbed Art Deco geometry into a cosmopolitan Chinese modernism.

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An ornate vintage-style illustration shows a woman in a floral qipao resting her chin on her hand beside a teacup and a vase of blossoms, with a waterfront city and Chinese pavilion behind her. Floral borders, birds, geometric corner ornaments, a small landscape panel, and the Chinese heading “春曉” surround the portrait.
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

01

How it works

  • Centre one idealised figure, usually a fashionable modern woman, modelled with soft, photographic gradation.
  • Frame the picture with an ornamental border that carries the brand, the product and the calendar.
  • Blend Western shading and perspective with Chinese auspicious motifs, gardens and landscapes.
  • Design headline characters as geometric 'art lettering' (meishuzi) with Deco stems, inlines and stepped strokes.
  • Pair powdery pastel skin tones with saturated jewel accents and gold.
  • On magazine and book covers, cut type and image on bold diagonals with flat colour planes.

Shanghai, China

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Ornament-free, Non-representational, Modular grid, Rebellious & subversive, Photocopy & distress, Typography only

Palette

  • #f1d9c4
  • #b8322f
  • #1f5f5b
  • #c8a24a
  • #2a2a3a
  • #e9c6c9

Typefaces

  • Meishuzi

    Republican-era 'art lettering' display characters

  • Songti

    Song/Ming printing type

  • Brush calligraphy titles

    kaishu and xingshu

  • Art Deco Latin display faces in bilingual branding

Known for

  • Zhou Muqiao

    early calendar-poster painter

  • Zheng Mantuo

    rubbed-brush watercolour 'cabi shuicai' beauties

  • Hang Zhiying & Zhiying Studio

    founded 1922, with Jin Xuechen and Li Mubai

  • Xie Zhiguang

  • The Young Companion (Liangyou) pictorial

    1926–45

  • Modern Sketch

    Shidai manhua, ed. Lu Shaofei, 1934–37

  • Zhang Guangyu

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Shanghai Modern & Yuefenpai’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.

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04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleShanghai Modern & Yuefenpai1910–1949 · East Asia

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Real works

Artefacts in museums, libraries and archives that show the style, linked at their source.

06

Sources

  1. Ellen Johnston Laing, Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century Shanghai (University of Hawai'i Press, 2004)
  2. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Harvard University Press, 1999)
  3. Scott Minick & Jiao Ping, Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century (Thames & Hudson, 1990)
  4. chineseposters.net, 'Hang Zhiying' (https://chineseposters.net/artists/hangzhiying)

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