Lecture by Professor Julia F. Andrews, Pictorial Shanghai (Shanghai huabao, 1925-1933) and Creation of Shanghai’s Modern Visual Culture.
This talk will examine 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. 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 hybrid culture that has left its traces in Shanghai’s cultural world today.
