Ask most collectors where Chinese advertising posters began, and the answer is almost always Shanghai.
It is an understandable assumption. By the late 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai had become China’s commercial capital, and its celebrated yuefenpai (月份牌)—advertising posters featuring elegant women promoting everything from cigarettes to cosmetics—would become icons of twentieth-century Chinese design.
Artistic traditions rarely appear fully formed. Long before Shanghai perfected the genre, artists elsewhere in China were already experimenting with an entirely new relationship between art and commerce. They combined portraiture, landscape painting and commercial messaging into images that blurred the boundary between fine art and advertising.
Several of the earliest examples in the Bai Win Collection suggest that this creative evolution was already underway in northern China during the early Republican period.
From Portrait to Advertisement
The simplest of these works still echoes a traditional portrait. The young woman dominates the composition, standing against an uncluttered background with little distraction from her calm expression and elegant dress. There is almost no sense of commerce. Instead, the artist presents dignity, restraint, and refinement—the very qualities that educated Chinese audiences associate with good taste.
Unlike the glamorous calendar girls who would soon fill Shanghai’s advertisements, this figure is neither fashionable nor provocative. She is timeless. In many ways, this image represents a transitional moment: advertising had begun to borrow the authority of portrait painting without abandoning its artistic roots.
Landscapes Become Part of the Story
The next step is even more revealing. Here the woman is no longer isolated against a neutral background. She inhabits a carefully composed landscape of pavilions, trees, and water. Holding a fishing rod beside a peaceful lake, she becomes part of a scene that recalls classical Chinese painting more than commercial illustration.
The advertised product—a tin of Pirate cigarettes—occupies only a small corner of the composition.
This reversal of priorities is remarkable. Rather than selling cigarettes directly, the artist sells an ideal of leisure and refinement. The product simply inhabits that world—a strategy that would later define Shanghai advertising.
Selling Through Beauty Rather Than Product
This sugar advertisement illustrates another important transition. The carefully framed composition, decorative border, and softly rendered figure reveal an artist thinking beyond simple product promotion. The product packages are treated almost as still-life objects, while the young woman remains the emotional center of the composition.
Even the calligraphy becomes part of the artwork. The result is an advertisement that rewards careful looking in the same way a painting does. Rather than asking the viewer to buy sugar, it invites admiration first. Only afterwards does the product quietly make its appearance.
Advertising Learns to Tell Stories
By the time we reach this composition, something fundamental has changed. There are now two figures. One reads while the other watches. The interaction creates a narrative.
Instead of presenting beauty alone, the artist introduces companionship, education, and domestic life. The advertisement no longer offers a single figure, but a glimpse into an imagined world.
Toward Shanghai
Viewed together, these works reveal a remarkable progression. Portraiture becomes landscape. Landscape becomes the narrative. Narrative becomes advertising.
By the mid-1920s, artists working in Shanghai would refine these ideas into the glamorous calendar posters now recognized throughout the world. They introduced brighter colors, fashionable clothing, sophisticated typography, and increasingly modern settings. Yet the artistic vocabulary itself had already begun to emerge elsewhere. Shanghai may have perfected the calendar poster, but it did not invent the idea of transforming advertising into art.
A Foundation for What Came Next
These northern posters demonstrated that advertising could become art. Portraiture, decorative design, and commercial imagery merged into a distinctly Chinese visual language.
Shanghai would later refine these experiments into one of Asia’s most sophisticated forms of commercial art, but the foundations had already been laid.
Curator’s Assessment
Whether every one of these posters originated in Beijing, Tianjin, or elsewhere in northern China remains a subject for continued research. Together, however, they reveal that the artistic language of the advertising poster was already emerging before Shanghai transformed it into an international phenomenon. Their importance lies not only in their rarity, but in the missing chapter they add to the history of Chinese advertising art.
From the Curator’s Desk
Adam McMillan 年安瀾
Curator, Bai Win Collection
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