Ancient Costumes for Modern Ads: Zhang Guangyu’s Figure Lines and Photographic Patterns

The Taikang Art Museum’s exhibition “In the Vast Expanse of Heaven and Earth: Jiang Zhaohe Art Document Exhibition” showcases his pattern designs and magazine cover creations from the 1920s in Shanghai. It was during this period that Jiang Zhaohe gradually transformed from a mature billboard painter and window art designer to an artist. Unfortunately, very few related practice achievements or documents from Jiang Zhaohe have been passed down. However, materials related to commercial art from his peers, such as Zhang Guangyu, have been preserved and studied. This lecture specially invites young scholar Jiang Hanyun, who researches Zhang Guangyu, to share Zhang’s practices in the field of advertising art, offering a glimpse into the visual literacy sources of artists active in Shanghai in the 1920s, including Jiang Zhaohe.

What makes Zhang Guangyu unique in Chinese modernist art is not only his work across emerging mediums like cartoons, advertising, interior design, photography, and film art—providing first-hand experiential material for Chinese modernist theory—but also his particular attention to the characteristics of opera and film media and their influence on traditional Chinese figure painting in a modern context. The patterns of ancient costumes reimagined were endowed by Zhang Guangyu with a lifespan, tying knots into the intricate history of Chinese art. These knots anchor a new artistic taste, revealing Zhang Guangyu’s modernist decorative aesthetics, which embedded in Xiqu art itself.

This lecture will primarily use Zhang Guangyu’s advertising character paintings as case studies, while also discussing the collective creative endeavors of Jiang Zhaohe and other Chinese artists who sought to forge individual creative experiences and promote the reform of Chinese art within the “Ten-Mile Foreign Market” (the cosmopolitan, foreign-influenced entertainment district of old Shanghai).