ABSTRACT
This chapter probes into Shanghai advertising aesthetics and investigates how it served as a laboratory for inventing new ways of seeing, managing and experiencing the city in early twentieth-century China. Taking Shanghai as a case study, with a particular focus on the foreign settlements,6 this research intertwines three main lines of inquiry. In contrast to shop signs that were physically attached to a shop, and aimed at promoting the merchandise of this particular shop and its merchants’ name or trademark, billboards had no persistent relation with the product they displayed. They could advertise any product and brand name. Some advertisers went as far as to claim that their billboards offered a sanitary protection by preventing local coolies from dumping garbage and refuse in the surroundings. In sum, advertising aesthetics was not “art for art’s sake” – it also implied class divisions and elites’ concerns for social order.
