Shanghai Yuefenpai

The Chinese Wing

The calendar poster — art a household kept all year.

1914–1930 (deepens every January)

Zheng Mantuo’s rub-and-paint portraits (the technique that founded the school, from 1914) and the treaty-port advertisers — tobacco, cosmetics, pharmacies — who commissioned them: the modern girl in qipao, deco Shanghai rising behind her. The format is the story: a yuefenpai is a portrait WITH a working calendar, and launch pieces keep their original calendar panels intact. The school’s most celebrated decade, the 1930s Zhiying Studio era, is watch-listed and unlocks annually from January 2027 alongside the rest of the 1930s material. This wing is commercial portraiture of women in a semi-colonial port; it names that era honestly and centers the artists and the modern-girl moment they painted.