Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai

Art Worlds examines the relationship between the city’s visual artists and their urban audiences.
Through a discussion of images ranging from fashionably painted fans to lithograph-illustrated magazines, this book explores how popular art intersected with broader cultural trends. 

It also investigates the multiple roles played by the modern Chinese artist as an image-maker, entrepreneur, celebrity, and urban sojourner. Focusing on industrially produced images, mass advertisements, and other hitherto neglected sources, this book offers a new interpretation of late Qing visual culture at a watershed moment in the history of modern day Chinese artforms. Art Worlds will be of interest to scholars of art history and to anyone with an interest in the cultural history of modern China. 

By focusing on objects, sites, social networks, and technologies, this elegantly conceived book enriches our understanding of art production and consumption in nineteenth-century Shanghai. The author makes masterful use of newspapers, guidebooks, diaries, and advertisements — as well as paintings — to present readers with the compelling story of a city and its artists. 

Tobie Meyer-Fong, author of What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China.