Description

Enticing, eye catching, and artistic, the graphic art of product labels from years past also offers clues to understanding the contemporary culture and ways of life of everyday consumers. Here is a showcase of remarkable packaging and advertising art created from 1890 through 1976, primarily in Canton, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macau, and other cities of large Chinese populations. Included are more than 400 different labels for products as diverse as tea, medicines, foods, cosmetics, cigarettes, harmonicas, fabrics, matches, phonograph records, firecrackers, and incense. Designers and historians alike will appreciate how these labels employed a fascinating mixture of traditional Chinese imagery and ornamentation blended with modern Western graphic influences and later the ideology of the People's Republic of China.