Poster calendar titled "Girl at Airfield" and designed by artist Ni Gengye, for the Qidong Tobacco Company, to promote happiness in connection with their smoking products. From the collection of Agnes Tabah. Calendar measures approximately 103 x 38 cm. Ni Gengye is a Chinese artist whose work is highly sought after, and which fetches a premium when available on any market. He produced a notable number of works, many of them being calendar posters. He created advertisements for other tobacco companies including Hatamen Tobacco and the British American Tobacco (BAT). His date and place of birth are unknown, though some estimate his life span to be from approximately 1900-1965. Calendar posters were a particular genre of commercial imagery of the period. Typically, they were produced by tobacco, textile, soap, or perfume companies and were distributed across a wide geographical range. Almost invariably, they depict female figures in various guises, which were a key part of their appeal. Formally, the female figures are generally portrayed in an illusionistic manner, though chiaroscuro or shading is generally subdued. There is usually a frame, outside of which an image of the product and other necessary information are displayed. This 'calendar-poster' style had strong connotations of commercialism and was consciously avoided by designers of literary book and magazine covers. This stylistic differentiation probably served to mark literary works as a different type of commercial product. The format of the present poster-calendar was designed by Zhang Guangyu around 1931. It was mostly frequently tall and narrow, into which he introduced a large plaque for the calendar in the lower third of the space. This plaque itself was framed with ornamental designs and contrasted against a richly decorated background of various motifs. The tobacco vendor's cigarette packages were arranged on each side of, and sometimes below, the central plaque. This formula was frequently utilized, and spin-offs continued at BAT throughout the 1930s. It is thought that Ni Gengye's "Woman at an Airfield" is among the last uses of Zhang's formatting design. It is dated 1938 according to the reign characters Kangde, indicating that the poster was probably destined for advertisement in Manchuria, where the Japanese had set up the puppet state of Manchuko. The woman waves as if greeting an unseen person, having alighted from the airplane in the background, as she moves across the field toward the terminal. An alternate interpretation is also possible: the young woman might be departing, making her way across the tarmac, but turns to wave farewell to a friend, just prior to boarding the aircraft. If this is the case, Ni's picture is an ironic, unwitting, and poignant farewell to the era of advertisement calendars, for by 1938, the Japanese, entrenched in Shanghai, succeeded in pretty much cutting it off from the trade world and from the rest of China.
