The article “Modern Pill in a Modern City: Decoding an Aspirin calendar poster from 1930s Shanghai” is the outcome of the seminar "Transcultural Modernism(e): Jugendstil and Art Nouveau in Europe and East Asia" which the students took at the Cluster in the summer semester of 2015. It included a study trip to Berlin and was led by Dr. Anna Grasskamp and Sabine Schenk.
The authors situate an isolated Bayer Aspirin advertisement poster within the social and economic contexts of a fast changing Shanghai in the twentieth century. At that time, advertisers used the popular calendar posters with portraits of “beautiful women” to sell everything from soaps to sandals. By reading the visual codes embedded in the poster and analysing Bayer’s marketing strategy, artistic production and the life of the actress Ruan Lingyu featured in the poster, Yu and Goel argue that the Bayer ad featured a single figure of a popular actress idolised as a “new woman” to create a simple but memorable icon for its wonder drug.
Xue Yu is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute of East Asian Art History at Heidelberg University and had come to the Cluster from the University of Vienna. Garima Goel is doing her Research Masters in Contemporary India at the King’s College in London. In summer 2015, she was an exchange student from the University Hyderabad in India.
Dr. Anna Grasskamp joined the Cluster from 2013 to 2016 as a post-doctoral fellow. She is Associate Member of the Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context at Heidelberg University and Research Assistant Professor at Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Sabine Schenk is Alumna of the Cluster and a doctoral candidate at Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich.
The peer-reviewed academic journal "Baessler-Archiv" is published annually by the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin.