Early 20th century Chinese popular prints: The collection of the Museum at the Rothenbaum, Hamburg.

• Applicant: Dr. Bernd Spyra
• Subject Area: Asian Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 517637735

The object of this project are more than 360 specimen of popular Chinese prints held within the collection of more than 1300 not yet researched Chinese prints of Hamburg’s Museum am Rothenbaum, Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK), the former Hamburg Museum of Ethnology. These colour-prints were industrially produced in Shanghai during the late 1920s and early 1930s, their form and content replicates the popular New Year pictures (nianhua 年畫), which in research up to now was exclusively identified as block prints. Evidently these colour-prints form a unique corpus, which puts the established typology of Chinese popular prints to question. The aim of this project is therefore to create a Chinese-German entangled history of the early scientific conception and imagination of popular Chinese prints and Chinese visual popular culture, centered on the actors involved in the creation of the collection.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants