Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century Shanghai. From the early twentieth century until the Communist takeover in 1949, Shanghai commercial artists created thousands of colourful posters and black and white advertisements that formed an essential part of modern life in the city. This visually appealing and richly illustrated work describes the origin and evolution of modern commercial art in China, focusing on colourful advertisement calendar posters that featured distinctive feminine images. It makes clear how essential commercial art and its institutional backing were to the development of modern art and even modern society in China over the past century.