Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China adds to the well-established and extensively explored subject of the modern woman in visual culture. More specifically, it examines the dialectical interactions between women's visibility through visual representations and the nation's pursuit of modernity.

The significant contribution of Sandy Ng's work lies in her examination of how material and consumer culture foster women's visibility in public spaces and their sense of self-awareness regarding modern identity. This identity formation, developed through visual representations, emerges from various media forms, including painting, advertisement graphics, photography, and motion pictures. Female images and the modern identities they generate make women "visible and spectacle" in the public arena, as the author asserts (17).

To support her argument, Ng takes readers first to traditional household settings, where interior designs, particularly furniture, demonstrate the social status and cultured lifestyles of upper-class families. While families navigated their societal positions, women, Sandy Ng claims, "negotiated their positions within the family in accordance with Confucian doctrines and cultural pursuits". (31) The lifestyles of affluent families and their material possessions provided women with "desks and chairs" to play roles as poets, authors, educators, and consumers, both within the bedchamber and in social affairs. However, the social status and lifestyles of these families were mostly accessible to gentry families, literati scholars, or members of the official elite. Additionally, as the illustrations demonstrate, interior designs and crafted furniture often confined women to gendered spaces within Confucian traditions (e.g., The Bed Chamber, fig. 5; A Woman with Flowers, fig. 8).

The emergence of modernity and its interplay with tradition brought about significant changes in female identity. Ng approaches this transition through a comparative study of traditional beauty paintings from the pre-modern period and modern advertisements in early twentieth-century China. She argues that "womanhood and modernity were intertwined through hybrid design, and ideas of femininity changed amidst shifting cultural and social values". (66) Traditional beauty paintings portrayed idealized figures, often palace ladies or talented courtesans, framed within private chambers lavishly furnished with crafted furniture and interior décor. These depictions, whether of women reading, writing, painting, or embroidering, embodied a beautified and idealized femininity shaped by cultural cultivation and gentry lifestyles. However, questions regarding the authorship and spectatorship of these beauty paintings, as well as their relationship to consumption, demand critical examination. Whose consumption and how it was generated through the creation of these beauty images remain essential questions.

In contrast, the book explores the emergence of popular advertising posters as visual reflections of sociocultural transitions in early twentieth-century China. As Sandy Ng demonstrates, female beauties remained central in these posters, surrounded by either Chinese or Western furniture and decorations. Unlike the palace ladies or courtesans in traditional paintings, however, the modern beauties in advertisements were often framed alongside commodities for sale and lifestyles to promote. This shift brings the notion of consumption to the fore. Does the modernized and commercialized image of a modern woman - elegantly dressed in a qipao, with bobbed hair and high heels - truly embody "confident femininity," as Ng describes? The very concept of "modernity" is subjected to scrutiny, as these visual representations of modern women in calendar posters simultaneously entice and flirt with potential consumers, both men and women (e.g., figs. 39 and 54).

The final chapter of the book focuses exclusively on the subject of modern women in early twentieth-century China, as portrayed through photography, film, and print. According to Ng, the modern woman embodies a dual identification: she is both "fantasized about" and "identified with" through photographic displays, screen images, and magazine covers. However, the question of how these mediums - integral to the construction of modernity - articulate the image of the modern woman requires critical examination. The terms "modern woman" and "modernity" are often used too generally. For example, the film The New Women (1935, directed by Cai Chusheng) seeks to depict a progressive female identity that could be defined as modern or new. Yet, the construction of this identity is fraught with problems, owing to its hybridity and ambivalence. The film's protagonists - a progressive working woman, a pleasure-seeking lady, and a cultured writer/composer - reveal the dilemma of what it means to be a "modern" or "new" woman. The central protagonist, for instance, realizes that teaching and writing cannot secure her the title of a new woman as she must resort to becoming a one-night prostitute to have her book published.

In sum, Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China: Redefining Female Identity through Modern Designs and Lifestyles revisits the subject of the modern woman through visual representations in the realms of consumer culture and evolving lifestyles. Although the book is less concerned with gender politics, it unfolds how the modern woman's identity is instrumentalized as both the subject and object of representation, as well as a consumer and a consumed entity. Through reading this work, I have learned that the modern woman, as depicted through visual representations, functions not only as an image for consumption but also as an inspiration for the pursuit of modernity. The notion of modernity, in turn, emerges not as singular but as a diverse and continuous process. In the historical transition from tradition to modernity, women participated in this journey through their sociocultural roles within and outside the family, as well as through their visual images in photographic portraits and print advertisements. Thus, the identity of the modern woman during China's transition to modernity remains an evolving concept, both in discourse and the creation of visual imagery. Scholars as well as students, and academic course instructors will find Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China a valuable resource for teaching and research as it contains texts suitable for being assigned as course readings, offers references for visual cultural studies, and analyses of female imagery that cross disciplines connecting art history to material culture and consumer studies.

Shu-chin Tsui