Shanghai Entertainment Life In Late Qing Dynasty And Early Initiation In The Form Of Design

This thesis aims to find the origin of the emergence and development process of Chinese neoteric and modern design. The emergence of Chinese modern design was closely related to both the formation and development of Shanghai urban civilization, and the changes of Social life style. Since the middle of nineteenth Century, there is a great transform on the form of urban life, which based on the urban-public-entertainment-space. And this transformation stimulates the demand of modern life, at the same time people can witness the rise of modern design in China. Affected by the modern western entertainment mode, a number of late Qing Dynasty traditional private garden in Shanghai started to transform to the modern entertainment space, in which, the concept of fashion life has emerged in Zhang Weichun Garden’s entertainment life. In Zhang Garden, citizens interact with new civilization and foreign objects directly, which further expand the life space of people, and leaded them get out the limitation of their narrow home environment and walk into broader entertainment space. In this context, the issues of the public entertainment space such as image, entertainment technology and commodity transaction changed traditional life style directly and influenced the emergence of early design. Therefore, this paper will focus on the following three issues, which is analyzing the tendency of female dress in the late Qing Dynasty, the application of modern technology in business area and the transaction in design market. First of all, it will depict the life changes of early design formation in Shanghai, in order to provide us a reasonable perspective to understand the methods, characteristics and paths of the early Chinese design. This thesis asserts that the early design of neoteric and modern China comes from Chinese’s pragmatism resistance to the social concussion which brought by the western industrial civilization. And the sociality, daily and groupment which showed up during this time can perfectly explain the existence condition of neoteric Chinese design.