Gennifer Weisenfeld presents a fascinating breadth of Shiseido’s game-changing advertising strategies – from graphics and packaging to event and store design – through which cross-cultural and changing national concepts of modernity (in beauty, femininity and visuality) were formed. A timely survey of Shiseido’s legacy on the company’s 140th anniversary this year.

Images from Weisenfeld’s essay “Selling Shiseido” at MIT Visualizing Cultures. From left: Cover of Shiseido Graph (published between 1933-37); Eudermine and Peroxide Cream Poster (1925) by Yabe Sue; Announcement for reopening of Shiseido Parlour and Store, Ginza Shiseido Guide (1928) by architect Maeda Kenjiro.

From print design to ceramics, a show that reveals the politics of style behind the visually tantalizing Art Deco-influenced Japanese pre-WWII cultural aesthetics. How an aggressive top-down “modernisation” propaganda was part of Japan’s socio-political campaign to raise its status above the rest of East Asia, or Asia. I wonder to what extent its effects have lasted even till now – in the seemingly oft-assumed superior development of Japanese design culture, or cultural appropriation.

Images from Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920–1945.

From left: songbook cover; lithograph, inks on paper (1929); sake flash in the form of an Akita dog; porcelain (1930s); Panel, ink, colors, and mica on silk (1933)