From here. By Samuel Porteous.
ADDED: The characters 磨登, mó dēng, separately mean “rub” and “press” but here are used simply to transliterate the English word “Modern”, being as close as one gets in Chinese to the sound “modern”.
磨, mó is a nice character, used in the rubbing of an ink-stick onto a Chinese ink-stone, with the stone character at the bottom 石, shí, a pictogram of a stone under a cliff (厂).
The above is part of a series by Porteous based on 1930s posters in Shanghai. Porteous is a Canadian living in Shanghai.
He’s the sort of guy I would have met when I spent a year or so in Shanghai in 1989-90. There weren’t many foreigners there in those days. And I was pretty much plugged in to the Shanghai art scene, foreign and local. Many times I had drunken Chinese artists, crashing out in my flat, and waking up the next morning demanding toast and Vegemite, which they call 黑酱 hēi jiàng, or “black paste” in Chinese. They love it, like they love all strong flavours. They compare it to 臭豆腐, chòu dòufu, “Stinky Tou fu”. Which it kind of is.
