The smiling face: an intersection of multiple social lines

The smile is an expressive face, yet what it communicates is not single or spontaneous (Elias, 1987). Smiling or not, how to smile, and the specific meaning of one do not follow static and universal principles. Multiple meanings and versatile forms of the smile suggest that it is as dynamic as the face itself. The face is not just a body part but a singular and complex meaning system (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) – it connotes the self (Synnott, 1989; 1990), delineates the Other (Levinas, 1991) and innately communicates emotions (Hochschild, 1983; Elias, 1987; Qi, 2011). While the face establishes ‘an image of self’, it is also constrained by the social line (Goffman, 1955). Each face is inscribed by individual experiences and social locations as well as by expressive order, emotional conventions and aesthetic standards (Goffman, 1955; Simmel, 1959 [1901]; Ho, 1976; Synnott, 1989; 1990; Featherstone, 2010). The smile embodies the intersecting lines of the face. It simultaneously conveys emotional, social and aesthetic connotations.

Scholarly explorations of the smile started with its relation to emotions and its physiological mechanism. In Charles Darwin’s (2009 [1890]: 207) pioneering study titled The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he regards laughter as the primary expression of ‘mere joy or happiness’ and the smile as a mild form of laughter. This indicates a close relationship between the smile and happy feelings. Darwin (2009 [1890]: 212–213) also introduces the findings by Duchenne de Boulogne, who differentiated the genuine smile from the false one by locating the facial muscles that control the movements of the mouth (the zygomatic muscles) and eyes (the orbicular muscles) during a smile. According to Duchenne, the facial expression of frank joy involves both sets of muscles, whereas a face of fake joy does not involve movement of the eyes (Duchenne, cited in Ekman et al, 1990). Duchenne’s study suggests that the smile does not always express mere happiness as claimed by Darwin. The smile initiated by genuine enjoyment has been recognised as the Duchenne smile, which simultaneously acknowledges the existence of other types of smiles. Paul Ekman (1992: 150–61) proposes 18 types of smiles that express different emotions. According to Ekman, the felt smile expresses positive feelings, such as enjoyment, relief, sensory pleasure, amusement and contentment, while other smiles can express fear, anger, contempt, sadness, flirtatiousness, embarrassment, superiority, compliance and coordination among others.

Yet, human emotions, have their social and cultural roots (Goffman, 1956; 1967; Hochschild, 1979; 1983; Turner and Stets, 2005; Burkitt, 2014). The emotions delivered by subtly different smiles, which Ekman (1992) proposes, are not purely individual psychosomatic experiences, but are socially and culturally situated. The seemingly universal emotions expressed by a particular manner of smiling could be specific to a certain sociocultural context (Elias, 1987). The charming toothy smile, for instance, was a US invention in the 20th century, which was constructed along with the emerging culture of cheerfulness (Kotchemidova, 2005a). By contrast, in Indonesia, the broad smile does not necessarily express delighted emotions but rather is a ‘default’ face or ‘mask of courtesy’, while in Cambodia the smile of the Buddha represents great intelligence, compassion and endurance (Trumble, 2004).

In addition to sociocultural differences, the meanings of the smile also vary over time. Historically, the smile was not always a courteous nor aesthetic face. On the contrary, smiles were generally not encouraged according to Western etiquette, and smiling faces were rarely represented in artworks (Schroeder, 1998; Kotchemidova, 2005a; Jones, 2014). As Fred Schroeder (1998) notes, smiling or not in art conveys a class distinction, and smiling faces, particularly ones with the teeth exposed, belong to those who lack facial etiquette, such as children, peasants, madmen, senile people, drunks and all sorts of outcasts. The facial aesthetic against smiles was so hegemonic that it made an early smiling self-portrait a scandal in 18th-century France (Jones, 2014). European art had a conventional preference for unsmiling faces as well as a sense of the privileged class that they conveyed.

Likewise, smiles are seldom represented in traditional Chinese figure painting. Chinese portraiture mainly depicts the royal and other privileged classes, whereas smiling faces, belonging to lower classes, are not keenly visualised (Schroeder, 1998). This facial preference corresponds well with the unsmiling faces of anonymous and imaginary figures in traditional literati and shinü painting. The visual rarity of the smile in pre-modern China indicates that it was not regarded as a formal, noble or beautiful face, although it could express rich meanings in real life, varying from satisfaction, friendliness and amusement to flattery, frustration and contempt (Santangelo, 2009).

The aesthetic preference for the unsmiling face in traditional Chinese art embodies an old line of the face in pre-modern China. According to ancient Chinese philosophy, neither verbal nor facial expression is encouraged. Both Taoism and Confucianism devalue speech and eloquence (Lao, 1955; Confucius, 2007). Buddhism, another critical intellectual and spiritual influence in traditional China, also discourages utterance. Some Chan masters adopted silence to express the First Principle, which was considered inexpressible (Fung, Y. 1948: 258). Bodily expression of emotions is equally discouraged. One reason for this is the Confucian etiquette of facial control (Confucius et al, 2013). A dispassionate face was widely appreciated in traditional China because of the profound influence of Confucianism across social classes. While Confucianism circumscribes good manners of the face, Taoism suggests the control of emotions. For the Taoist Chuang Tzu, ‘the mental torture inflicted upon man by his emotions is sometimes just as severe as any physical punishment’, which can be relieved by reducing emotions through rationality (Fung, Y. 1948: 108). Thus, experiencing any emotion too much, even the probably welcome happy feelings, is not recommended, for it could turn to the opposite. Composure is a behavioural value shared by both Confucianism and Taoism. Buddhism goes a step further in terms of discouraging bodily expression. As suggested in the Heart Sutra, the transcendence of form, feeling, discrimination, compositional factors and consciousness is advised (Lopez, 1988: 19–20).

Thus, verbal and emotional reservedness is a common value of traditional Chinese thought. In addition, it was not exclusive to privileged classes. Verbal, facial and emotional controls were regarded as good practices of the ‘four virtues’ for women in general (Rosenlee, 2006). Therefore, at least for pre-modern Chinese women, the control of expression was not simply social etiquette but also a moral principle. As silence and poise were widely accepted as normal rules of verbal and bodily expression, a calm and reserved face was expected, particularly on formal occasions. Good facial control represented the normal face, reflecting a line of the face that guided facial performance in formal social interactions. Conversely, the face with explicit or exaggerated expressions had negative meanings attached and was thus discriminated against in formal social activities as well as in other public spheres such as the visual space.

The line of facial solemnness and emotional reservedness was greatly challenged in the Republican era as China was undergoing a process of modernisation in the social, cultural and political spheres (Lee, 1999; Mühlhahn, 2019). The popularisation of the modern smile aesthetic provides a good opportunity to probe the expressive and emotional transformation, yet it remains barely explored. The investigation of the promotion of the popular smile in modern China is productive in unveiling the face as an intersecting signal panel for expressing emotions, etiquette and aesthetics.

Methods and materials

This study employed a multi-modal approach combining discourse analysis and visual methods (Potter, 1996; Rose, 2016) to examine the complex process of constructing the smile as a popular face during the Republican period. The collected discourses included two main datasets. The first one focused on the discourses of crucial cultural agents from the fields of art, literature, photography and film, who actively engaged in the modern revolution in expressive order and emotional regime. The second dataset, which was based on the digitalised archival database of Republican newspapers and periodicals, incorporated relevant popular discourses of cultural critics, editors and commentators through thematic searches.

Visual materials are effective sources for the study of both emotional culture and aesthetic change (Flam and Doerr, 2015; Alexander and Bowler, 2018). The popularisation of the modern smile was inseparable from the growth of new visual forms in this era. I focused on visual representations of the open smile in four dominant popular visual forms, namely calendar posters, pictorial magazines, commercial portrait photographs and films. Successful and renowned calendar posters have been well documented by visual researchers (Zhang Y., 1994; Ng et al, 1996; Laing, 2004). I focused on examining the influential works of six leading calendar artists of the period.¹ The three popular and widely circulated pictorials Liangyou, Linglong and Pei-yang Pictorial News provided a second set of crucial visual sources.² I collected a variety of representations of the open smile in their cover images, illustrated advertisements, portrait photographs and film stills. Furthermore, I examined popular films and photograph albums of film stars from this era to understand the cross-field collaboration in promoting the modern face.

In the analysis of the textual data, I employed a two-cycle qualitative coding (Miles et al, 2014). At the same time, I integrated several complementary visual methods to read the visual data. In visual analysis, both the content and the context of an image must be considered (Banks, 2001). Semiology was a useful tool for interpreting the meanings of an image in a structuralist manner (Banks, 2007; Alexander, 2016), while iconography provided a method of investigating intertextual and contextual materials (Van Leeuwen, 2004). I also absorbed insights from social semiotics, which accentuates the interactive meanings between the viewer and the image (Jewitt and Oyama, 2004). The synthesis of different visual methods as well as discourse analysis enabled me to grasp and reconstruct the dynamics in the development of the novel facial ideal, decorum and expression.

Renewing the line

Reversing the traditional aesthetic hierarchy, Liu considered the body to be the most expressive being of all – a more superior art form than nature. The established expressive order and emotional rules were concurrently questioned (Goffman, 1967; Hochschild, 1979). Liu (1925) explicitly criticised that the downplaying of the human body in Chinese art was a result of the Confucian discipline of bodily expression. Liu’s emphasis on the expressive power of the body was widely supported by modern artists, art critics and intellectuals. For them, emotional expression through the body not only characterised humanist aesthetics but also represented the liberation of the body and resistance to feudal emotional oppression. Hence, bodily expression of emotions was endowed with both aesthetic and civilised connotations.

In the emergent fields of film and theatre, bodily expression was also greatly advocated. Theatre theorists such as Yu Shangyuan (1926) argued that ‘our facial features and body parts are only tools for conveying ideas and expressing emotions’. For Yu, versatile bodily expressions, such as gait, gesture, posture, gaze, facial expression and voice, constituted a fundamental advantage of drama over literature. Likewise, film critics also emphasised the importance of bodily expression to performance in film. Notably, these technical discussions of ‘expressing feelings’ (biaoqing) focused on the employment of the entire body to communicate the emotions and thoughts of the play/film to the audience, whereas the face was not given priority. Facial expression was generally considered an integral part of the overall expression of the body.

Popular discourses of bodily expression presented a different picture to those in art, film and theatre. The expressiveness of the body was constructed as a novel and critical element of physical beauty, particularly for women. Facial expression took central stage in the beauty of a female face, as preached to the reader by popular magazines such as The Women’s Pictorial (Furen Huabao, 1934): ‘If it is without a beautiful facial expression, the face will look fossilised and lifeless.’ To achieve a lively and vigorous face, careful management and constant training of facial expressions was advocated, ranging from temperamental cultivation to physical practice. The emphasis on facial expressiveness made mere good looks a dull and unsatisfactory face, while lively facial expressions came to be a novel standard of facial beauty.

In parallel, commercial photographers openly promoted a lively face for portraiture. Chen Jiazhen (1931), one of the most famous photographers of Republican film stars, advised novice photographers that ‘portraits should look lively and natural, not rigid’. While facial expression was commonly attributed great importance, a natural rather than an exaggerated face was often suggested for performance in front of a camera. Performed naturalness, however, is neither a real face nor an expressionless one. Rather, it would require daily discipline and practice to look photogenically natural. Thus, the ‘natural’ look, like the lively face, indicates a careful staging of the face. As this new line of the naturally expressive face was developed, the old line of facial solemnness was significantly disrupted.

The increasing appreciation of the expressive body and face concurrently contradicted the traditional norm of emotional reservedness. Bodily expression of emotions took its place and became a new norm and modern etiquette. The promotion of the smile exemplified this process of transformation. In Republican public discourse, the smile was associated with a variety of positive meanings, such as ‘physically and psychologically healthy’, ‘moving’, ‘beautiful’, ‘innocent’, ‘pleasant’, ‘peaceful’ and ‘civilised’. At the same time, the previous negative connotations of the smile as well as the corresponding emotional regime were criticised. The significance of the smile/laughter was strongly promoted by the modern writer Zhu Ziqing. In his novella A History of Laughter (1923), Zhu depicts the transformation of a young Chinese woman from a happy girl who ‘loves to laugh’ to a cold-faced adult who ‘no longer laughs’ and ‘does not like to see or hear others laugh’. By rejecting all of the hostile attitudes towards smiles/laughter that the heroine experiences, Zhu questions the unsmiling etiquette and the conservative norm of emotion and expression. By contrast, the smile/laughter represents not only ‘happiness’, ‘innocence’ and ‘sincerity’ but also bodily freedom, emotional liberation and the spirit of anti-feudalism. Such advocacy of the new facial etiquette and emotional norm resonated well with the ethos of the New Culture movement in this era (Mühlhahn, 2019).

Visualising the beautiful smile

The pictorial convention of facial solemnness gradually melted in this period when novel facial etiquette was actively constructed. The rapid development of visual technology and media accelerated this representational transformation. The rise of realistic and performative visual forms, such as calendar painting, film and colour photography, popularised the lifelike representation and lively performance of a real face. The prosperity of pictorials and the expanding visual market enhanced the circulation of domestic and international public faces as well as the modern smile aesthetic. Consequently, smiling faces had replaced solemn ones and begun to dominate the visual space during the last decade of the era.

In the 1910s, the revolution in facial aesthetics was already budding in the works of calendar artists. The visualised smile was initially designated as a form of subjectivity of lower-class women (Skeggs, 2005). In his renowned work Evening Makeup, Zheng Mantuo depicts two women of distinct classes: a seated, upper-class lady and her servant girl. While the lady’s face looks calm and solemn, the servant wears a slight smile, which is indicated by her gently smiling eyes, open mouth and exposed teeth. Their contrasting facial expressions and emotions effectually signify and reproduce their class relations (Holmes, 2010). Although conveying a happy mood, the servant’s mild smile looks quite different from a typical grin, suggesting that wearing an open smile was still not a facial norm at the time. The lady’s solemn face especially confirmed that the old facial aesthetic had not been replaced yet.

Nonetheless, Zheng’s tentative depiction of the gently smiling face established a new convention for calendar painting in the next decade. The popularity of the subtle smile in calendars began with Zheng’s own frequent repetition of it. Thin and subtly smiling eyes appeared repeatedly in his works throughout the 1920s. Moreover, Zheng’s elusive smile was widely imitated by other commercial artists such as Zhou Bosheng and Hang Zhiying, and became a motif in representing a beautiful female face. Since the late 1920s, variations of the subtle smile had been developed by many successful calendar artists, including Xie Zhiguang, Hu Boxiang and Ni Gengye, indicating that the smiling face was gradually conventionalised in the commercial imagery of beautiful women.

The development of film in this period revolutionised visions of the body in many ways. The face acquired a crucial position in film because of its efficiency in communicating meanings. The smile, like other facial expressions, was far more frequently visualised in film than in still imagery. Moreover, the use of close-ups in film provided a highlighted, hyperreal and sometimes exaggerated vision of the face and body to viewers. In addition, film produced facial ideals through real faces, alienating the face of the performer and making it a public one (Belting, 2017). In this era, public faces that were produced by the film industry overshadowed the imagined faces of traditional shinü paintings and became novel facial ideals. The changing vision of the face can be clearly observed in the popular silent film Fate in Tears and Laughter (Tixiao yinyuan, 1932). The film provides animated visualisations of various smiles of the characters. When presented to the audience, these smiles are often zoomed in on to catch attention and highlight the facial message. For example, Miss He’s beautiful smile is amplified and stays on screen for several seconds. This cinematic operation could make the beauty of her smiling face an unmissable message to the audience. Her smile looks open and bright with her teeth exposed. As her face communicates beauty, this open smile becomes indispensable to the facial aesthetic that her face represents. Therefore, this cinematic ideal of the face includes her open smile as its integral part, which embodies a departure from traditional facial aesthetics.

Public faces in films were massively reproduced in other visual forms. Film stills, for instance, were popular materials in comprehensive pictorials such as Liangyou and Pei-yang Pictorial News. Other portrait photographs of famous film performers were also regular content presented in pictorials. Such portraits were commonly used as cover images to promote sales. For example, the faces of famous film stars and the novel smile aesthetic had increasingly dominated the covers of Liangyou since 1932. In addition to pictorials, the faces of film stars were widely employed in commercial portraits and photograph albums, as well as other popular images produced by the Chinese culture industry – the sphere of heteronomous mass production (Bourdieu, 1985). As Liangyou’s chief editor Ma Guoliang (2002) recalled, the company produced a great number of photographs of both Hollywood and local film stars, which ‘sell well’ and ‘are highly profitable’. Open smiles were definitely a popular pose in these pictures.

Like film stars, other popular figures such as local celebrities and socialites began to wear open smiles in their portrait photographs. Their wide adoption of the toothy smile not only advertised this modern aesthetic but also made it a fashionable facial pose for the camera. As evident from the portrait photographs on the inside pages of Liangyou, the open smile was an increasingly popular face in the 1930s, which was practised by subjects of various backgrounds. Ambitious socialites and actresses were among the first to embrace this chic pose. Female students and high-born daughters also followed this modern look quickly. Noteworthily, women were particularly enthusiastic about posing with a smile in this decade. Portraits of smiling women pervaded Liangyou’s column Women’s Page and women’s magazines such as Linglong. The wearing of the open smile in their portraits by many upper-class ladies and the rapid imitation by fashionable women indicated that this modern pose was incorporated into the corpus of decorum, became a symbol of ‘conspicuous leisure’ and was associated with a particular social status (Veblen, 1912).

As the photographic pose of the open smile was widely practised by modern ladies, the smile overrode its subject in some photographs and became an aesthetic object on its own. For example, the art photographer Lang Jingshan published a portrait of a smiling woman in Liangyou. The work was titled Smile, but the owner of the smile stayed anonymous; instead, the name of the photographer was introduced. The smile seemed to belong to the photographer rather than the portrait subject. Since the subject’s name and identity remained unknown to the reader, the smile was effectively alienated from her body and became an independent art object to view. While the aesthetic sense of the smile was intensified, other meanings of the face were restricted. The title also underlined that the focus of the work was the facial expression of the smile, which was a sign of beauty on its own.

Selling the cheerful smile

The popularisation of the toothy-smile aesthetic in the modern age went hand in hand with the ascendancy of the ‘ethic of pleasure’ and the prevalence of the culture of narcissism and consumerism (Sennett, 1974; Lasch, 1979; Kotchemidova, 2005a; 2005b). When the smiling face began to represent modern facial beauty and photographic convention, it simultaneously reflected the embrace of the modern emotional culture of happiness and pleasure, which spread rapidly with the expansion of consumerism in large commercial cities of the country. Visual advertisements of all sorts of products could provide a clear view of how the smile, hedonism and consumer culture were entwined in this era.

Individual happiness was a main theme to which the smiling face in advertisements was attached. As demonstrated in Liangyou’s illustrated advertisements, this promotion strategy was adopted for a variety of personal care products, from cosmetics to food supplements. Toothpaste was one of the earliest products associated with the broad smile, which was similar in the US (Schroeder, 1998). In these commercials, the exposed teeth in a smile no longer signified a lack of etiquette or a lower class, but rather the joy of having ‘clean, white, fragrant’ teeth and hygienic modernity. Personal enjoyment from consuming the product was particularly emphasised in advertisements for cosmetics and nutrition supplements. The smiling subjects depicted in these commercials were happy advocates of the products, explicitly expressing their pleasure on consuming the product (Davies, 2015) and contentment with retaining ‘bright eyes, white teeth, snowy skin, rosy face’ and ‘natural, youthful and healthy beauty’. From special care for one’s teeth to intensive attention to one’s face and health, a spirit of self-indulgence pervaded these advertisements. The frequent employment of the smiling face indicated that it was an efficient sign for embodying and spreading this hedonistic spirit.

The happy family was a second dominant theme that the smiling face communicated in advertisements. Liangyou employed this strategy in its own advertisement in the August 1932 issue. The illustration depicted a family reading the magazine together, all with obvious smiles, while the caption claimed, ‘When Liangyou arrives, the whole family will feel happy’. The consumption of the magazine was explicitly bound with domestic pleasure, and thus the smiling faces of the family members signified both enjoyment from the purchase and family happiness. In many advertisements for domestic products, such as Kodak cameras, Sanatogen supplements and Allenburys milk powder, smiles were employed to represent the ‘fun of family life’, harmonious relationships between family members and their enjoyable interactions. Hence, the meaning of the smile was extended beyond individual contentment, and the sense of good social relations was emphasised.

Notably, in both of the themes of the contented self and the happy relationship, an image of pleased consumers was constructed. These happy shoppers were using Colgate toothpaste to protect their dental health, wearing Doan or Pond makeup to brighten their faces, using the 4711 fragrance to stay fresh, taking Vita Spermin or Sanatogen supplements to stay healthy or taking photographs with a Kodak camera to capture happy moments. These consumers were sometimes called ‘modern ladies’, as spelled out in a Lux advertisement, or ‘gentlewomen’, as advertised by Golden Dragon cigarettes, or named ‘Miss Merry’, as in a famous Indanthrene poster. The Three Flowers advertisements employed the smiling faces of some consumer representatives such as celebrities, socialites and female students. These visualised smiling faces not only created a pleasant image of consumers but also constructed a fascinating identity of modern women (Barlow, 2008), which invited people to purchase the product and become happy like them (Williamson, 1978; Kellner, 2019).

Furthermore, the advertised products together depicted a picture of a happy life as well as a modern and leisurely lifestyle of potential consumers. Additionally, since most of these advertisements were sponsored by international brands, a cosmopolitan taste was registered subtly. In an advertisement for Wrigley’s spearmint gum, a smiling woman was enjoying the product in a swimsuit while sunbathing outdoors. Her leisure activity was not quite relevant to the product, but by associating the two, the advertisement not only promoted the ‘refreshed feeling’ that the product could bring but also recommended a modish and relaxed way to consume the product. Such contextualising efforts made the consumption both functional and symbolic (Baudrillard, 1998). That is, the depicted scene and its stylish attachments would be consumed along with the spearmint gum by the purchaser.

Both the image of the happy consumer and the enjoyable lifestyle were crucial elements of the hedonistic consumer culture in the late Republican years. The widespread employment of the smiling face in commercials suggested that it was a powerful sign for conveying the pleasure of consumption. Nonetheless, while advertisers exploited the smile to express multiple reasons for feeling happy through consumption, the meaning of the smile was, in turn, severely reduced to happy feelings alone. Most connotations of the smile in real life were irrelevant to advertisers, for all that their products needed from the sign of a smile was a pleasant and relaxed mood. The smile thus became a forever cheerful one in advertisements.

Therefore, the frequent presence of cheerful smiles in commercials not only facilitated the spread of hedonistic consumerism but also contributed to the modern obsession with cheerfulness itself especially in urban space. This novel emotional culture, on the one hand, subverted conventional rules of expression and emotion in China; on the other hand, it differed from the liberal and revolutionary spirit in the early Republican years (Schwarcz, 1986; Fung, E.S.K. 2010). The particular appreciation of happy emotions in Republican urban culture revealed a possible emotional influence from the US, where the cheerful ethos, as Kotchemidova (2005a) suggests, had been growing for several decades. But like the illusionary nature of advertising, the culture of cheerfulness that pervaded the metropolises was real only for the fortunate few, while for the majority of Chinese living in rural areas and suffering from social turbulence, it was probably a distant emotional myth.

Feminising the smile

‘Women smile more, and more expansively, than men’ when both genders are present, as revealed in Goffman’s (1976: 48) study of US advertisements. Smiling is a gendered behaviour, and men are the more solemn gender (LaFrance et al, 2003). This implicit rule of expression is evidently demonstrated in the Republican visual sphere. Three aspects of social efforts to gender the smile can be traced in this era.

First, male faces were less frequently visualised than female ones in Republican popular imagery, and thus, they followed the modern smile aesthetic less closely. Visual professionals, from commercial painters and photographers to pictorial editors and advertising illustrators, were more interested in depicting the faces of women and their smiles. This seemed to coincide with the situation in Western imagery where, to use the words of Berger (1972: 47), ‘men act and women appear’. The editor Zhang Jinshou (1944) noted that ‘there were several times more photographs of women in newspapers and magazines than there were of men’. Liangyou, for instance, was a comprehensive magazine targeting a gender-neutral readership, whereas all of the covers of its pre-war issues employed the female face alone. The cover images of the women’s magazine Linglong had the same gender preference. In addition, photographs of female readers were recruited and published on the inside pages of such popular magazines. Likewise, faces in calendar advertisements and commercial pictures were overwhelmingly female. Apparently, these popular images continued the long-established tradition of viewing women in Chinese figure painting (Fong, 1996), and this gendered practice deteriorated in the modern age with the progress of visual technology and the proliferation of pictures. The spectacularisation and objectification of women escalated especially in the 1930s, as the women’s liberation movement waned and consumerism invaded urban space. As a result, when the open smile became a common facial aesthetic in popular visuals, it typically appeared on the faces of the more represented gender – namely women. The habitual connection of the smile with the female countenance rendered it a feminine trait. By contrast, male faces barely had an equal opportunity to face the audience and pose with an attractive smile as a spectacle or an endorser. The gendered preference in the popular visual space created an illusion that the smile belonged to the female, whereas men smiled far less than women.

Second, male faces appeared more often than female ones in formal portraits and serious event photographs; in both formats, the solemn face was still a dominant representational norm. In fact, the faces of ordinary men seldom had the chance to appear in publications, as Zhang Jinshou (1944) teasingly commented: ‘[M]en rarely have the opportunity to be printed by publications unless they are national or international celebrities. If [an ordinary man] wants to appear in publications, he will not be able to do so unless he gets arrested for robbing others.’

According to Zhang’s observation, the visualised faces of men typically belonged to elite figures, while ordinary men were far less visible. The faces of the extraordinary and powerful men would be presented seriously in the press, with solemn portraits attached. The format of unsmiling portraits was adopted by Liangyou in its column on significant figures. Faces on these pages tended to stay solemn. Since ‘significant’ females were very few in number in the male-dominated society of the time, women seemed to generally miss the opportunity to look serious in such columns. By the same token, men had more chances to be represented with a serious face in the formal portraits attached. Thus, it was this frequent appearance in serious textual context that determined the solemn format of representing male faces. Female faces, despite their increasing visibility in various popular media, dominated only the frivolous space, a vivid reflection of the continued subordination of women in this era.

Third, professional photographers shared a gendered convention that the smile was a feminine expression in portraiture. The commercial photographers Ding Song (1932) and Zhang Jianwen (1934) both recommended smiling as ‘the most beautiful face’ for female sitters. The leading photographer Lin Zecang (1927) also supported this gendered protocol. In his essay on the technical differences between male and female portraits, although Lin did not mention the smile in particular, in the two example photographs attached, a serious man was contrasted with a smiling woman, which implicitly indicated that the smile characterised the portraits of women. The dissemination of the gendered vision of the smile by portrait professionals invited more female sitters to wear a smile in their photographs. These practices, on the one hand, created a visual reality where women tended to smile whereas men tended to stay unsmiling, and on the other hand, they reproduced and reinforced the gender norm that women smiled more than men. The smile thus became feminised.