Old Orient Museum

September 19, 2010 6:44 AM

Vincent Lexington Harper compiled the world's largest collection of digitally restored pinups from the 1920s and 30s in the Old Orient Museum.

The Galleries are available from the Navigation Panel which pops out on the left of your screen. And a description of each poster is available by scrolling over it.

posted by gman (18 comments total)

What's the deal with the faces looking like they are attached to the head wrong? Is there a name for that effect? It is like the paintings are all bad head swap photoshops.
posted by idiopath at 6:51 AM on September 19, 2010

Figured out a way to link the the about page (scroll down, don't click to enter):

The world’s largest collection of digitally restored vintage posters is not a distinction taken lightly by the artist, Vincent Lexington Harper. Consuming 14 months and over 5,000 hours of diligent painstaking work to accomplish, this collection is remarkable in that it spans two decades, three countries, and an awful lot of history in between. Yet, the sole artist responsible for this historical perspective and preservation effort did it entirely on his own, for no financial reward and scarcely little recognition, toiling yearlong, the winter months in an office without heat, for the love of a lost art form, and the chance to rescue it from obscurity and extinction.

posted by gman at 7:06 AM on September 19, 2010

In Hong Kong all I have to do is walk down Lower Lascar Row (a.k.a. Cat street, owing to its history as a brothel) to purchase reprints of advertising posters very much like what is depicted on that site.

They certainly do evoke a sense of times gone by.
posted by bwg at 7:34 AM on September 19, 2010

I like it. The music. The cheap colors. The music. The little column of smoke. It really does evoke another world.
posted by Faze at 7:45 AM on September 19, 2010

Love those old ads. The site frustrated me although I did get a kick out of that cigarette smoke coming out of the scroll bar. Your post prompted me to look for less frustrating sites for vintage Chinese ad and I have to say that Mr. Harper, with alllllllll the work he did, does have the most beautiful pics. I still prefer a simple scroll site.

Adding to the ads: Smoking in China l Chinese (repro?) vintage posters for sale.

You know those lovely tangential coming across something unexpectedly amusing surfing experiences in which life is unalterably changed for the better on some level? Well, inspired by your post to look for more Chinese vintage poster art, I came across this odd article about Funeral Strippers.

Thanks gman.
posted by nickyskye at 8:22 AM on September 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

GODDDD that interface is infuriating! Move one or two pixels too far to the right, and the pick-from thumbnails whiz by.

Fuck flash photo interfaces! What's wrong with fracking pop-out windows? Oh, yeah: he doesn't want anyone copying them... unless they use a flash-breaking plug-in.
posted by IAmBroom at 8:51 AM on September 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

IAmBroom: "GODDDD that interface is infuriating! Move one or two pixels too far to the right, and the pick-from thumbnails whiz by.

While you can't choose the exact pinup you want to see, you can use the arrows available on each full size to scroll to the next (or previous) pinup.

Although they are much smaller and you have to scroll past the massive "Enter" the site link, you can view many of the posters using the links on the right side of this page.
posted by gman at 9:10 AM on September 19, 2010

Were these all printed on yellowed paper, or did Mr Harper correct the scans so they looked like the (now yellowed) originals?

Many people seem to believe that colors were paler in the past, and that there was almost no color before 1940. Just look at the films and photographs...
posted by hexatron at 9:31 AM on September 19, 2010

Here's my unyellowed version of the first Before/After image
posted by hexatron at 9:46 AM on September 19, 2010

Great content. An absolute shit-storm of a user-hostile, frustrating, vanity interface. Maybe the worst I have ever seen. But great content buried under there.
posted by Rumple at 10:42 AM on September 19, 2010 [3 favorites]

Heh. He has another section, in blog format, called "A Walk on the Mild Side" [nudity] that is a collection of girly pics and cheesecake illustration from a couple of 1950s Danish magazines. Bizarrely, the page title is "А тебе нравятся модные прически?", which babelfish translates as "But you do please fashionable hair-dos?"

Well, punk? Do you?
posted by taz at 11:01 AM on September 19, 2010

I was clicking away when -- what the hell?? -- I had to click back to see what was up with the moon girl with flashlight and... cans of soup? But then I caught the title. Ok, batteries makes marginally more sense. Even the moon uses K-K batteries. I'd like more cute weirdness like that.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 11:37 AM on September 19, 2010

I've had this open half the night, listening to the goddam glorious hypnotic autoplaying replaying music, whilst arguing over in another thread about whether Communism inherently involves atheism, and the whole time I've been in something like my imaginary version of the steam room at the Hong Kong foreign correspondents club c1955.

I think I might try to get to the images in the morning..
posted by Ahab at 11:47 AM on September 19, 2010

Did anyone realize that this guy is the real life version of Howard Moon from "The Mighty Boosh?"
posted by TheCoyote23 at 12:10 PM on September 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

The soundtrack is total David Lynch.
posted by cjorgensen at 1:36 PM on September 19, 2010

Oh god what is that smoky intro tune it's amazing.
posted by Palindromedary at 3:30 PM on September 19, 2010

Never mind: the little box in the bottom right produces a playlist when clicked. It's Waldeck - Dope Noir.
posted by Palindromedary at 3:38 PM on September 19, 2010

Whoah. I'd had the sound off when I visited. That's some atmospheric audio mojo.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 3:46 PM on September 19, 2010