Go almost anywhere in China and you’ll see street after street of garish, bright-red signs. They’re widely derided as ugly and mass-produced, so why can’t cities get rid of them?
Five years ago, the Chinese artist Huang Heshan began “construction” on a digital metropolis of the future. Huang’s virtual urban space, which he dubbed Too Rich City, is unmistakably a creation of our hyper-industrialized age: Towers loom so densely that there’s no skyline to speak of, while aircraft glide past in an echo of the cyberpunk cityscapes found in “Ghost in the Shell” or “Blade Runner.”
But take a closer look, and the generic futurism gives way to something surprisingly rooted in a specific space and time. Saturated red plastic shop signs and unruly banners for hotels and foot massage parlors infest the facades like a fungal bloom — emblems of Too Rich City’s thriving street life and a nod to the artist’s hometown in the southern province of Guangdong, a chaotic yet thriving town on the frontier of China’s marketization reforms.
Huang, who is preparing for an upcoming exhibition in Shanghai, has described his aesthetic as “socialist cyberpunk”: a mixture of documentarian and fantastical impulses that reflects the ambitions of China’s bustling reform era. And in this world, the garish red shop sign reigns supreme.
A building from “Too Rich City.” From @ 黃河山hhs on Weibo
“Too Rich City: The Old White Swan Passenger,” 2025. Courtesy of Huang Heshan via Fotografiska
Anyone who’s lived in urban China almost certainly knows the placards I’m talking about. They’re plastic, formulaic, and covered in massive fonts and saturated colors that shout for the attention of passersby. Unsurprisingly, not everyone is a fan of the aesthetic. Graduates of Beijing’s Tsinghua University — Huang’s alma mater and home to one of China’s most prestigious architecture and art schools — have long sought to purge the country’s urban landscape of their clunky, in-your-face presence.
They’re not alone: officials and landlords from small cities to major metropolises have launched sign replacement campaigns aimed at imposing a more pleasing aesthetic on businesses. But many of these attempts have met with an unusual degree of backlash from residents, resulting in scrapped plans and in some cases, the sacking of local officials. The garish red signs always seem to outlast their critics.
Funnily enough, while they’re closely identified with Chinese urbanism, the signs are a relatively recent phenomenon. For over a millennium, shop signs in China came in the form of horizontal carved plaques of wood or else the more creative huangzi: flags and lanterns with characters written on them or actual objects related to a given trade, such as a gourd for a medicinal wine shop. Even today, huangzi persist in some historical tourist spots, used to evoke a time when shop signs were more artisanal. Like the red-white-blue barber pole — once a symbol of bloodletting in Europe — each sign was itself a craft, a story, and an identity.
Examples of “huangzi” from “The Shop Signs of Peking,” published by the Chinese Painting Association of Peking, 1931. From Christies.com
It wasn’t until the late 20th century that mass-produced signs really began to reshape China’s streetscape. The country’s first neon ad blinked on in Shanghai in 1926, but even as late as the 1980s, many signs — especially those for small businesses — were handcrafted. The real revolution came with the rise of Chinese-language desktop publishing. Quick-print shops sprang up nationwide, offering cheap design and printing services using elementary software and whatever Chinese fonts the programs happened to come with — think Helvetica, Times New Roman, or Comic Sans, but for Chinese characters. With few trained designers and clients demanding fast turnarounds, the placards just had to be legible and eye-catching, and the result was a monotonous chorus of red signs, mass-produced on assembly lines.
China’s rapid urbanization over the past 40 years only exacerbated the trend. As old neighborhoods were razed and replaced by cookie-cutter developments, commercial tenants flooded newly built street-level shops. Standardization was the norm, and shop signs, once a vessel of individuality, were as replicable as Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes — an icon of mass-produced consumerism.
New shop signs designed to a unified standard. From People’s Daily Online
As China’s real estate boom fades and gentrification gains momentum, these red signs have become symbols of a bygone era, even if no one can quite agree on their place in today’s society. For critics, they’re an icon of unregulated urban growth, while defenders point out that removing them won’t magically improve a city’s charm. Commerce, after all, draws vitality from the surrounding community, and a refined sign is meaningless if the store beneath it has no story to tell.
Enforced aesthetics like those proposed by anti-red sign advocates have a mixed track record of their own. In many cases, businesses are given tight deadlines to redesign signs to meet an arbitrary standard with little community input. Ironically, this demand for efficiency and uniformity mirrors the very forces that gave birth to the ubiquitous red signs in the first place. A better approach would be to give business owners time and flexibility to explore their identity, and how their presence shapes — and is shaped by — the neighborhood around them.
But this would require dispelling a persistent belief in China: that garish signs are the natural product of a culturally unsophisticated grassroots. In fact, it is technology, urban planning, and fast money — not a lack of culture — that imposed this aesthetic on China’s streets. Traditional huangzi and their vernacular creativity show that grassroots design can be rich and meaningful. Even today, ingenuity flashes on our streets: The art historian Bai Qianshen has written about the unique calligraphic beauty of handpainted barbershop signs in the southwestern megalopolis of Chongqing, while dash, a zine about typography and visual culture, has documented distinctive sign styles on a Shanghai street slated for demolition.
A hand-painted barbershop sign in Chongqing, 2001. From Bai Qianshen via Jiemian News
Old shop signs uncovered during a renovation in Shanghai, 2021. Shen Chunchen/VCG
In fact, most shop owners are acutely aware of the benefit of better sign design to their business and are willing to work with redesign initiatives, according to a 2019 study of a Shanghai street led by the late sociologist Zhu Weijue. For her own street, Zhu drafted a guide that included recommendations for muted tones — but more importantly, she invited dialogue among shop owners, designers, and academics. Zhu believed that neither government mandates nor market forces alone could shape the ideal streetscape. What was needed, she argued, was a “street-level negotiation.”
For Huang, garish red signs are a vessel of historical memory — worth preserving precisely for their shallowness and flamboyance. As gentrification reshapes more and more neighborhoods, these relics deserve to be archived — just as he did in the Too Rich City project. “These cheap and practical signs help small shops efficiently deliver their messages and fuel the city’s growth,” Huang said in an interview with dash. “I love how they stretch, unruly, out into the street.”
Cai Yineng is an editor at Sixth Tone.
(Header image: People walk past shop signs in Changsha, Hunan province, 2024. Zuo Dongchen/VCG)