After a short and unhappy arranged marriage that brought her to Fengtian, she returned to Shanghai where she was discovered in 1922 by Zhang Shichuan of the Mingxing Film Company.

[6] Wang's first film with Mingxing was Orphan Rescues Grandfather (1923),[3] a melodrama about a young widow spurned by her father-in-law after being baselessly accused of adultery.

[7] Made while Mingxing was at the brink of insolvency, Orphan Rescues Grandfather was a commercial and critical success, saving the company and launching Wang's career as China's first female film star.

Portraying Zhiruo, a young woman forced to eke a living after being disowned by an unfaithful husband, Wang received critical acclaim along with her co-star Pu Shunqing.

[3] The World Against Her was a commercial success, and Wang produced two further films with Great Wall in 1925: Star-Plucking Girl and The Person in the Boudoir Dream.

Purchasing a screenplay from Bao Tianxiao, she rented space at the Minxin Film Company and began working on what would become Revenge of an Actress (1929).

When her first pick for director, Bu Wancang, focused more on horse racing than the production, Wang took a directorial role alongside Cai Chusheng.

[3] She brought Revenge of an Actress on tour to great commercial success, performing live during the intermission and receiving audience feedback.

[1] Press coverage of Wang highlighted her status as a modern woman, one who showed her unbound feet on camera and who was willing to have her hair cut on screen.

[2] As with other early Chinese film stars, Wang embraced the modern mass media, which was generally shunned by society's elites;[12] at the same time, she attempted to cultivate face-to-face interactions with her fans.

[13] At the peak of her career, Wang was considered a trend-setter, with clothes that she and her fellow film stars wore becoming popular among the general populace.

The film scholar Chen Jianhua describes her character Yu Weiyu in Orphan Rescues Grandfather as "a new domestic subject, a self-assertive woman who was economically independent and taking the responsibility of educating the younger generation".

[15] The character Zhiruo was similarly portrayed as an independent woman, failing in her efforts to live and thrive not due to her own shortcomings but because she is exploited by men; Wang later described this as her favourite role.