Pictures and politics

By Yang Lan Source:Global Times Published: 2014-12-24 18:43:01

China’s classic propaganda posters become treasures overseas


Foreigners look over the exhibits at Yang Peiming's museum on Huashan Road. Photo: IC



A private museum located in the basement of a residential block on Huashan Road, Shanghai, has been ranked sixth among the top 10 museums in China by TripAdvisor users in the 2014 Travelers' Choice section - higher than the National Museum of China. This private museum is the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre, home to more than 6,000 historically and artistically valuable posters.

Propaganda posters generally used a distinctive socialist realism style of art, presenting dramatic images that reflected major events or campaigns in China, mostly from the establishment of the People's Republic of China.

The center is found in the basement of a residential building and consists of several rooms showcasing posters of different periods. It's a very basic display and the center director, Yang Peiming, admits that the low rent for this hidden away museum is why he has settled his collection there.

After Yang graduated from the English Department of the East China Normal University, he worked as a tour guide in Shanghai and discovered visitors to China were often very interested in propaganda posters. He began to appreciate the art and style and started collecting them himself in 1995.

The poster Peter J. Peverelli hangs in his office in the Netherlands. Photo: Curtesy of Peter J. Peverelli

A poster at Yang Peiming's private museum in Shanghai Photo: Yang Lan/GT



 

Foreign visitors

At first, he kept his posters at home and friends from abroad would visit him to look over his posters. As his collection grew and he found himself showing more and more visitors his posters, he set aside a large room as an exhibition space in 2002. Today the museum covers 400 square meters. It costs 20 yuan ($3.21) for admission and during the week between 30 and 60 visitors arrive to view the posters although at weekends about 150 people arrive each day. Yang said most of people who visit his museum are foreigners.

The posters are displayed chronologically and many have strong political themes. In the 1967 poster Follow Chairman Mao to Make Revolution Forever, artists from the General Liaison Office of Publishing of the Workers General Headquarters pictured Kang Sheng, Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, Chen Boda and Jiang Qing.

In the poster, they hold the Little Red Book, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, in their hands, and wave to the people. On a banner below them is written: "A warm welcome to the 18th Anniversary of the Founding of the People's Republic of China." The poster reflected the intense respect and devotion given to Mao and the country at that time.

Some of the posters are rare, like Firmly Support US People Against US Imperialism Invading Vietnam, which illustrated China's opposition to the American involvement in the war in Vietnam.

Other posters are ironical or amusing in today's context. John Rides an Ox and I am on a Horse - What a Shame if He Wins the Game was created during the Great Leap Forward (1958-61) and portrays a Chinese rider on a magnificent white horse galloping past an overweight British soldier on a slow moving ox. It was intended to portray the determination of China to surpass the industrial achievements of the United Kingdom.

Peter J. Peverelli is a Dutch academic who was in China when propaganda posters were at their height. In 1975 he was studying at the Beijing Language Institute (now the Beijing Language and Culture University) as an exchange student.

A poster at Yang Peiming's private museum in Shanghai Photo: Yang Lan/GT



Political struggle

"There were posters everywhere in those days," Peverelli told the Global Times. "After some time, we were able to distinguish the posters related to the ongoing political struggle. On one hand there were posters urging people to unite in peace, but close by you could see a poster stating that uniting in peace did not mean that there should be no class struggle."

The posters helped him understand what was going on at that time. Later, when he returned to the Netherlands, in an antique shop, he came across a 1968 poster about the setting up of Revolutionary Committees. He related to this and immediately bought it. Today it is still hanging in his office.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Chinese nationalized large publishing houses like the People's Fine Arts Publishing House in Beijing and the Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House and these produced many propaganda posters, according to Stefan R. Landsberger, professor of contemporary Chinese culture at the University of Amsterdam. They were the main producers of propaganda posters from the 1950s to the 1970s.

The production of propaganda posters reached its peak during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), becoming a major form of communication between the country's leadership and the people. Thousands of officially approved artists were employed to create the posters and once the posters had been created, they were reprinted in their thousands and distributed throughout the country. The politically charged posters carried slogans, visions of the future, and recorded great achievements.

In 2000, however, government policies changed and the production of propaganda posters came to an end. The earlier posters were scattered throughout the country and private collectors began hunting for them.

The website maopost.com has 1,851 authentic propaganda posters on display, all collected by Pierre Lavigne and Pierre Budestschu. Pierre Lavigne has lived in China since 1998, running a small trading company. He spent 14 years in Shenzhen and now lives in Guangzhou. He began collecting propaganda posters about 10 years ago, attracted by the powerful graphics. Lavigne especially enjoys the posters with strong socialist realism styles and only collects authentic versions. His website partner, Budestschu, is a graphic designer based in Paris.

A poster at Yang Peiming's private museum in Shanghai Photo: Yang Lan/GT



Unique service

Their website offers people a unique service - if someone sends them a personal photograph they can incorporate this into one of the classic propaganda posters and reproduce it. It's a modern, witty twist on a classic political art form.

Apart from his maverick approach to the politics, Lavigne believes that foreigners are interested in the posters because of the bold designs and the fact that some of them appear kitsch. He thinks few would be aware of the campaigns that inspired the works.

Unlike Lavigne and Budestschu, Professor Stefan R. Landsberger began to collect Chinese propaganda posters in the 1970s because of the history they were involved with. Trained as a sinologist at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, Landsberger is now a professor of contemporary Chinese culture at the University of Amsterdam and a lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He did his PhD research on materials published in China in the 1980s, and wrote the book Chinese Propaganda Posters: From Revolution to Modernization.

"Like most Westerners, one of the first Chinese propaganda posters I saw was Dong Zhengyi's famous Huxian peasant painting The Commune's Fishpond (gongshe yutang). I already had a fascination with totalitarian art, but the relatively cheap Chinese posters were a medium which even I, as a poor student (at that time), could afford," Landsberger told the Global Times. During the 1970s and 1980s, a propaganda poster was one of the very few things foreign visitors could buy and take home as a memory of China.

From the 1970s, he bought posters from bookshops in China and the Netherlands and now has a collection of about 4,500. He is working on placing all of these and a collection from the International Institute of Social History and a private collector in the Netherlands on to a website: chineseposters.net.

Landsberger's research linked the political and social changes during the past 60 years with the posters. "Indeed, the history and development of the Chinese propaganda poster is like the history and development of modern China itself. This makes the Chinese propaganda poster such an extremely interesting and important source for research," Landsberger said.

He thinks that the Propaganda Poster Art Center in Shanghai should receive official support and there should be more official recognition of their existence, production and influence. He suggests that there should be a national catalogue of posters established.

"Secretly, I hope that somewhere in Beijing, there is an archive where all posters published over the decades have been collected and stored for future reference," he said. If it did exist he would be thrilled to be given access.

Official recognition is not close but in 2013 the Shanghai government gave Yang a grant of 70,000 yuan.

"My main interest is collecting the posters, not really running a museum," Yang told the Global Times. But if the museum did begin to make a profit he would like to move it to a better venue.

A poster at Yang Peiming's private museum in Shanghai Photo: Yang Lan/GT



 

A poster at Yang Peiming's private museum in Shanghai Photo: Yang Lan/GT



Teaching resource

Far away in London at the University of Westminster there is another collection of propaganda posters that was donated by the writer and journalist John Gittings as a teaching resource for students of Chinese language, history and culture.

This collection is supervised by Professor Harriet Evans who is the director of the Contemporary China Centre at the University of Westminster.

She believes that there are now more private poster collectors than had been estimated. She said she had seen many private collections sold at international auctions in recent years. Apart from Chinese collectors, many foreign academics and collectors are interested in the posters because of the history.

"After all, it is much easier to engage in open critical inquiry about the Cultural Revolution, and how it was conducted and depicted, in the West, than in China, and posters are an invaluable primary resource for the study of the period," Evans said.

"They were also extremely vibrant, colorful and full of diverse meanings. Now in 2014, poster aesthetics have also found their way into global consumer design," she added.

Posted in: Metro Shanghai, City Panorama

blog comments powered by Disqus