(Something I wrote earlier but forgot to put up.)

Propaganda poster art museum today (Thursday). Was amazing. It was in the basement of some random apartment complex, and it was very sketchy at first. But when we walked into the few rooms themselves, we were blown away. It was a huge timeline of the posters, going from (I think the 50's or so) until the 80s, when Mao Tse Dong's successor, something Hua something, ordered a stop to the "big character" propaganda posters. It was put together really well, even though it was clearly just one dude who put it together. Occasionally there would be bits like "I remember when…" in the official museum text, and it had a great sense of realism as you walked throughout. The pieces on the walls weren't masterpieces (although they were tremendously crafted) kept in sterilized environments. Everything had its wear, and you could tell that they had done their time on the walls of China, shouting their messages to the citizens.

 

Because I have an eclectic but apparently handy set of interests, I knew a little bit about Mao's early days as a graffiti artist and calligrapher (I know, right?!). He wrote the longest work of graffiti ever recorded, which I think was about 4,000 characters or something in his high school bathroom stall. It was in a style called "DaZiBao" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big-character_poster) and was basically just a big, mindless essay written on a wall. This style later became the graffiti of choice for young revolutionaries during the Cultural Revolution, and the curator says he remembered being in college when people were putting up tons and tons of these big tapestries of propaganda. I'd never seen any examples of them before, but he had a good section of them, and they were really striking. There were varying styles of writing, some had big, imposing characters written on top of the normal text, different inks and handwritings might be used on the same poster, and each had some fervent inspiration guiding the strokes. It was wonderful and maddening and beautiful and scary. Art and propaganda at its most bare (and very worst?) 

 

What I thought was the oddest part was the end, where there was a special exhibit on landscape depictions of the city of Shanghai from the past to the present. Which was a cool topic for an exhibit, but the curator's reasons for putting it up threw me. It was in honor of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, to mark the wonderful transition that this represented in China's history. Which sounded a little too much like what he must've been hearing back in his college days. Isn't HaiBao, the mascot for the expo, a propaganda entity itself? All those posters, statues, commercials (he fights off bad guys in one), lighters (I have a HaiBao lighter. You pull his arm and fire shoots from his head.), topiaries, guys in HaiBao suits at the major subway stations, on and on and on. It may not be towards the same ends, but it certainly feels like the same means.

(Pic: an actual propaganda poster hung in the streets of China, made in 1970, that I bought at the museum. I like it because it has many of the repeated themes I came to recognize in the posters, all on the one image: a large, imposing figure who was clearly leading the movement; bunches of people behind the charismatic leader, supporting revolution [it is "their" revolution, after all]; Mao's little red book in every hand; symbols of the working class and labor, like the helmets, shovels, uniforms, and muscled arms and bodies; the leader has some of his own revolutionary writings in the same hand that holds Mao's thoughts. Theres also some more writing inside of the picture itself, in addition to the main text on the side, which I always like to see integrated into the picture [I got it translated by the guy. They say (no particular order): 'Self reliance,' 'hold high the flag of criticizing,' 'change the situation of north coal going to the south,' 'Deepen the revolutionary criticizing,' and the big print on the side, 'Grasp fast the revolutionary criticizing to consolidate the proletarian dictatorship'] [No, I don't know what that's supposed to mean], and there's even a propaganda poster within this propaganda poster, which I still can't wrap my head around. In short, I like it very much.)