‘Crush the Dog Heads of Those Who Oppose Chairman Mao!’, ‘Smash the Capitalist Class!’. ‘Chairman Mao is the Red Sun of our Hearts!’. Even if you’ve never been to China, chances are you have at least a passing familiarity with the bold and colourful propaganda posters that are most strongly associated with China’s disastrous Cultural Revolution period (1966-1976); their slogans and imagery by turns inspirational and aggressive.
And while many will have heard of Mr Yang’s daring Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre – a collection of posters in the basement of a former French Concession apartment block – most are unaware that the Long Museum Pudong, located in a slightly forlorn corner of the Huamu area, has one of China’s most striking collections.
In fact, this is one of the world’s best and most important collections of Chinese revolutionary art, almost all of it is in the form of oil paintings, since many of the later posters were based on the original works you see here.
The story of the museum (and its sister location at West Bund) is fascinating in itself, opened to display the private collection of taxi-driver-turned-billionaire-art-investor Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei. The couple have an immense and hugely varied collection that spans ancient jade pieces and ceramics through to instantly recognisable contemporary pieces by top Chinese artists. Thankfully, while most exhibits are rotated every couple of months, the revolutionary art has a permanent spot on the museum’s second floor.
Now, since we’re in the business of finding you the best experts to learn from, Team Bespoke visited with a Shanghai-based art historian who helped select a few key pieces to illustrate the main themes. And it’s a good job she did. These works are overwhelmingly huge – many several meters wide – and while their impact is immediate, the subtle clues in their imagery and meaning are harder to spot. Free of the slogans that adorn the posters, the narrative is conveyed solely through images.
Most of these works, we’re told by our expert, would have been commissioned by the government and then sent to tour the provinces of China where they were displayed in exhibitions for the workers. The most impressive and ideological among the paintings were then printed into posters in vast quantities. To give you an idea, Li Chunhua’s Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan is one of the period’s famous and has been replicated a mind-blowing 900 million times (at least) by many estimates, and as a result has (unsurprisingly) become an iconic image.
Though the most celebrated paintings come from the Mao era, many were so ubiquitous they retained their influence long after the Chairman’s death. In fact, our expert argues they were so pervasive that an understanding of these works is a key tool for an appreciation of much of China’s modern art too. Contemporary artists such as Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun frequently invoked the imagery in their work, often in a subversive way, as China began to change.
So if you want to go deeper to understand the meanings (and see the original artworks behind) the kitsch Chinese propaganda posters everyone’s more familiar with, this is your chance. In fact it’s one of the only places in world you’ll be able to and it’s a great jumping off point to understand more about one of the darker periods in China’s history.
Want to visit with Bespoke’s art historian? Just email us at info@bespoke-shanghai.com for more details!