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State of the Art
Text: Joshua Rose : Photo: N/A
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Communism might have proven to be a lousy political system but it sure excels at churning out high-quality, state-sponsored artwork. After all, wasn’t it Chairman Mao himself who said, “An army without culture is a dull-witted army?” For Mao, culture equals propaganda and as such it can serve as a perfect vehicle for politics, as long as you keep the general public largely poor, uneducated, illiterate and lacking of serious modes of expression and entertainment
In its new, celebrated title, Chinese Propaganda Posters, art-publishers Taschen has provided a glimpse—via photographer Michael Wolf’s collection of over 400 posters—into the images that helped continue the rule of Chairman Mao Zedong from 1949 all the way until the early 1980s. The posters, including everything from heroic soldiers to pony-tailed females to babies hugging carp, show how images, and art for that matter, still can have such a powerful influence on both the way people act and believe as well as the way people want other people to act and believe.
It is estimated that during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) some 2.2 billion portraits of Mao were printed, roughly three for every person in the country. According to Stefan Landsberger, who wrote one of the introductions for the book, these posters became the central identity to the homes of most Chinese during that time, not just because of the popularity of the Chairman himself but also because of the quality of the posters.
“Because they were widely available, they could be seen everywhere. And they were an excellent way to brighten up the otherwise drab places where people lived,” writes Landsberger. “In this way they could penetrate every level of social organization and cohabitation, even the lowliest ones.”
Later in the history of the movement, the posters became more about the image of Mao than of the socialist ideals themselves. However, the early posters, complete with slogans like “Red Flowers blossom on the former battleground,” or “Regard the class struggle as the main link in the chain” or even the mundane “Encourage good manners and politeness; brighten up your surroundings with plants” are replete with the usual iconography associated with political idealism: round-faced cherubs look outward and upward, fists clenched above them, bright-eyed children prancing about in Prelapsarian bliss, happy peasants working in the fields and bare-chested eager young boys getting ready to defend their way of life.
Interestingly enough, the posters lost their quality and style at the same time that capitalism started to find its way into Chinese culture. With wealth and materialism becoming the new Gods, the propaganda posters lost their ability to enchant the masses with hopes of better lives and a promising future.
As Landsberger states, “With popular interest in politics at an all-time low, people no longer care about being ideologically or politically pure. They are more interested in having fun, and therefore in the size of their paychecks and whether they’ll still be employed tomorrow.”
Duo Duo, considered the greatest poet to come out of the Cultural Revolution has a different perspective entirely on the matter. In an essay for the book, Duo recalls a moment when the idealistic world of the posters clashed with the all-too-real daily struggles of living in China.
Walking into the house of a newly married peasant couple, Duo remembers seeing “the propaganda poster on the clay wall. In it, thick smoke rose from the chimneys, carrying within it the hope that poverty could be overcome by work! How romantic the painted smoke was! Like clouds in paradise. In a village where people and livestock lived together, what comfort was there in looking at a picture of chimneys rising up into the sky?”
It takes publishers like Taschen to have the understanding and visual sense to publish a book like Chinese Propaganda Posters. Oversized and full-color, the book gives the posters the respect they deserve and viewers a chance to study the imagery and iconography of all the posters without having to utilize a magnifying glass to do so. The posters are even subdivided into over thirty chapters, some as specific as “Building our country through diligence and frugality,” or ‘Self-reliance and arduous struggle.” As such, the history and progression of the posters is more readily understood. Throw in the bright red and gold divider pages and the frequent large-scale type quotations and you can see how Chinese Propaganda Posters provides visual documentation for an important yet understudied style of 20th century art.
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