Poster

When I was an impressionable teenager, I thought it was cool to draw the odd hammer and sickle on my rough book at school and wear a donkey jacket - up the revolution / power to the proletariat (of leafy, suburban Mellor)! I even bought a communist badge from Park Hall antiques fair but I can't remember if I ever actually had the balls to wear it at school. Probably only when no-one was looking and obviously prior to them making me Headboy.

Anyway, today we went to the Propoganda Poster Centre to see the real thing. A late-middle-aged gentleman named Mr. Yang pei Ming runs it. It is situated in the basement of a block of flats in a residential area very close to our apartment. You would never know it was there unless you have a guidebook. It's his private collection of propoganda posters spanning the decades - from square jawed peasants harvesting yet another record breaking crop of corn, to scary red and black images from the cultural revolution, through to celebratory pictures of non-existent technological and scientific feats of the 1980s (anyone remember the Chinese space shuttle? I thought not)

He keeps the place (and presumably himself) going on the 20RMB per person ticket price that he charges and the proceeds from the sale of the posters to people who used to draw hammers and sickles on their rough books and surreptitiously wear a badge with Lenin's head on it under their donkey jackets. He gets no state / party support to keep the place open (no one officially wants to remember what happened) so when you are next in Shanghai, go and pay him a visit at 868 Huashan Lu.

The posters that are for sale are originals according to Mr. Yang, and they certainly appear to be. They were produced for the local Communist Party Office, in batches of a few thousand. To a greater or lesser extent, all artists had to produce state approved art, and local collectives of artists were responsible for churning out as many images as the party required. Nonetheless, some of the pictures are really beautiful. The early ones are in a kind of folk art style. Things get a bit dark and messy later on (lots of America bashing in monochrome) before coming over all orange and brash in the late 70's and 80's. It seems that even in China the 80's was a taste-free zone.

We picked up a fantastic poster of a Tibetan peasant who has done her good deed for the day by marching many miles to the local state hospital to visit a sick child (not her own - that would be a bourgeois act). The Tibetan peasant has a cheery disposition. The nurse at the bedside is ruddy of cheek and clearly of sturdy breeding stock, and the boy in bed (still wearing his cap, bizarrely) looks to be a picture of health, the lazy little slacker! Oh what a marvellous place to be - a Chinese hospital bed somewhere near Tibet (presumably) in the mid-70s!

I bottled out of asking for a discount on the sticker price so I was probably terribly ripped off but that's irrelevant. It's a great image and I love it. Mr. Yang's place smells very damp so hopefully my inability to say the words "Best price?" will mean the air conditioners will run a bit longer for a few days and prolong the life of some of his beautiful pictures that the Party doesn't want to spend money preserving.