Sterling Larsen and Dr. Dana Bourgerie, Asian and Near Eastern Languages
China’s Cultural Revolution is a defining event in modern Chinese history and a topic of lasting interest to foreign observers. While some speculate the shadow of Mao is fading in the light of capitalistic reforms in China, the impact of those decades of political upheaval persists in shaping China’s government, economy and society today. Among the most visible and iconic manifestations of that era are propaganda posters ablaze with the deified Mao and political slogans which suffused every aspect of daily life for many Chinese in the 1960s and 1970s.
Even now the visual vernacular of these highly stylized posters is re-appropriated for application in contemporary advertising design. Investigating this phenomenon from an art historical perspective, I surveyed the iconography and visual devises of the Cultural Revolution that persist in commercial posters today.
Over the course of six months while I lived and worked in China, I documented and compiled outdoor advertisements in Shanghai’s most popular commercial shopping districts. As the highly globalized economic center of China today and an epicenter of cultural production during the Cultural Revolution, Shanghai is an ideal location from which to observe the melding of consumerism and communism. I limited my investigation specifically to outdoor posters so as to draw a more narrow and direct comparison to the propaganda posters of the Cultural Revolution that once filled the same public space. My archive of Cultural Revolution era posters draws mostly from the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Museum collection and compilations made by Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald.
Posters are an exceptional visual form in that their function and design are geared to instant comprehension by a large portion of the population and rely on shortcuts to make a point and to create an immediate political or emotional impression. I chose to evaluate the posters I collected according to the subjective criteria of artistic formalism largely because visual analysis, in the case of a specific visual discourse of the Cultural Revolution, introduces a range of possible readings into the interpretation of history, which may be neglected by other modes of study. Selecting archetypal examples of Cultural Revolution era posters on which to base my comparison, I looked for similar symbols, aesthetic qualities, compositions and content in outdoor advertising posters.
My initial assumption was that domestic Chinese companies would continue to employ images and visual devises from the Cultural Revolution in commercial posters to elicit feelings of nationalism and nostalgia in order to promote their products. Most surprising among my findings, however, was the overwhelming tendency of transnational corporations to use the iconography and compositional devises of the Cultural Revolution in designing advertisements. Ironically, foreign companies like McDonalds, Adidas and Coca Cola were much more willing to evoke the visual language of the past and promote political agenda’s of the Chinese government in advertising their products than their domestic counterparts. For instance Fig. 1 shows a McDonald’s poster encouraging patrons to buy a “Love Combo” for which McDonald’s will donate part of the proceeds to victims of the Sichuan earthquake which invokes the same graphic, block print style and bold colors of the 1966 poster The Chinese People Cannot Easily Be Humiliated. Figures 2 and 3 similarly illustrate how athletes can replace the image of Mao in a symmetrical composition which emphasizes a central heroic figure and embodies the hopes of the masses following or looking on.
This project has provided me with valuable insights into the visual culture of contemporary China and inspired my second ORCA grant proposal. I am currently preparing a final draft of my findings for publication in The Rice Papers, BYU’s Asian Studies Journal and look forward to exploring the role of propaganda in China’s visual culture in greater depth next year.
References
- Evans, Harriet and Donald, Stephanie. Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution. Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Oxford, England. 1999. pg. 18
- Evans, Harriet and Donald, Stephanie. pg. 193