Posters provide window into 'cultural revolution'

On a recent Saturday night, I did some moon gazing by the Huangpu, Shanghai's arterial river, and although I couldn't sight any werewolf as part of my lunar fantasy, I almost drowned in a sea of Chinese tourists at the Bund.

The following morning I decided to spend my remaining Mid-Autumn festival weekend far from crowds. I picked a place near the heart of the city to go underground - quite literally.

The museum of propaganda art is located in the basement of a routine housing community on the leafy Huashan Road.

Its curator, Yang Pei Ming, a Chinese man in his late 60s, is also the owner of this gallery that obtained a government license in 2012.

It opened in 2002 as a one-room store that exhibited and sold as mementoes, bygone propaganda material of the Communist Party of China. The private entity has grown both in fame and size in the past few years.

On any day of the week, between 100 and 150 people, mostly foreigners, visit the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center, making it a top tourist draw in the city, Yang says.

His museum has more than 6,000 posters from 1940s China up to the 90s and dozens of Mao Zedong sculptures. Yang says that he once paid about 250,000 yuan ($40,665) for a large painting of Mao sketched against the backdrop of the Forbidden City in Beijing, outside which multitudes had gathered.

The Shanghai-based octogenarian artist of the original piece had then given it up for auction.

The museum is also perhaps a rare public place where posters from the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) can still be viewed.

Yang says that he has about 300 pieces of the da zi bao (big character journal). A couple of samples that I saw were nearly in shreds, possibly because their original gatherers ripped them off the walls of streets or universities where they had been pasted.

The museum wants to hold a special exhibition in 2016 - the 50th anniversary of the start of the "cultural revolution" - but Yang has yet to plan it.

The Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center isn't steeped in history alone. The works of many of China's top painters and cartoonists, who were involved with propaganda visuals, are lodged here.

Among them are several that target "Uncle Sam", reflective of the anti-American national mood at the time.

He wanted to promote that art before it disappeared, Yang says, adding that China no longer makes such posters, and that there's little artistic appeal in modern computer-generated productions if any.

Yang's journey as a collector began in 1995, mainly driven by a desire to preserve propaganda artwork from a few years before and after the founding of New China in 1949.

"It's nothing to compare in terms of money," says Yang. "The collection is historical and educational."

Admission tickets are 20 yuan per person and visitors are welcomed between 10 am and 5 pm daily. A gift shop attached to the museum is in high demand too owing to the cheap prices of items.

The museum's collection has been boosted, thanks to the many overseas Chinese, whom Yang pursued to either sell or donate to the museum the illustrations that they possessed.

In 1996, the first foreign exhibition titled Mao's Graphic Voice was held by Yang in Wisconsin, United States. Earlier this year, he displayed the artwork at Edinburgh University in the United Kingdom, and hopes to go to Brazil next year.

The museum also houses hundreds of calendars and advertisements, featuring the "Shanghai Lady", from the years between 1910 and 1940. The posters show female models in colorful cheongsam posing with beauty products.

A related series on entertainers has a vivacious foreign cabaret dancer in a red dress.