Chinese Propaganda

April 9th – April 30th, 2006

This exhibit features Chinese propaganda, posters, collectibles, kitsch, and other objects of art that combine fact and fiction in a style that exudes relentless optimism.

Often ridiculous, but always striking, these objects appeared in schools, factories, railway stations and even homes. In many of the en-mass distributed compositions, Chairman Mao Zedong is depicted as a benevolent, deity-like fixture presenting his public persona – from smoking a cigarette with peasant workers to standing by the Yangtze in a bathrobe.

When Mao died in 1976, he left behind a China that had been largely insulated from Western-style of capitalism and consumerism. While Americans, in the decades following World War II, were engaged in an unprecedented spending spree, the Chinese were undergoing the Great Leap Forward, an enforced economic modernization program that organized agricultural workers into enormous communes to a disastrous effect. The subsequent Cultural Revolution saw the dismantling of the educational system with intellectuals and artists exiled to the countryside and forced into manual labor and dissenters executed.

The productions runs of much propaganda iconography and paraphernalia were pushed to the point of absurdity. However, a large proportion was ordered destroyed when de-Maoization et in. Many of the badges, posters, books, porcelain plates and figures, clocks, portrait busts and other surviving examples are now collector’s items. This extraordinary exhibit will take place at both our Bellevue and Seattle galleries.