Happy New Year! It’s Chinese Propaganda!

January 1st, 2008 · No Comments

I love propaganda. Lucky for me, the planet is plastered with it. Tear open a package of noodles, fumble with that impossible condom wrapper, listen to your leaders rant about airplane hijackings and medical marijuana- your life has just been touched by the magic of propaganda, comrade.

Essentially, “propaganda” is just artwork with a message. Where it gets its bad reputation is that message is not always true. C’est la vie. My messages aren’t always true either, unfortunately, and I’m guessing I’m not alone in this. And anyway, who says that creative intelligence and marketing strategies directed at manipulating and brainwashing the masses can’t also be fun? Maybe I want a farm girl with a rocket launcher to tell me what to believe and who to shoot at.

So if you’re like me, and truly relish classic propaganda for its irony and stoic assertions of “truth,” you’ll love Stefan Landsberger’s massive online anthology of photos chronicling seven decades of Chinese propaganda poster art, on topics ranging from the People’s Liberation Army to SARS to the space race. Landsberger, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Lecturer in contemporary Chinese History at Leiden University, The Netherlands, boasts a collection of roughly 2000 Chinese propaganda posters dating back to 1937, and there are quite probably over a thousand pictures (at least) taken from that collection available on his website. This is an awesome repository for artists and a great inspiration for youngsters with dreams of future world-domination.