Drexel Gallery-Current Exhibition

When you enter the gallery look to the left. There is a broadside on the wall next to the entrance with an overview of events that influenced the production of printed material designed to influence and persuade the Chinese masses during the twentieth century. The information on this hand out is an abbreviation of the broadside and makes reference to specific images on the walls.

The images featured in this exhibition correspond with historic periods. Those in the first group were produced in Shanghai between the years 1915 and 1949. The second group is composed of reproductions of prints from the New Woodcut Movement of 1931 to 1949. The remaining posters were designed after the 1949 "Liberation."

Throughout its history, with few exceptions, the common people of China were impoverished and oppressed by a system with characteristics that made it unique to China. Its structure was seamless, invulnerable and circular in logic. It functioned to hold China society in a vice for two millennia.

During the latter part of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century the system came under assault by a series of catastrophes that brought the government to ruin There were the famines and rebellions in which millions of people died and there was opium, war and the Japanese and European imperialists gained control through treaties that divided the country into sectors under their domination. Though not destroyed the system that gripped Chinese society was weakened.

Western products were introduced to China toward the end of the nineteenth century. The posters on the left wall were made to help sell the services and products of foreign owned businesses. They were made to influence the urban people of Hong Kong and Shanghai where they were printed. The images decorated calendars that were sold and given away. They were very popular with urban people and were produced from about 1913 to 1949 by Shong Wu Publishing House, Wei Xin, Da Yue, Xu Shenji, and Shen Shen, in Shanghai. Hong Zhi Ying is the most famous of the artists commissioned to design these posters. Some of the other artists are, the Hong Kong based He Yi Mei, Jin Zue Chien, Li Mu Bi.

Next are reproductions of wood block prints from the New Woodcut Movement that was formed in Shanghai by the League of Left-Wing Artists. The artists from this period of revolution responded to the horrific conditions of the common people fated to live through a continuous series of man-made catastrophes and mayhem. These images modeled from the stylistic language and techniques of European artists Kathe Kolwitz, Vladmir Favorski, and Carl Meffert. They were made with the purpose of politicizing the masses to form a force that would liberate China from their oppressors. In this series the artists depict the humiliation suffered at the hands of the Japanese Army. This army was responsibly for the murder of ten million Chinese citizens. Others in the series are a call for the peasants to arise and fight, to welcome Communist soldiers to their villages, and to see how the revolutionary writers and artists suffer at the hands of the Nationalists.

The posters on the back wall demonstrate a change in the propaganda message. It was no longer desirable to encourage people to revolt. The government was concerned with stabilizing their control over the nation, so the use of woodcut posters as a vehicle of protest and criticism was no longer acceptable. The Chinese government preferred to use other forms of visual media to promote their new policies and programs. Other mechanically reproducible media more suited for mass distribution were favored.

The leaders felt that Social Realism with its depiction of the reality of the present combined with a better future would appeal to the masses. It would depict the lives of ordinary people participating in the creation of a New China. These would portray idealized and political models, ordinary men and woman as real heroes, happy and proud to be a part of the creation. They could be relieved of helplessness and horror. That would all be put to rest behind them. Zhou Yang (1907-1990) controlled the department of propaganda from 1949 until 1972. He introduced the idea that China needed unique style that was a combination of the Soviet style Social Realism with the more traditional techniques of Chinese painting.

Most of the posters made during the fifties and sixties have disintegrated or were destroyed during the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. The posters shown here were designed during the seventies. In the hearts of the people Mao was great. In fact Mao filled the void that needed to be filled in the minds of the Chinese. He became the Emperor; the epicenter of the system that bound China for so many centuries in the system that never really goes away.