A Million Maos

Most of the stuff I saw with my parents in Shanghai was stuff that I'd already seen before at some point. The one exception was the Propaganda Art Museum which was recommended to me by Dave before he left. The Propaganda Art Museum was really hard to find despite some good directions. Basically we had to take a taxi to this one really random building in the city not particularly near anything. Then we just wandered around confused for a while before a guard at the entrance to a little housing complex came out a gave us a card that had directions on exactly where to go on it, I think he knew who we were by the fact that we were the confused looking foreigners. Even with the little card we walked by the building we were supposed to go into a couple of times before finally finding it after about 15 minutes. In the building we went down to what was basically the sub basement where we finally came to the Propaganda Art Museum. The museum was basically in a couple of small rooms. Each room was filled to the brink with old propaganda posters from the 40's-70's. The posters were really amazing both as historical relics of an amazingly crazy time and also for there interesting artistic quality. The signs around the museum explained how the different styles of the time and the different people in charge effected the look and composition of the posters.

The small museum was divided by the dates the different posters came out and didn't really have much to it besides wall after wall packed full of posters. It was still an amazing find. In a country that usually so quick to brush over it past flings with radicalism I suppose it's the fact that the communist part can't really write off Mao who they depend on for so much of there legitimacy that allows a place like this to exist even if it's in the basement of a housing building. As we were walking over to the gift shop we met the owner and collector of the place. He said that they didn't really have a specific problem with the government but that it was just his personal side project and they didn't have much money so they were in the little building. That being said I've seen the big and famous museums of Shanghai and there was nothing 1/10th as memorable in them as what was in the little Propaganda Art Museum. The gift shop alone was worth going to check out as they sold tons of original propaganda pieces. They're somewhat rare since not many were kept but because of the huge quantities made at the time they have enough extra to frame and sell some to pay for the rest of the museum. I went a little wild as there were a lot of things in there I had been looking for. I got a great English version of Mao's little red book. I got a Red Army jacket and a Red Guard arm band. I got a hilarious teaching English book from the Cultural Revolution where every practice sentence just praised Mao.

I also got two small old propaganda posters one extolling the people to harvest wheat and the other wishing Mao a long life. I love them and they are incredibly interesting to me. I'm a little conflicted on the Mao one since I consider Mao a really evil figure and I wouldn't exactly display an old picture of Hitler on my wall. But I suppose his picture is still so prevalent here it's not like I'm exactly reopening old wounds. My dad talked to the owner for a while and when he heard that my dad was a reporter he got excited and offered to show us some more stuff. He had another sort of storage room with a huge pile of plastic Mao busts and other posters. The most interesting stuff though was old sheets of really big paper from the Cultural Revolution where people had written messages criticizing various people. What was really interesting is that messages would be crossed out and new things written over them. It sort of made a back and forth discussion in big angry words. The owner noted that he had seen the posters years ago and hated them. But after seeing them more recently he realized that they had a odd artistic value as sort of a mass generated art. I suppose I've never thought of the Cultural Revolution for it's artistic value before. I'd recommend going to the Propaganda Art Museum as the best stop in Shanghai for anyone traveling there.