This will be the last installment of the Dispatches from China series of posts for a while (at least until we can find a regular correspondent). In closing up this series I wanted to reflect on the place ephemeral print occupies in Chinese culture as an artifact within a culture that has an extremely long history of sophisticated printmaking, but also as a means of constructing collective memory. With this in mind, I set about wandering  with my camera ready.

It turns out I didn’t have to wander far, any neighborhood that traffics in tourists will have posters for sale. Most of the posters are great examples of various stages of propaganda poster utilized during the thirty tumultuous years following the founding the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), while a few are advertisements from the relatively short-lived Republic of China.

For pocket change you can own an ‘authentic’ poster from the early days of the PRC. I say authentic because on closer examination most of what you’ll find on the street are off-set prints that have been meticulously aged (perhaps with tea?) to look the part of aged artifacts. The posters, whether real or not, contain great imagery from the early days of Chairman Mao when the artists were encouraged to turn away from a historic Chinese visual culture that had (so the story goes) supported centuries of oppression and instead make a new art for the people. This early work can be identified by the clear influence Soviet Social Realism had on the chinese artists; these were most often lithographic reproductions of history paintings. During the Cultural Revolution artists migrated back to the traditional form of the woodblock print; allowing the posters take on a more graphic quality, often using just red and black (hmm.. this work reminds me of someone).

Clearly I don’t have room and you don’t have time for an art history lesson, but if this is a topic that excites you as much as it does me, I would refer to you to Art and China’s Revolution exhibition at the Asia Society and the book by Melissa Chiu ).

One last thought to complicate matters, by and large the bulk of tourists on the streets of Beijing where these pictures are sold are Chinese tourists visiting their capital. The reception one of these posters must have to a survivor of The Great Leap Forward must be very different from the western view, perhaps of well-designed cold war kitsch.

More pictures and less words after the jump.

Read More After the Jump Dispatches from China: Printing History

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