Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution | 
 enlarge | Authors: Lincoln Cushing, Ann Tompkins
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 54160
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 144
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 10.4 x 7.9 x 0.6
ISBN: 0811859460
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.674095109046
EAN: 9780811859462
ASIN: 0811859460
Publication Date: September 27, 2007
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
The Cultural Revolution in China produced thousands of powerful social and political posters exhorting the Chinese people in a sweeping transformation of Chinese society. These brilliantly colorful images of cultural celebration, industrial development, agricultural production, and revolutionary heroes were displayed in homes and public spaces across the country. Chinese Posters collects more than 150 of the most striking of these posters and offers background on their social and political context and production. An essay by Ann Tompkins provides a personal account of living in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution.
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| Customer Reviews:
Happy and hopeful scenes of a revolution August 14, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Say what you want about oppressive regimes, they always have the best propaganda. Art, when made to serve the purpose of convincing a population that what is going on around them is actually great and wonderful even though they are starving, produces something eerily inspiring, something that taps into a subconscious desire to believe in those in power.
This is the artwork in "Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution". These are images of a bright future, where the land is abundant and serves the will of the people, where industry is clean and progressive, bringing fair income to everyone, where everyone pulls their weight with a smile and Chairman Mao shines light on us all. The art here is joyful, optimistic and hopeful. It makes you feel good to look at it. It makes you feel bad knowing that this optimistic, hopeful future never materialized, and was followed by starvation and oppression.
But this is so much more than just a picture book. The author, Ann Tompkins collected these posters while living in China during the Cultural Revolution, a full participant in Mao's glorious dream who wanted to live and work alongside the people forging this Brave New World. Reading her introduction is a bit shocking. I expected a historical critique on the nature of propaganda, not the flip side of the coin, someone who believes in the dream and remains inspired by the message.
And through her eyes, I saw these posters from a different perspective. How progressive, how revolutionary they were at the time. Here were positive images of women working in factories, firing guns and conducting scientific experiments during a time when they were expected to be house wives and mothers. Here were glorious scenes of all human beings struggling together, separated not by race, religion or gender, but bound by the brotherhood of the proletariat. The fact that it failed: is it the fault of the dream or the dreamers? This is the kind of art that makes you ask those questions.
As both an art book and a history book, "Chinese Posters" succeeds beautifully. I enjoyed it much more than I was expecting to, especially after reading the introductions and then looking at the posters in a whole new light.
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