The Propaganda Poster Art Centre is a private museum in a basement on Huashan Road, in the former French Concession. It was founded by a Shanghai collector who began buying up posters in the 1990s, when they were being thrown away, and the result is a collection of several thousand pieces covering the 1940s to the early 1980s.
What is on display
The walls are hung with the printed posters that were produced in enormous quantities for factories, schools, communes and military units. The subjects are what you would expect - industrial production, agricultural labour, model workers, soldiers, children, the space programme, foreign friendship - but what makes them worth an hour is the design. The colours are flat and confident, the composition is borrowed from Soviet and earlier Chinese advertising art, and the printing quality of the better pieces is high. Some of the most interesting items are the earlier ones from the 1950s, which are freer and less formulaic than the later output.
The collection and the shop
Alongside posters, the museum holds badges, ration coupons, household objects, children's books and printed ephemera from the same decades. There is a small shop selling original posters, reproductions and books, and purchases are an easy and legal way to take a piece of twentieth-century Chinese graphic design home. Ask about condition and about whether a piece is an original print or a later reprint.
Practical information
The centre is in the basement of a residential building near the junction of Huashan Road and Anfu Road, which makes it easy to miss - look for the doorway number and take the stairs down. It is open daily during normal daytime hours with a small admission fee of a few tens of yuan, and it closes in the early evening. Cash and mobile payment are accepted; cards usually are not.
Why it works
It is small, personal, unpolished and full of material you will not see elsewhere, and it sits in the middle of the best walking district in Shanghai. Half an hour in the basement followed by coffee on Anfu Road is a very good afternoon.
