My birthday was on the 9th and hands down the best gift I received was from my dad. I have to say he really hit it out of the park for what I would find interesting. The book I received was Chinese Propaganda Posters by Taschen and including written essays by Anchee Min, Duo Duo and Stefan Landsberger. While I havent gotten through the entire book yet and havent read all the written material it has to offer, the book is fantastic.
Even if it included zero written words in the book and I looked at the book simply as an art book, I would still love it. The pure historical value the collection of posters in the book, offer insight into China at the time they were created. Asia has always been an area of interest for me, especially because one of my two majors was Asian studies and the majority of my classes in college were about Asian culture or economics for my economics degree.
Knowing about what ultimately happened in Maoist China and being able to look at the posters that spread propaganda to further that message, resonates with the reader. Once you know the story, you know that you arent looking at cheeky regular posters, but in some cases posters that encouraged self steel creation and basically killed tens of millions of people by starvation.
Just to have this snapshot in time of the posters that if not created or saved might have been lost to the world in 100 years, helps people see what the times were like. China isnt the only country to partake in propaganda posters, in fact the United States has many itself, but the art style and subject matter of the hundreds shown in this book are truly telling of that era. You might notice the striking similarities between Chinese and Modern North Korean propaganda posters and that is because China is where they basically took them from.
The book is fantastic and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in this type of art or this time in China's history. At a relatively cheap price of only around $20 USD its fantastic even if you just want to look at the beautiful imagery.
-Calaber24p