Chinese Propaganda Posters at the British Library

I’ve recently published a paper in Visual Resources (36:2), which rounds up the cataloguing project I undertook at the British Library back in 2015. Abstract below: In this paper, I discuss a project designed to increase knowledge of and make more accessible a collection of post-1949 Chinese propaganda posters at the British Library, for the…

Two recent guest blogs – Post-1949 Chinese revolutionary art and design

I have recently published* a pair of guest blogposts on the subject of post-1949 Chinese revolutionary art and design. The first, ‘Knock Down the Gang of Four!’: caricatures in the British Library’s collection of post-1949 Chinese posters, is available from the Language of Authoritarian Regimes website. The second, ‘Do the Chinese always smile?’ Exhibiting the…

New Chinese Propaganda pages on the British Library website

Great news! The British Library now has an online guide to the Chinese Propaganda poster collection, which includes a downloadable list of posters with their shelfmarks, based on the catalogue I put together at the end of last year.    

Revolutionary nian hua at the British Library

On a suitably ‘new year’ theme,* my blogpost about a set of revolutionary nian hua prints from 1950 has been posted to the British Library’s Asia and Africa blog. The image is a detail from Jian zheng huan xuan hao ren (建政懽選好人), ‘Good people happily select a government’, by ‘Wulejibatu’ (烏勒吉巴图) of Inner Mongolia (Neimeng, 内蒙]). Revolutionary nian…

Chinese propaganda posters and the thorny issue of copyright

Just popping by to mention that BICC has published a blog post by me on the thorny issue of Chinese propaganda posters and copyright, based on research I have been doing during my three month postdoc at the British Library.  I was surprised by the advice we were given with reference to digitisation and public…

M+ Sigg Collection at The Whitworth, Manchester, UK: A review, sort of

I recently had a rather ill-fated mini-trip to Manchester. Ill-fated because after three days of drizzle and public transport-related tribulations (and with apologies to Mancunians) I decided I really do not like Manchester. However, one of the (few – sorry!) highlights was the motivation for my visit in the first place, The Whitworth Gallery and, in particular the…

BICC Cultural Engagement Project – British Library

In preparation for my forthcoming three month postdoc at the British Library, a little profile of me and my project has been published on the British Inter-University China Centre (BICC) website. I’m raring to go and can’t wait to get my hands (I’ll be careful – promise!) on the British Library’s largely unresearched-to-date collection of Chinese…

A Chinese art mystery

As I mentioned a few posts back, before Easter our masters students put together an exhibition of objects loaned by the University’s Department of Geology and Leicester Arts and Museum Service. One painting, on first sight seemingly straight-forward turned out to be quite an enigma. Called ‘A Mountain Boy’, it is recorded as being by…