Stylogeny in the style of China Dream Folk-Art Propaganda Posters

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Pictorial & machine age · 2013–present · East Asia

China Dream Folk-Art Propaganda Posters

Also known as Chinese Dream posters (中国梦), China Dream public-service posters, China Dream Child (中国梦娃, Mengwa) Core Socialist Values posters

A Party propaganda campaign that swapped the Maoist hero for folk and popular art. Each poster sets one piece on a stark white ground: a photographed Nirenzhang clay figurine, a paper-cut, a Yangliuqing woodblock, a Longmen or Wuyang peasant painting (a genre the Party fostered from 1958) or a Feng Zikai ink cartoon. The emblem, Lin Gang's clay girl Mengwa, was a newly made piece. A brush slogan, a prose poem, a red seal, a QR code and a thin red credit line frame the image. The tone is filial, rural and nostalgic; the posters run in long rows along hoardings.

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Use it with care

These are the official propaganda of a one-party state, made under the Civilization Office of the Party Central Committee. They borrow living folk crafts made by named workshops and makers, among them Lin Gang of the Nirenzhang studio, who modelled Mengwa, the paper-cutters of Yuncheng and Yuxian and village peasant painters, and the work of Feng Zikai, an artist persecuted in the Cultural Revolution. The peasant painting they use is not untouched folk art but a genre the Party itself fostered from 1958. Critics such as Joyce Lee read its use of Longmen and Wuyang peasant painting as folding peripheral and minority styles into a Han-centred image of the nation. Credit and commission the actual craftspeople rather than copying the campaign, and do not present its cheerful rural idyll or its slogans as neutral heritage or as a cute 'Chinese' look.

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How it works

  • Put one folk-craft work at the centre (a Nirenzhang clay figure, a paper-cut, a New Year woodblock, a peasant painting or a Feng Zikai sketch), photographed or reproduced as an exhibit and credited to its craft and workshop in the frame, rather than a newly drawn propaganda figure.
  • Isolate that single image on a stark white or pale ground with plenty of empty space around it.
  • Write the slogan in red or black brush calligraphy, add a short prose poem and a red seal as the imprimatur, plus a QR code and a thin red credit line naming the folk-art form and the issuing Public Service Advertising Art Committee.
  • Show children, grandparents, harvests and village festivals instead of workers, soldiers or rising factories.
  • Preach Confucian family virtues such as filial piety, thrift and honesty in mild, non-ideological words.
  • Make the posters as a uniform series and paste them in long rows on hoardings, walls and street boards.

People's Republic of China: after Xi Jinping took up the phrase 'Chinese Dream' at the National Museum in November 2012, a nationwide poster campaign went up from July 2013 on bulletin boards, billboards, street screens and construction hoardings in Beijing, Chengdu, Datong and other cities, designed under the Public Service Advertising Art Committee of the Party Central Committee's Civilization Office. The same clay girl and folk-art format then carried the Core Socialist Values campaign: CCTV's 2015 'China Dream Child' (中国梦娃) ad, commissioned by the Propaganda Ministry, was spread as posters and billboards, and Ying Miao found both it and the values posters still active in 2020, so the period is left open. Values posters in other illustrative forms (the wider 388-poster 'visualising our values' set) belong here only when they use the white-ground folk-art format

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Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Diagonal axis, Horror vacui, Visual tension, Dark ground, Grotesque & neo-grotesque, Photomontage, Rebellious & subversive, Ironic & self-aware, Technological & futurist, Full bleed, Luxurious & glamorous

Palette

  • #fbf8f1
  • #c8161d
  • #1a1a1a
  • #e8a33d
  • #f2b8a8
  • #3f7d4e

Typefaces

  • Brush calligraphy (xingshu and kaishu) for the '中国梦' headline and the slogans

  • Red seal stamp (yinzhang) in seal script as the poster's imprimatur

  • Regular-script (kaiti) and Song-style text for the prose poems and the red credit line, which names the folk-art form and the issuing committee

Known for

  • 'Chinese Dream. My dream.' (中国梦·我的梦)

    Lin Gang's Nirenzhang clay figurine of an apple-cheeked girl crouched in thought, which Tianjin Daily called newly made in August 2013 and which is known as Mengwa (梦娃), with a prose poem by Yi Qing (Xie Shaoqing); the campaign's main image

  • 'Filial piety: the lifeblood of the Chinese people'

    a Nirenzhang clay girl feeding her grandfather and saying 'Grandfather, eat!'

  • 'Thrift to cultivate virtue'

    a Nirenzhang clay boy holding a tray of rice, meat and vegetables

  • 'Spring is always ahead for our motherland'

    Nirenzhang clay children with a lantern and firecrackers

  • 'From morning to evening, approaching the dream'

    a Wuyang (Henan) peasant painting of farm workers with oxen and a tractor before the sun

  • 'On the road towards the dream: helping each other in friendship'

    a Taohuawu (Suzhou) wood carving, shown beside a Yangliuqing woodblock print captioned 'Kindheartedness. Compassion.'

  • 'Good children of China'

    Shanxi paper-cuts of six scenes of children planting trees, studying, exercising, working, befriending and caring for elders; the campaign's red paper-cuts come from Yuncheng (Shanxi) and its multicoloured ones from Yuxian (Hebei)

  • Posters built on Feng Zikai's ink sketches; the campaign drew on more than a thousand of them

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Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This style China Dream Folk-Art Propaganda Posters 2013–present · East Asia

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

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Sources

  1. Ian Johnson, 'Old Dreams for a New China', The New York Review of Books (NYR Daily), 15 October 2013: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2013/10/15/china-dream-posters/ (also https://www.chinafile.com/node/4210)
  2. Joyce Lee, 'Expressing the Chinese Dream', The Diplomat photo essay, 28 March 2014: https://thediplomat.com/2014/03/expressing-the-chinese-dream/
  3. Wikipedia, 'Feng Zikai' (his paintings used for China Dream posters since 2013): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_Zikai
  4. Wikipedia, 'Chinese Dream' (Xi's use of the phrase at the National Museum of China, November 2012): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Dream
  5. Tianjin Daily via China News Service, '泥人张要塑中国梦 民间艺术尽显文化生命力', 21 August 2013 (Lin Gang's newly made 《我的梦，中国梦》): https://www.chinanews.com/sh/2013/08-21/5186576.shtml
  6. The Paper (澎湃新闻) on Lin Gang and his Nirenzhang figure 梦娃, modelled on a girl he met in Xinglong County, Hebei, in the 1980s: https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_8502381
  7. Ying Miao, 'Romanticising the Past: Core Socialist Values and the China Dream as Legitimisation Strategy', Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 49(2), 2020 (the China Dream Child clay girl in the 2015 CCTV ad and posters; campaigns still active in 2020): https://publications.aston.ac.uk/id/document/78137
  8. Allen Memorial Art Museum (Oberlin), 'A New Kind of Painter for China, 1960s-1980s' (Huxian peasant painting classes from 1958, promoted by the government through mass-produced posters): https://amam.oberlin.edu/exhibitions-events/exhibitions/2024/01/30/a-new-kind-of-painter-for-china-1960s1980s

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