What are people doing with our posters?
David Alan Grier, The Book of David | Chairman Miaow | Shepard Fairey, Molotov Man | Chinese Restaurant, Toronto | The Economist | nickcalyx's Desktop | The Sydney Recreational Flying Club | Law & Order | A day in the life of Dang Ton'ku, student and Red Guard | New photographs with old slogans | Time Lapse in Beijing
Over the years, our posters have been used in many different ways: for exhibitions, to illustrate publications, or to be shown on websites.
Here we would like to give you just a few examples of less obvious cases. If you know other examples, please let us know !
David Alan Grier, The Book of David
In 2003 the poster
'Advance victoriously while following Chairman Mao's revolutionary line in literature and the arts' (ca. 1968) was used to create a backdrop for the stand-up comedy performance 'The Book of David: The Cult Figure's Manifesto' by American actor and comedian David Alan Grier.
This is a design, not an actual picture of a performance. The poster on the far left is a variaton on a Che Guevara poster, the poster just visible on the right a 1930 Soviet poster. Both are from the IISH collection.
These are pictures from the performance. On the left the show is about to start. The central part of the curtain will rise to let Grier come on stage, the audience is wearing red Che-Grier T-shirts. The backdrop design has been altered: the left and right part of the original poster are switched, and Grier no longer wears a mustache. On the right, Grier is talking about the New York Knicks. You can see how much attention has been paid to the details of the design: all faces on the Red Books and in the crowd have been altered. Videos of Griers performance are available online at http://comedians.jokes.com/david-alan-grier/ 
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Inspired by his cat, Andrew Davies made a series of montages based on posters from our collection. He replaced the heads of people in the posters with the heads of cats, and changed the slogan to something relating to the life of cats and their struggle against dogs ('woofs'). The pictures were published in a book entitled The Thoughts of Chairman Miaow (New York: Gramercy Press, 2005)
In the sample pages above, you may recognize the 1970 poster Greet the 1970s with the new victories of revolution and production and Forcefully beat back the bandits in space from 1958.
The artist Shepard Fairey is known for his re-use of existing propaganda images. In 2006 he used a 1963 poster design by Ha Qiongwen - probably found on the web exhibition 'The Chairman Smiles ' or on Stefan Landsberger's Propaganda Posters - as a source of inspiration for his print 'Molotov Man'. In 2008, Fairey would become world famous with his 'HOPE' poster for Barack Obama's election campaign.
In 2006, a Chinese restaurant in Toronto, Canada, used Chinese posters from our collection to decorate the exterior and interior. The name of the restaurant is Made in China, the address is 371 Yonge Street, Toronto. More pictures can be found on the restaurant's website, at http://www.madeinchinarestaurant.com/gallery.htm
For a cover image illustrating an article on China's new economy, the magazine The Economist used a poster from our collection. The original is from 1969-1970, titled 'Support Argiculture Energetically', published by the Revolutionary Committee of the Cultural Section of the Revolutionary Committee of Shenyang City (call number BG E13/833). In the original, the red book is - of course - a Little Red Book. On the cover of The Economist, the book title has been changed to 'Property Deed'. The cover is of the American edition, vol 382, no. 8519 (March 10, 2007).
Flickr user 'nickcalyx' found one of our posters on the web, an liked it so much that he used it as desktop wallpaper. In July 2007, he took a photograph of his computer screen, and uploaded the picture to Flickr, where we accidentally found it (at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickcalyx/699178222/ ). To close the circle, we put the picture here!
The Sydney Recreational Flying Club
The Sydney Recreational Flying Club, operating from The Oaks Airfield (Sydney, Australia) is sometimes troubled by flights from a neighbouring airfield at a circuit height of 1.900 feet. One of the Club members, with memories of the Chinese posters being around when he studied in the 1970's, had fun photoshopping some posters to 'warn' the other airfield.
The poster above, posted on the SRFC blog in October 2008 , is given the alternative title "Be ever vigilant to guard our circuit from intruders". The original poster, "Stand in combat readiness, be always prepared to eliminate the agressor", from 1970, can be found on our page on the People's Liberation Army Air Force.
'Take-Out', an episode of the American TV crime series 'Law & Order', first broadcasted in the USA on 18 March 2009, starts when a man is found murdered in a park. At his last known address, detectives find Chinese books and a napkin from the (fictional) Sino-American Institute. They head for this institute, where an where an exhibition called 'The Art of the Long March' is being held. Reprints of posters from our collection were used to create this exhibition.
In the picture above, Assistant District Attorneys Connie Rubirosa (played by Alana De La Garza) and Michael Cutter (played by Linus Roache) visit the Institute. In the background, a poster announcing the exhibition can be seen.
The storyline of the episode can be found at http://allthingslawandorder.blogspot.com/2009/03/law-order-take-out-full-menu-recap-and.html . The picture was taken from http://lawandorder.wikia.com/wiki/File:Cutter_Rubirosa_Take-Out.jpg 
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A day in the life of Dang Ton'ku, student and Red Guard
The French blogger "Zoppol" (http://textibule.artblog.fr ) created a video clip of posters from our collection to tell the story of a young Chinese boy on a very particular day in August 1966 on Tian'anmen Square, entitled "Une journée extraordinaire dans la vie de Dang Ton'ku, étudiant et Garde Rouge". He posted it on YouTube on 28 March, 2010.
New photographs with old slogans
Dutch photographer Robert van Sluis (http://www.eyefordetail.nl/ ) made several trips to China, to photograph the fast change from 'communist utopia' to 'neo-capitalist super-power'. The results were shown first in 2011, in his exhibition 'The New China - between ideal and reality. Van Sluis combined his photographs with slogans from Chinese propaganda posters to make the tension between ideal and reality - or between past and present - more tangible. He also edited the colours to create a poster-like atmosphere.
The photograph on the left has the slogan "We should do more and engage less in empty talk" (for the 1992 poster, see http://chineseposters.net/gallery/e13-410.php), the one on the right "Prosperity brought by the dragon and the phoenix" (for the 1959 poster, see http://chineseposters.net/gallery/e16-340.php).
In 2010-2011, Dutch photographer Alice Wielinga created a series of images, "illustrating the possibilities of what would happen should three important historical periods occur at the same time. The periods consist of Imperial China, the Cultural Revolution Era and post-Olympic modern China. Characters from these eras meet and cause a comical generation/cultural clash at the Forbidden City of Beijing".
In the second image from the series, "the emperor is doing his daily stroll around the Palace. He is infuriated when he sees a toddler tourist using the palace ground as her bathroom and none of the servants know how to handle the situation. In the center of the image, the working-class (farmers) from the Cultural Revolution Era are conforming to Chairman Mao’s propaganda. A phoenix appears above the girl’s wheat bunch and a dragon flies out of the boy’s bucket 3. On the right, the empress is departing the palace with a few governors and generals".
The center part is modelled on our 1959 poster "Prosperity brought by the dragon and the phoenix"; the dragon and phoenix have undergone some photoshopping.
Alice Wielinga's photographs (and the texts quoted above) can be found at http://www.alicewielinga.nl/
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