This international and interdisciplinary project, which is coordinated by Indiana University's East Asian Studies Center and has received major funding from the Henry Luce Foundation, is jointly directed by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (History Department, I.U.) and Harriet Evans (Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster). It involves the participation of scholars based in four continents - from Pan Zhongdang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong to Stephanie Donald of Murdoch University in Australia to North Americans and Europeans such as the directors. It also involves representatives of a variety of disciplines, ranging from art history (Craig Clunas, Julia Andrews) to literary studies (Chen Xiaomei, Wang Youqin) to political science and sociology (Robert Benewick, Gong Xiaoxia ). And, finally, it includes several component parts, the main one being a multimedia exhibition of posters and ephemera of the Cultural Revolution era (1966-1976), during which recordings of songs that were popular during the era will be shown and film footage from the time will be shown. This exhibition, as well as related events such as symposia and public talks, are all intended to help those who are directly involved in or merely come into contact with some aspect of the project take a fresh look at the cultural dimensions of China's Cultural Revolution. The exhibit will premiere at Indiana University's School of Fine Arts Gallery in late August 1999 and then travel to Ohio State University in the fall of this same year before heading to European sites (exact times and places to be announced).

The main focus of the project is a reconsideration of one of the key media of communication of the time: the sometimes beautiful and sometimes disturbingly stark posters emblazoned with political slogans that were such a ubiquitous part of the Chinese urban and rural landscapes throughout the decades immediately following 1949. Ironically, given the name of the event, the cultural aspects of the Cultural Revolution-including the public art of the day-have tended to receive relatively little attention. This is in part because most studies of the period have, for understandable reasons, focused on issues such as high-level factional politics and the dynamics of Red Guard violence. We readily accept the importance of these dramatic topics. We are convinced, however, that we will not have a full picture of the decade until we know much more about how ordinary people experienced the period, how political messages were spread to mass audience, and how the popular culture of the time developed. Analysis of the posters of the period is a good way to start moving toward accomplishing all of these things as well as moving toward integrating cultural analysis into the study of the Cultural Revolution.

Our project is not, however, simply an effort to illuminate one short and admittedly unusual period in China's history. We aim to address broad issues that have relevance which goes far beyond the Cultural Revolution decade as a period and posters as a specific art form. Our goal is to use the project to pose very general questions. As a result, we hope that "Picturing Power" will have much to offer to scholars who merely have a passing interest in the Cultural Revolution per se-for example, those who integrate some discussion of it into courses that cover the whole sweep of the modern period. We also hope it will have much to offer scholars who do not concern themselves with posters, but nonetheless deal in their research with texts that, like the works in the Westminster collection, combine pictorial and written elements.

One example of the sort of broad question that interests us and has relevance for the field as a whole is how and why it is that, even in periods of chaos and change, one often sees familiar aspects of the extant popular and political culture endure. A related question that concerns us is how and why it is that, even when a period is repudiated as completely as the Cultural Revolution era has been in China, the influence of that era on popular and political culture can still often be felt. The University of Westminster's poster archive, which includes some holdings from both the pre-1966 and post-1976 periods that are especially useful for comparative purposes, provides a wonderful window onto these two phenomena. Recent work on the music of the period, including a paper on model operas by Barbara Mittler (University of Heidelberg), shows that these themes have relevance for cultural forms other than posters. The series of musical selections that accompanies the exhibit - contained on a CD that Dr. Mittler and I.U. ethnomusicologist Sue Tuohy have played the leading roles in producing- illustrates the point of enduring influence very clearly, including as it does recent popular re-workings of Cultural Revolution songs, as well as recordings from the time itself.

The Cultural Revolution may often be seen, for good reason, as an aberrant period in Chinese history. But close scrutiny of the posters and other forms of cultural production reveal that there are continuities worthy of attention that connect this chaotic decade to the events that came before and after it. In the political posters of the time, for instance, as in Shanghai advertisements of the 1930s and Shenzhen billboards of the 1990s, one sees interesting attempts to combine aesthetic approaches derived from foreign sources with those rooted in Chinese folk traditions. Turning from artistic to social issues, one sees in these posters many things revealed about patterns of social organization which suggest that, even during the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, not everything changed by any means. The way men as opposed to women figure in the posters, the way members of particular generational or occupational groups are portrayed, the way economic and social life is envisioned - these all reveal not only ruptures but also continuities. Best of all, at least when it comes to teaching various kinds of publics (of all ages) about China, the posters provide an unusually "student-friendly" medium through which to make points about change and persistence over time.

Further details about the exhibition, and about the unique Centre for the Study of Democracy archive of Chinese posters on which it depends, can be found elsewhere on the online gallery featured on this website or in related links to the SoFA Gallery and to the University of Westminster. A full list of events that will take place while the exhibit is at Indiana University, ranging from public roundtables to a closed two-day workshop-style international and interdisciplinary symposium, can also be found. So, too, can updates on new activities associated with this project, which remains very much a work in progress that will continue to evolve as the exhibition moves to other sites and new teaching materials and research materials are developed in conjunction with it. One final thing to note about the project, which makes it particularly exciting to the organizers, and we hope also to others as well, is that it seeks to bring together the insights of those who have studied the Cultural Revolution from a temporal and geographic distance and participants. Not only are the authors of two acclaimed memoirs of the period involved - Rae Yang and Mobo Gao - but so too are a variety of others who grew up around the posters and have agreed to reflect upon their meaning anew with us.