From Propaganda to Pop Culture: How Maoist Propaganda Transformed Into a Global Art Commodity
Journal: Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University)
Year: 2019

Propaganda artwork created during the Chinese Cultural Revolution has been a widely studied topic since the decline of Mao Tse-Tung’s leadership. Less often discussed is how Maoist inspired visual arts transformed from government-sanctioned propaganda into pop culture iconography. This thesis will discuss the artistic evolution that took place through examining the methods used by Chinese propagandists to saturate foreign audiences with Maoist iconography, and how the appropriation of those symb