Artwork

Shannon Wright and I found this poster in New York, when we were there for the MacWorld Expo in 2001, on our way to visit my parents in Maine, but the policeman is something Will and I got in China.

"Everybody observes order, everybody pays attention to social morality" (Gege zunshou zhixu, renren zhuyi sehui gongde), 1983.

There was a poster store in downtown Xi'an that was usually pretty busy. The walls were covered, floor to ceiling, in all sorts of posters, so Will and I picked out the ones with the most interesting graphics. Our Chinese language skills weren't quite up to snuff, and the results ranged from the "Social Morality" vein all the way to "Safety with Electricity". I wish we'd bought more, considering how inexpensive they were (5¢ each?), but we didn't want to appear rude or extravagant.

Funny to think that appreciating a pedestrian poster enough to buy a bunch of them would be rude, but there you go - we were always surrounded by a crowd watching what we were doing (and commenting to each other too, with the expectation that we couldn't understand Chinese at all), and for some reason our interest in these images was viewed with suspicion.

I don't remember ever seeing a public advertisement or billboard in the PRC - perhaps the same effort Westerners put into shaving creme ads went into the Chinese' public service posters?