Propaganda Poster Art Centre, Propaganda art museum in French Concession, Shanghai, China

The Propaganda Poster Art Centre is a private museum in Shanghai's Xuhui District, at Room B0C, 868 Huashan Road. It shows more than 400 posters in three sections: Republican-era calendar posters from the 1910s to the 1940s, including pieces modelled by actresses Hu Die and Zhou Xuan and drawn by Hang Zhiying and Xie Zhiguang; New Year prints and propaganda posters from the 1950s onward; and Cultural Revolution big-character posters and woodblock prints.

The center was founded in 1995 when collector Yang Pei Ming began gathering discarded political posters during China's shift toward a market economy. What might have been destroyed instead became the foundation of this collection documenting that transformative period.

The posters served as a visual language that conveyed government messages and shaped how people viewed their daily surroundings. You see how art and politics were intertwined in everyday life through these images displayed on walls and in public spaces.

The museum moved in 2019 from a Huashan Road basement to an office building on Yan'an West Road, so check the current address before setting out. Inside, the roughly 400 posters are arranged in three sections, from Republican-era calendar posters to Cultural Revolution works. The collection is little known and mainly visited by tourists.

The centre moved in 2019 from a basement on Huashan Road, opposite Wukang Road, to an office building on Yan'an West Road. Its founder Yang Pei Ming, a retired manager of inbound tours for foreign visitors, began collecting in 1995 and had gathered nearly 6,000 kinds of posters by 2014.