上海宣传画艺术中心 — Local services in Shanghai

If you like art and history, this is a must see in a city teeming with hidden gems. The Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre has dozens of original posters spanning from early 20th century to the 1970s, including comic art and sketches from the war years. I don’t know of anywhere else in the city (or the world) you could go to view such a collection of original posters.

For a preview, many of the posters can be seen on the Art Centre’s web site. There is an interesting back story to the collection which you can easily google. The site is at shanghaipropagandaart.com

The Art Centre recently moved to its current location on the 7th floor at 726 Yan An Road, in the Hua Min Empire Plaza, East Tower. In its new location there is a lot of space and abundant natural light from the large windows. It’s very easy to find in the east (right) tower of the plaza.

The gallery is designed and the posters arranged so that you can walk through the several periods depicted in the posters, beginning with the pre-WW2 Shanghai Lady advertisement posters and spanning through the posters of several wars years, the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s. The layout takes you through the events of these periods of Chinese History from an artistic perspective. There is detailed information printed in English and French about the themes, events and content of each section and information about each poster, too.

It takes time to digest the visual content On my second visit, my children were pointing out things in the posters I hadn’t noticed on the first or second viewing. If you like to contemplate the art, plan to spend at least an hour here.

There is a gift shop with professionally made copies (thick poster stock) and original posters available, too, along with several unique treasures for kids and adults that you will not find anywhere else...

I'm studying abroad in Shanghai this summer, so I took a free rainy day to go check out this museum. It was very cool! Not too hard to find, and I'll include instructions at the end for how to get there. There were a bunch of posters running from the early 1900s to the 80s. They had little info blurbs around groups of posters talking about the era and circumstances. At the end there was a gift shop where I got my own propaganda poster! My ticket was only 25 yuan, I bought it in person upon arrival, and the people there were very nice. I tried practicing the Chinese I spent 3 1/2 semesters learning, but they kept responding in English so no worries for those who don't speak Chinese ;)

As for getting there, a couple of these reviews are right about the new address. You can plug in 726 West Yan'an Road or the name listed (上海宣传画艺术中心) into Google Maps or Baidu. It will drop you in front of two tall buildings connected in the middle. Facing the buildings, you will see building 726 (the building the museum is in) on the right, and 728 on the left. I walked in to the building that connected them, turned right to the elevators, and rode to the 7th floor. When the elevators open, there is signage pointing to the...

The location of this place can be found in Gaode maps and I hear Baidu now has English too. Google address is wrong. It is just NW up the street from the google location past the major street intersection in a huge multipurpose hotel office building on the 7th floor. This was perhaps my fave museum in Shanghai, because I've seen so many artifacts at this point. They have nice summary of the different movements and decades that was just the right amount of information. Make sure you move through in the right direction -counter clockwise. They do sell some prints, books and other little goodies, unfortunately they were out of the ones I wanted and the fellow there was pretty strange about me asking about them. Whatever. It was 60 Yen in May 2025. If you are in Shanghai in May or June go see the Soyarama show at the Nanzuka Art center next to Shanghai...