Visualizing Salvation

Chinese Christian Posters in a Revolutionary Age

Curated by Daryl R. Ireland

January 19 – March 20, 2027

Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery

Visualizing Salvation: Chinese Christian Posters in a Revolutionary Age provides a new way to see a period in Chinese history that was both chaotic and effervescent.

Between the May Fourth Movement in 1919 and the Communist Victory in 1949, China was in a transitional state. The old had gone: the Qing dynasty and the first effort to establish a democratic republic had collapsed. And the new had not yet come: the Chinese Communist Party was operating on the periphery. The future was uncertain, but China did not lack prophets. Christians squeezed in alongside everyone from anarchists and artists to fascists and fortune-tellers to proffer their own vision for how to make the nation new.

This exhibit makes it possible to revisit those aspirations and, in so doing, discover important features of Chinese history and Chinese Christianity. Religion both contributed to and contested China’s revolution.

Meet the Curator

Daryl R. Ireland is a Research Associate Professor at Boston University School of Theology and is fascinated by popular forms of Christianity. The work done by pastors, priests, and academic theologians is important, but how do young urbanites express their faith? What makes the gospel appealing to illiterate farmers? Which sounds and images can both captivate and express the imagination of the masses? These questions have pushed Ireland to explore such things as Chinese revivals, West African Pentecostal films, and the North American Sanctuary Movement.