4/8/2014 ArtAsiaPacific: The Long March Project Backward Progress

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From  Issue  56
EDITOR’S  LETTER  In  Search  of  Lost  Time

ESSAYS  Pakistan  Goes  Global!

NEWS  Murakami’s  GEISAI  Festival  Reemerges  in

Miami  after  Yearlong  Hiatus
BACKWARD PROGRESS
NEWS  Public  Outcry  Sways  Lebanon  Censors THE LONG MARCH PROJECT
PROFILES  Museum  Fever  Breaks  Out  in  China

FEATURES  Lee  Bul

FEATURES  The  Long  March  Project

REVIEWS  Lhasa:  New  Art  from  Tibet

REVIEWS  Montri  Toemsombat

REVIEWS  Sultana’s  Dream

PROJECTS  Raqib  Shaw

Table  of  Contents

Web  Exclusives
Archive
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Photo  documentation  of  a  performance  by  women  of  the  Mosuo  culture,  an  ethnic  minority  living  in FEATURES  BY  ANDREW  MAERKLE  FROM  NOV/DEC  2007
China’s  Yunnan  province.  The  performance  was  part  of  "The  Long  March:  A  Walking  Visual
Display,”  a  traveling  art  project  organized  by  Chinese  curator  Lu  Jie  in  2002.  Courtesy  Long CHINA
March  Project,  Beijing.

Even someone with a passing familiarity with Chinese contemporary

art knows that a booming, speculative international market and
favorable exchange rates (1 euro to 10 Chinese yuan) have spawned
a legion of self-indulgent cultural entrepreneurs who crank out
trademark six-figure canvases or photo editions on factory-style
assembly lines for waiting lists of willing buyers. Cynical realism has
become simply cynical, and China’s leading artistic generation—the
first to come of age following the paranoia and destruction of the
Cultural Revolution—is losing the creative experimentation and
urgency that drove its 1980s and early 1990s avant-garde
manifestations.

However, Lu Jie, the 43-year-old founder and director of the

Photo  documentation  of  a  performance  by  women  of  the  Mosuo  culture,  an  ethnic
minority  living  in  China’s  Yunnan  province.  The  performance  was  part  of  "The  Long
March:  A  Walking  Visual  Display,”  a  traveling  art  project  organized  by  Chinese  curator
Lu  Jie  in  2002.  Courtesy  Long  March  Project,  Beijing.
nebulous Long March Project, takes issue with that jaded
assessment. A forceful speaker who can deliver a convincing lecture
on Chinese politico-cultural history extemporaneously, he lays
responsibility for China’s current situation not with the artists, but
rather with curators who fail to challenge them.

Since he began planning the Long March Project in 1998 while

studying for an MA at Goldsmiths College in London, Lu has worked
with most of the notable artists in China. Inspired by the Chinese
Communist Party’s epic cross-country retreat from Nationalist
forces in 1934, the Long March Project itself is hard to define. It
incorporates a New York-based non-profit foundation (the Chinese
government does not recognize non-profit organizations) and a
space in Beijing that serves as the organization’s headquarters,
curatorial laboratory and commercial outlet. But the Long March
Project also participates in international exhibitions, such as the
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4/8/2014 ArtAsiaPacific: The Long March Project Backward Progress
Asia-Pacific and Auckland triennials, as an artistic entity. This year it
will have its first major presentation in New York as part of
PERFORMA07: The Second Biennial of New Visual Art
Performance. The experimental nature of the Long March Project
has resulted in a number of “failures,” but throughout the
organization has been guided by an ethos of challenging the status
quo.

Much of that wherewithal comes from Lu himself. Born in Fujian

province, Lu graduated from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou
in 1988. While studying there, Lu gave up making art to focus on
translating Western philosophy and theory. Upon graduating he
was hired as an editor for Shanghai Fine Arts Publishing House due
to his combination of an arts background and strong English reading
and writing skills. That position exposed him to international
visitors who began developing a taste for Chinese contemporary art.
Soon Lu was working with pioneering Hong Kong dealers such as
Tsong-zung (Johnson) Chang, Stephen McGuinness and the late
Manfred Schoeni, introducing them to then-rising talents such as
Fang Lijun, Wang Guangyi, Yang Shaobin, Yue Minjun, Zhang
Xiaogang and Zeng Fanzhi.

Lu reflects, “Political Pop presented a cynical metaphor about

society that, in comparison with socialist painting, was closer to our
lives. I was a fierce promoter of the Post-89 work, but I also looked
at it as one part of an entire historical development. It’s problematic
to consider Post-89 as something that parachuted into China in
opposition to the socialist tradition. I believe that Political Pop was
actually extremely didactic. It was avant-garde in the social
dimension, not in the artistic dimension.”

However, that original assessment lost currency as the artists Lu

championed transformed into a new elite class. Fed up, Lu left China
to travel the world, eventually settling in New York, where he still
maintains a home and his wife and children live. Throughout, Lu
continued thinking about the avant-garde’s commitment to social
engagement as well as the difficulty in reconciling a specific Chinese
approach to contemporary art with international expectations and
interference.

Lu says, “The Long March metaphor has existed in China’s collective

consciousness from the country’s founding until today, and yet it
represents this idea that we are part of an international community.
The Long Marchers stopped in one place and read German labor
movement leaders’ essays before setting off the next day. Yan’an
was a training camp for Ho Chi Minh and others. It was about
providing a position for being international.” And it presented the
perfect “map” for exploring many of the themes driving
contemporary art, from the fallout of utopian ideals to mass
migration, gender politics and post-colonialism.

The kitsch associations that many Chinese might have about the
Long March—such as its use as a brand name for everything from
cigarettes to space rockets—might have scared away a locally based
curator. Lu admits dryly, “the idea of turning the Long March into
the basis for a new cultural and social engineering project could only
come from a Chinese who has lived abroad and been both tortured
and inspired by his own transformation and translation across
history, geography and ideology. Why—out of all the overseas
Chinese curators and critics—I was the only one who came up with
it, I don’t know. I have to say I’m a naturally idealistic person, maybe
my suffering was much stronger than others.”

Lu began extensive research and made several trips along the

original Long March itinerary in planning “The Long March – A
Walking Visual Display,” which took place in 2002. Along the way Lu
developed a 90-page project proposal that, if nothing else,
emphasized the seriousness of his intent. “When I came back with
this proposal, everyone laughed at me: ‘Long March! Are you crazy,
trying to humiliate mainstream culture?’” He continues, “Even as
everyone was rushing to documenta, the Venice Biennale and

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4/8/2014 ArtAsiaPacific: The Long March Project Backward Progress
international museums, we were planning to go back to the
countryside.”

Xu Bing, who had met Lu in New York and ultimately produced

“propaganda” materials for “Walking Visual Display,” including the
current Long March logo, a woodblock-style line drawing of a
hammer, sickle and ink brush, recalls a conversation with Lu about
the idea in early 2002. “I was surprised that he had already
produced a lengthy, detailed prospectus. I forget the details of our
conversation that day, but I remember feeling his overall plan had
great potential, and like the art world itself, was something non-
static, not confinable, with a life of its own. I too was thinking about
the many problems inherent in the contemporary mainstream art
system.”

Lu and co-curator Qiu Zhijie mapped out 20 sites along the Long
March where artists would present themed projects. Sui Jianguo,
known for his absurd monumental plastic red dinosaurs,
contributed a two-thirds scale statue of Karl Marx and a handheld
Mao-suit-wearing Jesus on a crucifix that were paraded around
Jinggangshan, considered the historical birthplace of the Red Army.
Seminal American feminist artist Judy Chicago met the “Walking
Visual Display” at Lugu Lake in Yunnan province—home to the
matriarchal Mosuo culture—to lead a workshop for Chinese women
artists. Tensions ran high as the workshop members addressed
deep-seated concerns about both gender and China’s relationship to
the West.

Stopping in Maotai, Guizhou province, famous for its vodka-like

distilled spirits, the Long Marchers invited locals to have lunch and
drink with them at a restaurant while watching the American
biopic Pollock (2000), about the abstract expressionist icon and
alcoholic painter, culminating with a drip painting event on the
banks of the Chishui River. And at Daliangshan in Sichuan province,
the group vainly tried to convince officials at the Xichang Satellite
Launching Station to send one of Zhan Wang’s stainless steel scholar
rocks into orbit.

After completing 12 of the 20 sites on the itinerary and three

grueling months on the road, the Long Marchers decided to shut
down “Walking Visual Display,” stating in a release: “We have to
prevent the Long March metaphor from being mired in the trap of
superficiality, functionality and practicality. Precisely by postulating
the project’s ‘incompletion’ as ‘completion,’ we remain faithful to
the very open-ended nature which has been its hallmark from day
one.” Yet despite everything, the success of the Long March—as it
moved from province to province, each with its own administrative
quirks—was guaranteed by its inversion of orthodox culture. Lu
says, “You can’t say no to the Long March in China. It’s the grand
narrative.”

Since then, the Long March Project has made periodic returns to
different sites along the itinerary, with the Long March Space in
Beijing—which opened in 2003 in the 798 Art District as the 25,000
Cultural Transmission Center and has now grown to include two
massive gallery spaces, a separate space for independent projects, a
courtyard, offices and a fashionable canteen—often hosting
exhibitions of work made on the road. Notably, the painter Yang
Shaobin has been pursuing a multi-year project returning to his
hometown of Tangshan in Hebei province, where he documents the
lives of miners working the Kailuan coalmines there. Not
surprisingly, Yang has produced a series of large-scale paintings,
“800 Meters Under,” that revisit the socialist realist tradition while
adding a dreamlike palette and surreal juxtapositions of scale. But
he has also produced documentary films and videos, an archive of
historical photographs and begun a new project, “Blind Spot,” that
extends to other sites in China and continues through 2008.

And the Long March has introduced new artists to the international
spotlight. One of the participants at Lugu Lake, the Xi’an based
painter Guo Fengyi, for example, has gone on to present her

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4/8/2014 ArtAsiaPacific: The Long March Project Backward Progress
colorful ink paintings—simple figures made from accretions of
multi-hued cross-hatching—at exhibitions including the Yokohama
Triennale and the Prague and Taipei biennials. In other cases, Long
March helps build rural infrastructure, undertaking a three-year art
curriculum at Yanchuan county in Shaanxi province, site of its
“Great Survey of Papercuttings in Yanchuan County,” with support
from the county government.

Yet the Long March seems determined to undermine its own

position as a “stamp of approval.” Lu has said previously that, “The
Long March should not be a ‘thematic’ placeholder for a Chinese
national pavilion filled with contemporary Chinese art, but rather
an international campaign that enters into the different temporal
and spatial sites of experience and action, as well as construction
and reproduction.”

Preparations are underway for the Long March participation at

PERFORMA07 in New York this November. On paper, the proposal
seems modest but still reflective of the organization’s interest in
tactical incursions into new domains, with Qiu Zhijie leading an
unconventional dragon dance performance in Chinatown and
Shanghai-based conceptual trickster Xu Zhen installing migrant
workers in Chelsea’s James Cohan Gallery. Outside Harlem’s Studio
Museum, artist Zhao Gang, who lived in the neighborhood when he
had a home in the city, will recreate his Harlem  School  o f  New
Social  Realism, an event he first staged in 2002 inviting Asian and
African-American artists and critics to discuss revolutions in China
and the US.

The most ambitious proposal for New York, though, benefits from
the Long March experience in China. Beginning with a public panel
discussion at the China Institute on the posh Upper East Side, Long
March  P roject  –  Avant-­Garde will continue with a backwards,
double-file march across Manhattan, passing through the halls of
the Museum of Modern Art, which extends the breadth of a city
block, and concluding in Times Square. This time the red tape
involves city officials and MoMA director Glenn Lowry, who
personally signed off on the request to use the museum’s private
space.

Where the Long March goes from here remains to be seen. The
conditions in China today are not so different from 70 years ago,
and Lu Jie’s personal take on that parallel provides the project with
its fundamental spirit. Rather than the cynical, world-historical
interpretation of the original Long March as a manifestation of Mao
Zedong’s genius, Lu views the event with a pragmatism just short of
romance. “There were so many ideas, so many imported theories,
warlords, landlords, capitalists fighting to ‘make the country better’
and control everything. Why were none of them successful?
Communism swept up people’s minds and got them to join in. The
Long March Project is not a revisionist embrace of Mao or
communism but instead takes that part of history as the natural
response to the conflict between tradition and modernity, local and
global. We try to show it as the result of an entire generation’s
mobilization.” Lu’s ability to galvanize his peers suggests that he and
the Long March Project could set the tone for an artistic community
off-keel from the sudden infusion of fame and fortune, but the
savvy curator also guards against self-satisfaction. “We cannot just
do the Long March and then return to our daily routines. Nor
should we finish the Long March and let the rest of the world carry
on in what it is doing. We need to be the reference—keep coming up
with ideas and provoking other people—even if we create a lot of
trouble for ourselves.”

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