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The Long March Project is an ongoing physical and conceptual journey of visual creation, expenditure and display. It takes China’s historical Long March as its initial primary source and meta-narrative in which to curatorially engage and question the meaning of contemporary culture in the face of a historical consciousness. At the conception of the Long March Project in 1999, Chinese people were on their own Long March, the journey of a socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics. Long Marcher Deng Xiaoping once said "only development is hard reason." While rapid urbanization and commercialization have occurred along the route of this new Long March, such changes have also caused cultural losses and ideological voids. At the same time, a new cultural paradigm has been established in China, whereby people regard wealth as representative of social status. The birth of the Long March Project was spurred by such questions as what do people today think about communist idealism, the seeds of which were sown along the route of the historical Long March? What do they think about revolutionary practice, in which retreat can become victory and achievement, and which potentially substitutes "Chinese reality" and "the local context" for foreign "truth?" Such questions continue to be referenced by the Long March Project today, however our questioning of the processes of cultural production has theoretically extended. Today, the Long March Project is an engine room on an international journey, provoking relationships between culture and education, market and economy, seeking to problematise how these relationships take on certain meanings in society. What is deemed ‘international’ in the face of a new market exoticism where production and market could potentially be argued as based, and perhaps controlled, in the once-called ‘third’ world? From the viewpoint of visual culture today, ‘Long March Culture’ is missionary and metaphorical. It has turned the kind of culture that derives from the people to serve the people (now a phenomenon of individual wealth and entrepreneurial activities) into a valid, yet complicated, mainstream language. Such a system has surpassed concrete authority, which could be argued as rooted in collective memory.
The premise of the Long March Project’s first undertaking in 2002, titled ‘A Walking Visual Display’, was determined to engage the meaning of history and culture, through a social paradigm. This project arose from Lu Jie (Founder and Director) and his writing of a 90 page curatorial precise which explored China’s Revolutionary Long March of 1934-36, as a methodology and departure point for futher discussion. Co-curated with artist Qiu Zhijie, this project involved the re-tracing of this historical 6000 mile journey, in conjunction with over 250 artists, writers, theorists, curators and scholars, from China and abroad.

At each of the sites that comprised this monumental journey of Mao Zedong and his Red Army, it was proposed to hold artistic activities encountering historical events pertinent to each revolutionary site, presenting artistic material from China and abroad which challenged social, cultural, political and economic assumptions of social memory and lived experience. On this journey new works were realized, discussions were held and documented and events of the past were re-visited, challenged and provoked. Artists engaged with local communities whose definition and understanding of what we consider to be ‘contemporary’, what we consider to be ‘art’ was challenged and debated.

Enter and Exit, a performance/installation by Long March artist Xiao Xiong, was produced during his own journey for the ‘Long March Project – A Walking Visual Display’. With a ceramic bust of Mao Zedong in his suitcase, Xiao Xiong left Beijing and headed to Yan’an, the final stop of this historical Long March. From here, he walked along the historical route in reverse, heading towards his comrades who were leaving from Ruijin (the first site of the march). At the start of his journey, Xiao Xiong asked a member of the local community what they would consider giving him in exchange for his bust of Mao, and so ensued a series of social bartering that delivered objects such as flags, hats and even a kiss from a local lady into the hands of Xiao. Each person who participated signed the suitcase that accompanied him on this journey, and a photograph was taken to mark the moment of exchange. The final objects were 2 thermometers and a red piece of cloth braided with yak’s hair. This participatory project highlights the varying values invested in material wealth and the personal meanings and stories, be they nostalgic or sentimental, which come to provide a sense of worth. By asking strangers to question their own property, and what they would be willing to part with in exchange, calls to mind the significant sacrifices made by many Chinese people along this historical route embraced as a form of cultural ideology and also a political campaign.

Long March Remains is another installation by Xiao Xiong, composed of 79 hammers and sickles collected along this journey, working with numerous different communities he encountered along the road. Xiao Xiong sought the tools that marked the unique qualities of the various provinces and ethnic regions, acknowledging the effect of economic and geographic factors on the style and condition of each instrument. The hammer and sickle are internationally recognized as a part of the symbolism of communist thought, referring to the industrial proletariat and the peasantry. The hammer is commonly superimposed over a sickle (as seen in the Communist party flag of the People’s Republic of China) indicating the unity between industry and agriculture – two prominent areas of reform in Communist China under Mao Zedong and further, under Deng Xiaoping’s economic policies of the late 1970s. In this installation, the basic tools of production are laid down as a cultural memory of human labor, of a united human undertaking in the production of a better state of survival for a developing society. Long March Remains questions what is it today that joins cross-sections of social communities together? How is the idea of material wealth defined today within a collective ideal?

After arriving at Luding Bridge, in Sichuan Province (site 12 of this historical pathway), the Long March Project team decided that this forward march could not be a mere re-enactment of the past. Such a philosophical engagement which crucially questions the role and meaning of how history is written, discussed and displayed must continue beyond known footsteps and so ‘Long March Space’ was established in Beijing’s 798 Art District in 2003, which is now the primary headquarters of the Long March Project.

We are now on a new Long March of self-discovery, with no fixed conclusion. Marching through various sites across the world, on a pathway of engaged and collaborative creative activity, this journey seeks to nudge and nurture cultural specificity, empowering the voice of the local through an opening of awareness in its resonance with a larger global collective. Ours is an explorative experiment that desires a different text and terminology for the practice of living that does not fall into the easy trap of oppositional politics, but rather embraces the multiplicity of human experience.

Today, the Long March Project can be considered a complex, multi-platform, international arts organization and independent ongoing art project, that can be simultaneously considered a curatorial lab; a publishing house; an artistic collection; an educational meeting place; a gallery space; a consultancy; a commissioning and production atelier, artistic facilitator, and author. From a critical distance, all of these avenues of production aim to provocatively construct, and in turn renew, presumed action and thinking concerning ‘contemporary art’.

The ongoing journey of the Long March Project can be conceived as:
1. a process of movement through space, time, or thought without a fixed beginning or end, involving multiple transformations
2. a methodology which stresses adaptation to local and temporal circumstances, focused on artistic, social and educative activities that are designed to interrogate contemporary visual economies
3. an artistic intervention, operating on a national and international platform, in collaboration with artists and an increasing range of public, private and independent arts organizations and individuals.

We seek to move beyond the presumed language of difference and alterity, transforming a linear past through shared motivations in an eventual unfolding of divisive boundaries — a process empowered by understanding the power of art to communicate. It is hoped the sharing of contextual specificities of artistic production will engage ideas, and project new avenues, for the development of new methodologies of existence.

Zoe Butt
Director, International Programs, Long March Project

1. An historic event (1934-1936) in which the Chinese Communist Party led a flailing Red Army over six thousand miles from their base in Ruijin, Jiangxi province to Yan'an, Shaanxi province, simultaneously suffering tremendous casualties and developing the ideological and organizational structures which would come to serve as the basis of the People's Republic of China.