Site 9, Maotai, Guizhou Province

August 13
09:45. Lu Jie went to the bus stop in front of the Zunyi train station to hire a minibus to take the marchers to Maotai. Unfortunately, minibuses were only allowed to pick up their passengers from the train station. After much negotiation, the driver came up with an idea to put the "double happiness" sign on the front window to transform the bus into a wedding vehicle, which are exempt from the train station rule. With a large, red double happiness sign taped up on its front window, the minibus hurried to pick up the comrades who have been waiting.

10:30-14:00. The party of ten people consisting of the curatorial team, artists Yao Ruizhong, Wang Chuyu, and the film crew departed for Maotai on the minibus. Everybody wanted have a break from visual art, so Qiu Zhijie called for a Hong Kong martial arts movies by Xu Ke, and the ranks were taken in. Once the bus left Zunyi city limits, it wound deeper into the terraced fields of Guizhou province.

14:00. The Long Marchers arrived in Maotai, the number one rice wine distillery in China. The smell of alcohol hung in the air. While most of the Chinese public is under the impression that Maotai's brand history spans over 1000 years, it has only become famous in the last 80 years or so. There are two reasons behind the myth and the illusion of Maotai as the long-treasured national wine: first, it has been said that when the Red Army arrived at the Maotai Winery after crossing the Chishui River, they mistook the alcohol for warm water and washed their tired feet with the "water" to rejuvenate and stimulate their circulation and qi. The town's wine supply was then drunk dry before the army had left. A second story involved Premier Zhou Enlai receiving Richard Nixon during his historic trip to China in 1972. At the concluding banquet, Zhou and Nixon went shot for shot on Maotai wine for hours. While Nixon ended up utterly tipsy, Zhou retained his composure. It was later discovered that Zhou had not been drinking Maotai wine at all, but water, identical in color and density to the potent spirit. This cunning method for dealing with foreigners resonated with its imperial antecedents, and won the adoration of the Chinese people.

Passing through a gaudy gold sculpture portraying two goddesses dancing around a wine jar, the marchers found accommodation at the aged and rundown Maoyuan Hotel. They discovered that they could not make any outgoing calls from their rooms, and that the curatorial team had no way of uploading new photos onto the website. This was very critical, as the international public was waiting to find out more about the progress on the road, but there was no way to dispatch the information.

16:00. After dropping off their luggage, the curatorial team immediately headed out to investigate the site, the Maotai Number 1 Distillery. They quickly found out that they were actually already inside the distillery, and that the whole town of Maotai itself makes up the factory. They arrived at the head office building welcomed by a statue of Zhou Enlai, with the engraving "Father of the National Wine." At the entrance, they explained to the guard that they were here to investigate the cultural life of the factory workers. Accompanied by the director of the Communist Youth League, they went upstairs to visit the Workers' Union Cultural Section and the Propaganda Division. Maotai Wine Distillery is a large company with branches scattered around the area, and numbering more than one hundred all over China. Six thousand workers manned this particular factory in Maotai. The conversation with various departments revealed that they had just held a first art exhibition with one hundred workers participating last year, showing mostly Chinese ink paintings and calligraphy works, with a few oils and watercolors. The director showed some exhibited works to the curatorial team. They appeared to be only a type of work that repeated the canons of traditional Chinese art-making. Unsatisfied by their discovery, the curatorial crew left the office for downtown Maotai, which seemed alive and full of energy. Lu Jie came up with an idea to modify the original plan of collaborating, exhibiting and interacting with amateur artists in the distillery to generate discussion about the individual and its relation to society. He decided upon carrying out a project involving the general public. The idea was to invite people from all walks of life to a lunch and drinking party, showing works by Che Guevara and Jackson Pollock, to examine the public's understanding of alcohol, art, idealism, individualism and their relationship with collective ideology. The program would conclude with a public performance of abstract drip painting in the Pollock manner by local people with no background in art, after lots of wine!

August 14
The marchers awoke in the gritty confines of the Maoyuan Hotel. For all the fame of the distillery, the hotel was in forlorn shape. In the lobby, a worn down leather couch blocked the elevator, apparently no longer in use. The clocks behind the reception desk, displaying the time in five major world cities, had exhausted their batteries long ago. A hulking golden sculpture of two bare-chested women revolving around an ancient Chinese ding (three-legged drinking vessel) decorated the driveway. The marchers lived in five rooms on the fifth floor, and the film crew in two rooms on the third. Lu Jie asked the service staff director, who was the highest central leader, to visit the distillery. Premier Zhu Rongji had come, but had returned on the same day, forgoing the opportunity to stay a night. Somehow, the marchers were not surprised.

After a morning of quiet preparations on the fifth floor, the group set out for the site of its Maotai activity: a tiny restaurant along the bank of the Chishui River, downtown Maotai. They packed two van-taxis full of equipment and descended the hills from the brewery to the riverside. After a preliminary inspection of the Mao Zedong memorial stone, a shabby slab of marble demarcating the point at which Mao and his troops crossed the river on February 17, 1935, the group lugged its equipment into the restaurant and enjoyed a quick pre-activity meal. The meal's highlight was the fresh tofu, served in large bricks with a light broth. The hurried meal was timed not to interfere with the town's normal lunchtime, which occurs at around 13:00.

The Maotai stage of the Long March centered on the idea of the individual and its relation to society and a sub-theme was the idea of the "genius," and its different articulations in communist and capitalist societies. At the sight of an act of military "genius" by Mao, crossing the Chishui river four times to outflank the Nationalist army, the afternoon's activity would talk about communist genii like Zhou Enlai and also Che Guevara, whose "genius" has been commodified in a manner distinct from but parallel to that of Mao. The capitalist genius of the day was Jackson Pollock, a notorious alcoholic. Renowned for his individuality, the fruits of Pollock's genius have been quite literally commodified, now selling for tens of millions of dollars. The activity would look at alcohol, a major strand in genius-creation discourse in both Western capitalist and Chinese traditional society. Where Chinese often look to one or another leader's jiuliang (capacity for alcohol intake) as a measure of his ability, Americans often portray alcohol as a channel for the liberation of one's true self, an idea present in the notion of Pollock as genius-drunk. How does the power of the individual, particularly its extreme incarnation in a handful of "genii" fit into a larger social structure or historical narrative? These are questions the Long Marchers would explore with a handful of Maotai residents picked from the street. After food, drink, and a viewing of a film about Jackson Pollock, the tipsy participants would walk to the site of Mao's river crossing and create drip paintings in the abstract expressionist manner.

The time quickly came for the team's work to begin. Qiu Zhijie cut pages from a Chinese biography of Che Guevara as "Qu Guangci" and Lisa Horikawa taped them in a row to the restaurant wall. A gap in the Guevara pages provided a place to hang nine circular paintings of traditional Chinese cultural icons, one of which was the PRC emblem, by New York artist Emily Cheng. Lu Jie ordered a large meal for the table of anticipated guests. The film crew got its cameras into place, and Qiu Zhijie prepared the laptop computer and digital projector that would show the movie Pollock, as Yao Ruizhong hung a bedsheet from the eaves of the restaurant to serve as a screen. Artist Wang Chuyu was busy tying long strands of red cloth from the four corners of the restaurant, which he would soon use in his performance piece Warmly Celebrate!

It was now lunchtime in Maotai, and the activity was ready to roll. Lu Jie stood on the street trying hard to convince random passers-by to come in and eat a free meal. He almost won over a group of five managers from the distillery, carrying cell phones in leather cases on their belts and wearing polo shirts embroidered with the Moutai logo. The managers finally decided not to come in because of a standing quarrel with the restaurant owner. Three little girls were among the first to sit down at the table. Several peasants wearing backpack-baskets then joined in. Finally a few workers came and sat down, putting the number of diners at around ten. A growing crowd of onlookers, curious but unwilling to eat, gathered at the restaurant entrance.

The local participants were initially wary of the activity. Lu Jie was the only marcher at the table with them, and he worked hard to explain how they should complete a survey form that had been prepared by the Long March team. The survey asked questions about the participants' identities: their names, occupations, and ages. It also asked questions about their relationship to alcohol - how often they drink and their general thoughts about alcohol - as the spirits distilled here are at the core of the town's collective identity. It was discovered that many people at the table rarely drank, and few believed that alcohol could make one a genius. Lu Jie tried hard to keep the conversation alive asking questions such as which famous Chinese leader could drink the most.

Wang Chuyu began his performance. In this work, initially performed in a bar in the Tongxian artists' colony in eastern Beijing just after the PRC's fiftieth anniversary celebration in 1999, Wang had tied his neck, hands, and one leg to the walls of a room with red cloth. He proceeded to clap and chant the words "Celebrate, celebrate, warmly celebrate!" In front of an audience of Beijing artists, he endured for thirty minutes. Today, before the Long Marchers and a gathered group of fifty common folk, he managed to go for over forty minutes. The piece, which talks poignantly about the social restraints created by the government, stood in sharp contrast to the discussions of individuality and genius taking place by his side. Wang Chuyu's chanting and clapping eventually faded into the background, as the waitress weaved her way through his red cloth each time she brought a new dish out from the kitchen, and the film crew moved around him to record the work.

After a grueling forty minutes of clapping and screaming, Wang Chuyu brought his performance piece to an end. Now it was time to show the film Pollock. The projection crew went through three laptop computers before finding one that could play the pirated VCD. Even then, the movie was watched in tiny pieces, as the crew remained fearful of technical difficulties. Fortunately, the viewers were able to catch a few key scenes about Pollock's alcoholism, and most importantly, the scenes that included spliced footage from original films of Pollock in the process of painting. Qiu Zhijie provided narration throughout the screening, giving a concise portrait of the historical Pollock and the place he and his works hold in American society. The townspeople grew curious.

At around 14:00, the group, which had now swollen to some sixty people, made its way to the riverside, where townspeople would try their hand at drip painting. The Long Marchers had laid out eleven sheets of paper and readied acrylic paints; originally thinking the participants would each create an individual drip painting. The afternoon's first artistic surprise came when the participants immediately blurred the boundaries among the eleven "canvases," engaging from the start in collective creation. Artistic highlights included a man in a sport-coat who seemed to be a natural abstract painter: in two minutes, he had taken a small brush and the pot of green paint, and begun to paint a line across the bottom of all eleven sheets. The edge of the canvas is a theme which many abstract painters after Pollock would spend years exploring. Also interesting was another man who immediately dunked his hands in blue paint and began to put his prints on two of the central canvases. This man at once took to heart the organizers' direction to "paint in any style you choose," and also participated in the Long March discourse of leaving traces, as his handprints now graced several of the works. Finally, many of the children participants, who one would think might be among the most original and experimental of all, spent most of their time painting so-called "children's" images of houses, stick-people, and clouds. Their relentless clinging to these prefabricated, socially constructed images (eerily similar to children's paintings elsewhere in the world) made an important point about individuality and the way in which a society works to counter it, beginning with its youngest members. After thirty minutes of such painting, the fifty or sixty viewers cleared out of the outdoor corridor, allowing the film crew to shoot the newly created artworks. Long March T-shirts bearing the Xu Bing logo were distributed to the twenty painting participants.

A townsman was hired to watch the paintings as they dried, and the curatorial team returned to the restaurant to do some work. Late that afternoon, the group reunited uphill at the Maoyuan Hotel, and a few hours later the Long Marchers were eating pickled vegetables and fish soup at the restaurant next door. They returned to their rooms to continue working, satisfied that the ninth stage of the march was successfully completed.

August 15
The marchers boarded their bus bound for Zunyi at 10:30. Lu Jie encouraged the group to take this opportunity to sleep, as the coming night would be spent aboard the train to Chongqing. As the bus wound its way through mountains full of terraced rice fields, a call came on Lu Jie's cell phone. It was the mother of Jeff, the volunteer Taiwanese photographer and Pratt student who had been on the Long March for the past two weeks. Originally planning to march for just a month and a half, Jeff was deciding whether to take a leave of absence for the coming semester in order to continue on to Yan'an. The commanders, Jeff, and his family were in the process of working out the details.

The bus stopped for lunch forty kilometers into the 130-kilometer journey. The marchers ate another Guizhou meal and continued along the way after watching a stirring Michael Bolton video, I Said I Loved You But I Lied, on the restaurant's television. Most marchers slept for the next few hours, as Lu Jie continued to work with a newly hired website editor and translator. At five that afternoon they arrived at the long-distance bus station in Zunyi.

Filled with the revolutionary spirit and not wishing to lose the precious few hours before their train departure for Chongqing at 23:00 that night, Qiu Zhijie and Lu Jie rented a room in a nearby hotel to serve as a temporary office and base of operations. The Long Marchers deposited their bags in the room. Wang Chuyu and "Qu Guangci" took responsibility for collecting the luggage that had been left in the original Zunyi hotel, and shipped some of it back to Beijing. In the hotel room, Lu Jie, Qiu Zhijie, and Lisa typed away on notebook computers, responded to e-mail, composed daily reports, and sent pictures from the Maotai stage of the march back to the Beijing office. The workers were particularly grateful for a quick local internet-connection. Other marchers went into the streets to get a last glimpse of Zunyi.

At 22:00 that evening, they prepared to board the Chongqing Express. In the process, they realized that their ranks had been counted mistakenly that afternoon, and that the group was thus shy one ticket. A quick decision was made to buy a 'no-seat' ticket for one member of the group, and attempt to convert it into a hard-sleeper ticket aboard the train. They hired five local men to carry bags and equipment from the hotel to the train station. Once inside the station, Lu Jie convinced a snack stall operator to lend him her phone line, and proceeded to get online. He was able to send ninety-seven percent of a message containing many recent photos to the Beijing office, but had to abandon the task with just a seconds remaining lest he miss the train. Lu rushed to join the group just before the train pulled out of the station. Once aboard, he resolved the missing ticket situation without a hitch. The Long Marchers reclined in their berths, and had a fervent discussion about avant-garde art in China until 03:00 that morning, when they would doze off for a few hours before pulling into Chongqing at 05:30.

August 16
At 6:30 a.m., the train from Maotai rolled up to the platform of Chongqing train station. After the usual hectic unloading of luggage, Qiu Zhijie immediately boarded a bus for Chengdu. He was going to meet up with artist Liu Chengyin who would be carrying out a performance work at the next site, Xichang, and Zhou Chunya, who is well connected with Sichuan's art circle (both official and non-official), and who would hopefully help him establish some contacts with the people of the cultural organizations in Xichang. For other marchers, it was a day to prepare and recharge themselves for the upcoming campaigns. They checked into a hotel right across form the train station. After a brief rest, everyone congregated in Lu Jie's room for a strategic meeting. Decisions were made that cameraman Shen Xiaomin, photographer Jeff, Beijing artist Wang Chuyu and Taipei artist Yao Ruizhong would make a supply run for high-tech goods including a detachable hard drive and phone lines. They would also get the digital images of works to be exhibited in Xichang printed, while Phil Tinari and Lisa worked with Lu Jie on the English website text until the early afternoon. At 11:00, Yang Jie, the newest female red army soldier from Guangzhou province knocked on Lu Jie's door. A former anchorwoman and currently an executive in the advertising department of the Guangzhou TV station, she would help the marchers with various administrative affairs on the road.

In the afternoon, all marchers except for Lu Jie and Yang Jie met up at the site of the Civil War-era Sino-American Special Technical Cooperation Organization, a place where some 200 Chinese Communist Party members were confined to torturous questioning by the Nationalist Party and, in many cases, executed. The gruesome records of what happened here have been preserved. Roaming from one room to another, Shen Xiaomin sensed a bad fengshui in the place. Yao Ruizhong carried out his work Turning the World Upside Down against the backdrop of walls that bore aggressive slogans urging the Reds to conform to the demands of their questioners. In the evening, the marchers were joined by local comrades from Chongqing for dinner, all of who had joined the Long March on the road at some point between Kunming and Zunyi. The Long Marchers boosted their low energy levels with the spicy taste of authentic Sichuan hotpot.

August 17
08:12. The train for Xichang left the platform carrying six Long Marchers (Lu Jie, Xiaomin, Yang Jie, Yao Ruizhong, Jeff and Lisa Horikawa). Phil Tinari and two Long March artists, Wang Chuyu and Li Yong, saw them off. Newly added Long Marcher Yang Jie had already begun to make a great contribution to the team. Under her supervision, the luggage was loaded in a thorough and orderly fashion. Every marcher went to sleep immediately after dropping their luggage. Three hours into the train ride, Lu Jie rose and started reviewing the videotapes from the Zunyi symposium. At the same time, he gave a briefing of the curatorial plan for the next site, Xichang, to Yang Jie and the film crew.

Evening. After dinner, the marchers killed time by playing poker. Lu Jie ended up the all-time winner by beating Jeff and Yao Ruizhong from Taiwan, keeping up the lead of the Reds over the Nationalist Army. The poker game led to a discussion of contemporary art in Taiwan led by Yao Ruizhong.

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