Let's start with some basic history. Where did the idea for the Long March project come from, and how did it develop in the four years that you have been working on it?

The Long March project was initiated during my time in London almost four years ago. I was one of the first two mainland Chinese to study curating abroad. I was at Goldsmiths College, University of London, which is a very open place, very provocative and controversial. As you know many of the YBAs are from Goldsmiths. And that was the first time for me to seriously re-examine my memory, my individual experience in China, in connection with collective memory and consciousness of the quest for revolution outside of China. One day when I was in the dining hall, I was approached by an English student asking me to join the communist party. This to me sounded bizarre; I was very arrogant. I said to him, you cannot possibly want to talk to me about communism, I am from communist China. But as the dialogue went further and deeper, I realized that there are so many interpretations of communism, the idealism, the quest for an ideal world. And I still think that it's right in the center of discourse in Western Europe. So I suddenly realized how ignorant I was. I discovered that many British intellectuals are quite pro-left in their thinking, something of which my fellow artists in China and I were not aware before.

The key word we use at Goldsmiths is 'context'. Apart from the theoretical and practical training of 'creative curating', I was able to free myself from my original fixed answers for many things. For instance I was able to re-examine Chinese communism and revolutionary memory in an international context, and when I was finalizing my graduation projects I was thinking about what I wanted to do every second. Finally, one night around midnight an idea came to me. The next day I was due to present my proposal, and I started to reorganize myself, who I am, what I went through, what I'm doing, why I'm here, all these questions. I started to think about what people have done, how they work, what my fellow Chinese curators had done. I started to examine those things, and then to think about what hasn't been done, how I am different from these curators no matter abroad or in China. I began to feel anew my criticism of much of the curatorial work that had been done to that point. I was frustrated that very often when you are displaying Chinese visual culture or exhibiting Chinese contemporary art, especially abroad, it's a game of constructing Chineseness in a political way, but political in a superficial way. The most popular thing is Political Pop, which is playing with politics, but not seriously engaging it.

In contrast to "context," "strategy" has been a key word for the Chinese art world in the last 15 years or so. I got to thinking that these kinds of strategies bring you something very effective for the short-term, something along the lines of Western vogues for Russian art in the 1980's, or South American art, or whatever the third-world art of the moment happens to be. But when you are attracting people's attention, when you are creating this political exoticism, what comes next? I was not trying to say that my colleagues have done something wrong, but I was thinking that for art in China right now, maybe we should go further, take a greater departure which will not have a forced or faux arrival, and perhaps ultimately come up with something that is not just valuable in the short-term. I realized that through my time at Goldsmiths, I had done a lot of research on the politics of museum space and representational culture. I also began to think about the many inquiries I have about contemporary Chinese art. Forced Avant-gardism is not necessarily faux Avant-gardism, and it's very easy to simply criticize the elitist or careerist tendency of contemporary Chinese art, or criticize the power of the market. I rather think all the problems have more to do with a poor theoretical base and a wrong curatorial impulse. In one sentence, the theory and art practice are separated. You see lots of Western jargon introduced and overused, but it has little to do with practice. It's as if the theoretical tools of psychology, cultural studies, gender, postcolonial studies, and other important investigative frameworks have been introduced, but have been rehashed in certain formulae rather than made to truly engage with the work that is being produced. I also believe it is very important to introduce the study of visual culture, a profound way of looking at art by contextualizing and linking with different disciplines.

Originally I was thinking of doing an exhibit on "body and text," "Chinese video art at the turn of century" or something in the vein of all the usual things. And then suddenly I was thinking, maybe I should search for a structure. I wanted a structure that was organic, where I could include many issues connecting with Chinese contemporary art. Immediately I thought of myself, where I am, and decided that I'm a traveler-a traveler among different geographies, ideologies, and disciplinary frameworks. I'm not a professional. And I do not understand the artist's ego or careerist attitudes. Each time I build a career and do well and serve the society of artists and whatever, I immediately became cautious or suspicious of what I have done, unsatisfied, because I'm always interested in new theory through which I can open myself.

In that context I begin to think of travel, to think about my journey through different cultures, from Fujian to Hangzhou, to Shanghai, London, Hong Kong, New York, back to London and back to New York again; from traditional painter to editor to translator to art dealer, and now to curator. So thinking of myself crossing all different borders and disciplinary lines, I started to feel that art, or culture, or life, everything is all in one, it's not separated. It's more or less a journey. You bring things to people during the journey and you bring things back, and there are always illusions and imaginations and dislocations involved. I've come along a journey, and I feel like no matter whether in the U.S. or China, criticism is too often about binary things. For example, we could be against modernism, or we could be against the capitalist system, or the capitalist system itself could face off against communism. But what I find particularly interesting are all the non-binary meanings that have been produced in this transformation of the Chinese system-the translations, the different ideologies, locations, and geographies.

The idea of changing geography comes from the Goldsmiths environment. We have very deep thinkers and theorists there, people like Stuart Hall, Sarat Maharaj, and Irit Rogott. They got me thinking hard about geography vs. location, and about context vs. specific place. I remember one course in particular: when I went to Irit's lecture on geography, I thought I had gone to the wrong classroom. What could geography possibly have to do with art and curating, I wondered? So I tried to put Chinese art into this general atmosphere, and looking at it I found out that many problems of Chinese art are not that problematic. But many answers to contemporary art in China, whether they be international or domestic are problematic answers.

This all sounded to me like a Long March, and soon thereafter, the idea of the Long March as we now know it occurred to me. I had this moment of realization where I decided that the Long March must be the ideal way to examine all of these themes. Because in every Chinese mind, the Long March is the narration, the story of beginning from conflict, the rupture with tradition, the problem with modernity, and then the search for utopia. In it we encounter the problem of how important theory can be in a local context, and the relationship between theory and practice. The historical Long March is just that. Imagine this army on the run, every day making very practical decisions about where to move next. But at the same time, they were constantly thinking the unthinkable, trying to imagine a new society which must have seemed decades away from the cold grasslands of Gansu or the treacherous rapids of whichever river they were trying to cross. I was struck by this uncanny, romantic clash between idealism and pragmatism, and in it I found what we now call the "Long March Methodology" in our curatorial ranks.

Through the metaphor of the Long March, I found a structure to talk about the issues which now lie behind each of the twenty sites on our journey. Issues like the idea of the genius, the role avant-garde art, the relationship between self and other, the relationship between the Han Chinese majority and minority ethnic groups. Issues like Christianity in China, sharing and distributing resources, and the possibility of a new democratic society. The story of the Long March is precisely the story of these issues. I suddenly realized that the problems remain, the questions haven't been answered, although China has been dealing with them all the time-200 years ago, 100 years ago, during the Long March, after the Long March, and now.

This sounds very romantic, as if the project was thought up in a moment and took off from there. Is that valid?

That was my moment. I realized that this was definitely the right answer, to use the Long March structure and then to do a journey, a traveling exhibition. I realized I could use it to open up the public space, and to have a dialogue about many issues with which I'm not satisfied, such as the so-called Chinese public art which is just a show, a pretentious show, that only happens in the small narrow art circle, and which very rarely happens in the pubic arena. So all of these issues connect, and that was the moment I started to write down the twenty sites and the twenty themes. That has not been changed, never. Most of the themes and structures of exhibitions we are realizing now were scheduled in that night. The next morning was my presentation, my classmates and I took turns, and when it was my turn, I was really glad to receive support from my teachers and classmates. I got my strongest criticism from an Italian classmate, a communist. He was criticizing me as a revisionist, and that word in China makes trouble-it could put you in prison for twenty years in the 1950s. But again, that just convinced me even more that I must do this, because I'm sure a Chinese understanding of these issues is very different from that of an Italian communist. That was the time when I started to come out with the idea of the Long March.

I'm always hesitant to speak teleologically about art, but there is a certain political thrust to what you are doing-political in the sense of having a "message," and bringing that message to others whether they be fellow art-insiders of the people along the Long March route. I'm curious whether you think there is a "goal" to the Long March, and what that goal might be.

The goal is all of this! It's all right here. Because I've given it such structure, I feel like it's already there. It's very organic, a very open-ended structure through which one can examine a lot of issues. And it is not like another project where you might only be able to examine one or a few issues; in combining the historical route of the Long March route and the conceptual framework of a 'walking visual display' with art exhibitions, workshops, cross-platform dialogues, publications, and ways of distribution and communication, we are able to deal with many issues simultaneously and in a parallel manner. Both art objects and non-art objects, art issues and non-art issues can be juxtaposed in this structure under the Long March metaphor: that the quest for utopia, the desire for revolution, is a reciprocal thing, an ongoing journey of translation and transformation, local and international, a mix of inside-out and outside-in. Of course my point of departure is China, and the inquiry of 'what is China?' is always in my mind.

That's why I keep going, and people are always saying I'm being too ambitious. For example in the Jackson Pollock project in Maotai, I was basically questioning the cultural system behind Pollock's works, the cultural buildup that assigns capitalized value. Another very important thing I want to do is to think hard about what is art. 'What is art' is a question that's been answered a million times, especially in the 1960s and 70s. And it's still quite trendy and popular now, to try to go back and revisit those issues. But for me, spending so much time and effort looking for the so-called non-artists, or amateur artists, or folk artists, to me it's meaningful because we're so used to the contemporary art system that we hardly ever even question it.

Johnson Chang talked at the Zunyi Symposium about how maybe at the end we do not need a curator, we do not need an exhibition. And this is the original Chinese idea, that life and art always merge, are always one. It never becomes a profession, because if art becomes a profession in China it's very low class. In Chinese history, the court artists are always the most criticized. These kinds of notions of art and craft are very different from the Western point of view. In China, craft refers to that which is useful, because it's separated from your life. The provocative, independent artists are always the ones embraced by the society, so I already feel that lots of things had to be done in order to prepare a much broader and deeper foundation base for Chinese art to exploit its own resources, and in the meantime for the outside world to really understand Chinese art in a better way. So that's my initiative, and that's what most participants in Zunyi Symposium have been saying about a new departure, a new foundation base.

In Zunyi we talked a lot about curating in a so-called "Chinese context." In talking about this context, are we simply creating a category in which to place the issues which arise when talking about art in China, or are we presenting a new way of thinking about art and society that might run counter to what we find in the West?

It's not purely to counter what's in the West. It's not that we're sure we can deliver something here, but at least we can deliver and share certain experiences, which we believe are interesting. The international curatorial symposium in Zunyi was a good opportunity for people to understand that the kind of curatorial environment you find in London or New York is quite different from China. That was what I meant when I made a joke during the conference that I was not a good artist so I became an editor, not a good editor so I became a dealer, not a good dealer so I became a curator. In China at the moment, the curator has to create their own way to make things possible, in the meantime conscious of their claim to independent or avant-garde art. Issues arise of the curator's original initiative and power. So, for example, the translation of certain terms and methods from West to China are not necessary, because they are not necessarily grounded in the Chinese context.

Of course I agree very strongly that context is a very complex issue. What is Chineseness, after all? It's a very difficult question. But to me, at least to have an inquiry is quite important right now. And we're talking about contribution, talking about the goal: it's not only that we are examining who we are and what we want to do right now for our own purposes. It's also that by examining who we are we offer a channel, a forum for others who are very interested in Chinese art right now. If we can open things up for them to get rid of the mentality that "this year China, next year Vietnam, next year Cuba,"-each a novelty to be consumed by the international power structure-we have done good. If there's a way to make people think that, "wait a minute, maybe this Chinese thing is really something; maybe the Chinese visual culture is in the process of producing something that might be a very interesting reference point," then we have succeeded.

And that's my answer to my artist friends-many of them very important and famous in the West-when they voice their own dissatisfaction with the Western contemporary art system right now. People are so fed up with this stuff, totally fed up. And everybody's exhausted. Basically my feeling is that contemporary art is exhausted, but it may not be exhausted in China.

One event that seems different from many of the others along the march was the collaboration with Judy Chicago at Lugu Lake. What was the rationale behind bringing a master artist at a late stage in her career to a place with which she had no previous contact to work with some of the youngest female artists in China? Was anything gained from this collaboration?

Many people ask, if you schedule one event, one site, where you want to do feminist art, why didn't you pick up someone else who is fashionable right now? Well, you know feminist movements have been a serious part of modernization and revolution in China; it is not just a fashionable thing which just appeared in the art world recently. But to me feminist art has become a pure gesture in China, it's consumerized and fashionable. It's not serious or profound anymore, it has no energy to engage society or try to find a new departure for the visual arts, to go to a different level in a different time. Right now it has become only a canon of works about the viewer and the viewed one, the gazer and the gazed, it's all about sex, little about gender. You go to galleries and you see everybody posing herself.

We chose to work with Judy Chicago precisely because she is not "fashionable," precisely because she is not the hottest new thing on the scene right now. We are interested in feminist art in China, which has a very different genealogy and timetable from feminist art in the West, and particularly in America. Even though Chinese "feminist art" started to develop more recently than in the West, it grows out of a different context. In fact, part of the communist revolution was about feminism, and through the People's Republic there have been certain official manifestations of feminism quite different from what you see in the West, and which came before the women's movements of the 1970s. So we are interested in seeing what Chinese artists from different generations might have to say to a master of early feminist art in from the West. This is not about being fashionable, it's about creating a dialogue and a discourse.

And the responses were not so good, which is very interesting. We can even say we failed. The failure is the beauty of Long March too. It failed in that most of the artists submitted proposals designed to fit into the canon of "feminist art," and in that many of them had much more knowledge of Euro-American discourse and artworks then of their own. Judy and other participating international artists were giving back materials and knowledge of the Chinese feminist movement and of course, they have their own interpretation and dislocation. It was so interesting to see that dialogue was actually not possible, at least not at this stage. Still, I believe both parties gained a lot from this "failed dialogue."

Like you said earlier, and like so many people touched on at the Zunyi meeting, "strategy" is a word that comes up over and over again when we talk about contemporary art and public space in China. What is the Long March's strategic departing point? What does it do differently from an alternative exhibition in Beijing or Shanghai?

The strategy is journey and marching. In any journey or march you cannot plan, so you have to identify yourself, ask if are you willing to do it, and then go forward. With that in my mind always, our original metaphor is the motto of the original Long March that "the most important element for the Long March is campaign." We sometimes use the word propaganda, which is kind of cool and funky, but the idea of campaign works in many ways. It's about a mutual understanding among colleagues, the idea of unifying and sharing resources, the drive to cooperate and unify in the name of a larger goal. And for that part I spent three or four years trying to convince people to work together to do this. Ultimately it is about your own relationship with yourself and with the people, the space and the time.

Some artists when they heard this thought, "what a load of crap, the Long March, I'm hearing call from the Venice Biennale!" But after many years, big-time artists started coming to us. For example the sculptor Jiang Jie, whose work sits beside me right now: we never thought that she would participate, and so we never invited her, because we made the wrong judgment that her work doesn't fit into this project-I call it 'formalist sculptural installation'. Then one day we got a phone call when we were out on the road, it was her saying she'd like to participate, and that she had a work to donate to us. This is a campaign among artists, our own colleagues and so-called comrades. But the second layer is when the artists and curators organize, when we have these kinds of interactions and dialogues. Our goal is to generate a discourse, a methodology of speaking plain language for the public to understand. You cannot say I agree or disagree, I'm interested or not. I just work with this context, to hear people's desire, to work with it and to satisfy it.

It's like in the stage of the project which happened on the train from Kunming to Zunyi. Our plan was to convert the dining car into an "art car." The conductor said no. But to me, there is no "no;" we must do it. And at the end we did it. We just keep trying to convince them, but not force them, and we will always have the right way to introduce art to people. Keep in mind that all this effort is not to stage a show, so that you can have some proof, and then introduce the theory to others. It's totally based on my own theory and understanding that I do not think country people understand art less than academy professors in Beijing. If you asked Professor Wang from the painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, "what is performance art?" or "what is experimental art?" or asked him to interpret a piece of Qiu Zhijie's work, he would be as confused as a villager in Guangxi province. I don't just assume that the public, the villagers or workers don't know art. If those are the assumptions we must work within, well then let's not do art.

One difference is that Marxism has a discourse of salvation to it, but I'm not sure you'd make such a bold claim for art.

You're right, but then what is art?

Still though, when I first read the Long March Foundation website, I was somewhat put off by the paramilitary talk of "marching art to China's peripheral population." At the same time, the Maoist dictum of "art for the people" is alive and well in the discursive community of art in China, leading to some very interesting work, including some on the Long March. How do you reconcile the idea of creating for "the people" and the temptation to force art on people to make ourselves feel better?

It's always a double-layered thing. Bring art to people, not only to deliver something to them, but to be examined by them. In the meantime, examine yourself. At the same time, examine the people. The challenge is to go in all directions. I'm not promoting art for the people, or criticizing art not for the people; it's all inquiries, a set of inquiries. I'm not saying that I want to make a thing to make people say 'oh yeah, you're good.' But I do not want to lose any opportunity for communication or dialogue. If it sounds narrow-minded, then that's quite dangerous.

When we initiated this project, people were joking, "what, you want to parachute art into the villages, to make people understand that?" My answer is always, well how did Chairman Mao teach Marxism, which is totally an imported theory, to make a local landlord abandon his family's thousand years' property, and make thousands of people to leave their lands to join the Long March, to die on the road? How would you be able to do that? It's simple: to speak in their language and become real, and to convince people.

My last question is about the idea of revolution and where it fits into your curatorial practice. Is it a concept that holds weight anymore? Is it something you still believe in after your personal experiences in China and abroad? Do we still need revolution, or talk of revolution?

To me that's a very important question. People normally ask, "Isn't it a fixed answer that communism failed? Why do you want to do something with communism?" Some journalists call and say that even your own communist party has criticized Mao, so why do you want to do the Long March? And I can immediately say, well the Long March is not only about Chairman Mao. To me revolution is not only the communist movement. The desire for revolution is always there. And at any time, you can have a new interpretation of revolution. To me revolution is a must, it's part of a human being, that we always want to maintain this search for an ideal society. We want something different, and it has to be idealistic and romantic. It won't necessarily be realized, it might never be realized, but it's an ongoing process. So I think it's great to have a new interpretation of this. Revolution is to bring back the Long March to the people, not to a certain few representative leaders. Again it is a call for people to hold on to their idealism and romanticism.

When I was in Beijing we held an afternoon tea party to talk about the Long March, and many key thinkers came out to support our project. We sat there all afternoon, and the conversation was that in the social science field people are totally trapped in certain fights and issues, split in half. Most academics are very practical and very cynical. And there's no hope, there's no fresh energy or desire. Where in the visual arts field there are still places where people are seeking. Thus it becomes a place where I can find materials that are fresh and provocative. That's my answer as to why revolution is a must. That's why many international art figures express their support for the Long March project; they say you are doing this not only for China but for all of us.

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