Far Eastern Economic Review, September 12, 2002

Almost 70 years after Mao Zedong staged his Long March, a group of artists and curators is following his lead as they attempt to bring contemporary art
to the people

By Phil Tinari/Maotai, Guizhou Province, and Beijing

Lunchtime in Maotai. In a stall restaurant along the riverbank Lu Jie is barking orders at a waitress-pickled cabbage, fatty pork, freshly curdled
tofu. And a few bottles of the town's famed Moutai spirit. Ordering done, Lu walks up onto the street and invites passing locals to come and eat with
him.

Gradually, the stools around Lu's table fill up with tired-looking distillery workers, basket-carrying peasants and mothers with babies. Around
the door, an even larger crowd of bewildered locals is gathering, curious to see what all the fuss is about.

As the food is eaten, Beijing performance artist Wang Chuyu claps hands that are draped in long strands of red cloth, and shouts out "Celebrate, celebrate! Warmly celebrate!" continuously for 40 minutes. Lu's associate, Qiu Zhijie, finally forces a reluctant video projector into life to show scenes from Pollock, a biopic about the American artist Jackson Pollock. Lu,
meanwhile, is trying to engage his guests in a conversation about Maotai and its relationship to alcohol, and about alcohol and its relationship to
genius. He's having a tough time of it.

With lunch over, Lu manages to persuade a few of his now slightly drunk guests to walk across the street and try to create their own "Pollocks,"
splashing multi-coloured paint across thin sheets of butcher's paper. A small crowd looks on, bemused by their neighbours' efforts.

Maotai hasn't seen this much excitement in a long time. Not, perhaps, since the mid-1930s, when Mao Zedong led his Long March of Red Army soldiers into
the town on their epic trek through China. That journey became an inspiration for generations of Chinese communists, and was a seminal event
in the founding of the People's Republic.

Almost seven decades on, Mao's Long March is providing the inspiration for a new group of "revolutionaries"-not cadres this time, but artists. Since July, The Long March, a travelling exhibition and interactive art show, has been retracing Mao's journey through China. The aim of this "walking visual display," as it dubs itself, is in some ways as revolutionary as Mao's Long March. As Mao once spread the message of communism, the organizers of The Long March are "marching contemporary art to China's peripheral population."

But why link contemporary art to Mao's Long March? "In every Chinese mind, the story of the Long March is about . . . the rupture with tradition,"
answers Lu Jie, who dreamt up the idea of the show four years ago. Lu, 39, came originally from Fujian and has worked and studied in arts-related
areas, including curating, in Hong Kong and London. Currently he lives in the United States, where he heads The Long March Foundation, which is
organizing the trek through China.

In all, the project loosely involves 121 artists, 104 of them Chinese. The core group, though, is made up of no more than 10 or 15 curators, assistants, cameramen and artists, who operate in the style of a guerrilla army, referring to each other as "generals" and "comrades," and talking constantly of campaigns and revolutions. Members of this small group travel to each of the 20 locations on the route and stage the exhibitions and displays. Some of these last for no longer than a few hours, though at least some of the material should show up again in a planned international museum
show based on the project.

The drunken drip-painters of Maotai might struggle to make an impact on the international scene, but some other events on The Long March have a bit more
artistic heft. For instance, on the banks of Lugu Lake in northwest Yunnan province, American feminist artist Judy Chicago and 30 young Chinese female
artists put together a collaborative project entitled If Women Ruled the World. In that part of Yunnan, they do: The area is home to the matriarchal
Mosuo people. The women artists completed a series of site-specific sculptures and installations, many bearing a direct connection to the lake
that lies at the centre of Mosuo lore.

Then in Zunyi, Guizhou province, site of the Zunyi Conference that installed Mao as chairman of the Communist Party, the project organized a second
"Zunyi Symposium," this one a forum for Chinese and international museum directors, independent curators, editors and artists.

But are such events really "marching contemporary art" out to the masses? Lu Jie believes they are: "People say, 'What, you want to parachute art into
the villages, to make people understand that?'," he says. "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 property of a thousand years, and convince thousands of workers to join the Long March, to
die on the road?"

Others are less sure: "The impact at the grassroots level is going to be hard to measure," says Robert Bernell, founder and president of Timezone 8
Ltd., a Hong Kong-based publishing company devoted to Chinese art. "Ultimately, of the thousands of people whose lives are touched by this
exhibition in one way or another, there are going to be some who pick up the fuses laid by Qiu Zhijie and Lu Jie. But I don't think that either of them
ever thought that they would convert the entire population along the route of the Long March to art and into followers of avant-garde art."

In fact, some of the more meaningful interactions have come not with random passers-by but with artists living in the provinces. Along the route, the
organizers have worked with organizations representing Chinese artists-many working in traditional genres-that have virtually no connection with the international art world. These include formal groups like the Ruijin County Calligraphy Association and individuals like a father-son-grandson team of
photographers in Jinggangshan, Jiangxi province.

The Long March also tries to work with local officials to break down the scepticism about staging exhibitions of contemporary art that is still often
found in the provinces. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't: The Maotai event was originally intended to involve workers at the distillery and was
supposed to take place in the state guesthouse attached to the plant, but officials were unwilling to satisfy all the organizers' requests, so the event was moved. For Lu Jie, that wasn't a big problem: "In any journey or march you cannot plan," he says.

Still, if The Long March isn't always reaching its targeted audience, and sometimes has to change its plans at the last minute, many in China's art
world believe it is making a difference. Bernell thinks of the project as "a massive experiment involving almost every artist I know of in China," to make art "less antagonistic and more conciliatory with its audiences."

Feng Boyi, the Beijing-based co-curator of the upcoming Guangzhou Triennial, also sees it as a hopeful development. "Avant-garde art in China began in the early 1990s with a group that was extremely experimental and original," he says. "But as time went on," he adds, "the starting point of art became selling works or being selected for major exhibitions." The Long March is helping to re-create that original creative spirit and helping to discover
new artists, he says.

The event is also important for the audience, he believes: "To make so-called 'regular people' totally understand these works, that's not very likely," Feng says. "But to have an exhibition . . . where you have people other than the inner circle coming to view and record: That's the direction we need to go."