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Long
March - A Walking Visual Display On-Site Criticism
Meeting
April
10, 2003
Café, Sanlian Bookstore, Beijing
Organized by Dushu (Readings) Magazine and Li Xuejun
Participants:
Hang Jian, Professor, Chair of Art History Dep., Art
Academy, Qinghua University, Beijing
Han Yuhai, Professor, Literiture Department, Beijing
University, Beijing
Huang Ping, Executive Chief Editor, Dushu Magazine,
researcher of Social Science Institute, Beijing
Kuang Xinnian, Porfessor, History Department, Qinghua
University, Beijing
Li Xuejun, Deputy Chief Editor, Dushu Magazine, Beijing
Lu Jie, Chief curator, Long March project
Meng Hui, editor, Dushu Magazine
Gao Jianping, professor, Qinghua University
Philip Tinari, Associate Curator, Long March project
Wang Hui, Executive Chief Editor, Dushu Magazine,
Professor, Qinghua University
Wang Jianwei, artist
Wang Mingxian, Chief Editor, Architecture Magazine,
Beijing.
Zhang Guangtian, Play write and director
Zhu Jinshi, artist
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Lu Jie: The Long March is a difficult thing.
One problem is my lack of sufficient theoretical and
curatorial preparation. A bigger problem is that envisioning
and planning are nothing more than envisioning and
planning. Later, when we hit the road, it was "the
road that led us along", Note 1 and the whole
feel of the project was changed utterly. In many cases,
when we actually went to realize an artist's proposal,
the artist's feeling and intention was different from
the effect finally produced. Other changes were made
on account of the people we encountered, or the spaces
we used, all of which stand in interactive relation
to the project itself. In this process change is a
constant. Perhaps when we were actually there we felt
that there were tremendous obstacles. Or rather, we
felt like things we did were failing? But we were
very open, taking failure as experience, as a way
to accumulate material. But when we got to the eleventh
site, I sprouted some new ideas and decided that things
as they stood were not good enough, that we must stop.
Later, when we got to the twelfth site, we were continuously
debating this question with our artists and our curatorial
team. In the end, we decided to stop, to declare the
project "an uncompleted completion." But
overall I felt that the reasons behind our early end
included both the obstacles we encountered on the
road, as well as certain misunderstandings that date
back to our preparation and manifest themselves in
our realization. That is to say, the artists and the
curatorial team both had misunderstandings, including
my own misunderstanding and misperceptions of the
working environment in the art community in China.
Another problem was that before departure, we failed
to establish a strong common foundation in the public
realm, so that in the end the entire project was skewed
toward the existing elitist art circle. When we picked
our team members, most of the newcomers were very
idealistic, saying that they wanted to use this opportunity
as a self-ablution, to come work and sweat again.
But when it came to actually working, we couldn't
help but bring along our old working styles, which
is to say, to bring in the old habits of the art circle.
We ignored questions like how to turn the project
into a "sewer of seeds" by working with
media and society at large. Still though, looking
back on a few examples from the road, many of our
projects did have a direct connection with the viewers,
an effect on the people and events in a given environment.
Take for example Jiang Jie's work involving "adopting"
sculptures of babies-those babies may be an eternal
topic of conversation in the villages in which they
were left. Note 2 But still, if we want to spread
this project wide and far, we need to have a dialogue
with society. We regret how closed the project is,
that in the end it became a "theme exhibition."
There was not enough discourse internal to the project,
and not enough discourse was created by the project.
Today, in this room, I hope that we can have a dialogue,
a discourse, an interdisciplinary conversation. What
do you think of the curatorial concept like this?
What of the things that we have done can we affirm?
Which of the problems we face are not really as big
as they seem? We hope we can stop for a second; return
to older questions, and turn them over for awhile.
Actually this runs parallel to the context of the
historical Long March. The travails that befell the
Red Army after crossing Luding Bridge-the treks over
the snowy mountains, across the grasslands-these were
all fundamentally fights against the road itself,
individual struggles to exceed oneself over and over
again. We dared to set out, but should we dare to
stop? Should we dare to march on to Yan'an? Should
we dare to march toward success? Should we dare to
fail, and to face the consequences? People have voiced
doubt about me, saying that I should have taken the
project directly to completion. They say that as a
curator I must do it this way, otherwise I will self-destruct,
that I must not stop. But I was never hoping to do
a project in this form. At that time we truly lacked
an interdisciplinary debate and scholarly support,
we lacked media attention, and so we decided to return
and fill in the holes, to see how we could do things
better. After we returned we held a small press conference,
which was mainly a reception for the art circle. We
pointed out that the Long March is a charge to everyone
that for us to merely complete the project is not
enough. Furthermore, we pointed out, there is no need
to hold too rigidly to the historical framework -
with the temporal and geographical limits it implies-and
complete the project merely in the name of completing
it. This actually forces us to consider a theoretical
question: when we put together exhibitions, we always
think about how to begin them, but do we think about
how to end them? In deciding on our own to stop our
exhibition, to end it, is actually a challenge to
the current exhibition system. Such a big exhibition
has never had a chance of stopping in mid-stream,
to declare it a failure. As far as the system is concerned,
there is no way to do an exhibition in this way. Can
we thus say that the capacities of that system are
in doubt? Also, since we have this freedom to stop,
since we are doing this on our own, do we not also
have the freedom to defy the temporal and geographical
framework of the historical Long March? And so we
stopped. When we set out again, it will be the second
Long March.
Zhu
Jinshi: The Western art system has its problems,
and the comparison you just drew-you say that when
you decided to stop you stopped-this is something
that would not be possible in the Western system.
But I feel that this outcome is still essentially
unsuccessful, because it makes clear that the power
still lies mainly in the hands of the curator. Of
course I am not saying that this is a fundamental
problem-actually what it really shows is something
that could never come from the Western art system,
and that is what you have done in this Long March.
I remember debating the question of systems once with
Wang Hui. We talked about Documenta, about what kind
of measures we should take relative to the Western
system, to Western power. Wang Hui believes that the
system is necessary, that the system need only do
things slightly better than its counterpart. Speaking
like this is rather honest. The Long March, if it
is to continue on, will face the same problems you
have already pointed out. You feel like it has been
confined to a circle, including the Zunyi Curatorial
Symposium. Historically speaking, in Zunyi Mao Zedong
found more than just his own Red Army; he was looking
for all different kinds of people. But actually, later
on, only once he became powerful and then did not
really go look for all different kinds of people did
we really have what can be called the failure of democracy.
Art presents a similar problem: if art has no boundaries,
if as you're saying it is able to reach out through
scholarly exchange and media attention, it becomes
very powerful, it can continue on, and it will be
more interesting. It won't necessarily mean being
on the route of the Long March; perhaps its fine to
march in this city as well. Speaking of the Long March
spirit, if you travel your former route once more
and the vibe is not right, it would be wrong to travel
idly for even half of one day. You stopped for a reason,
which is to say, you discovered problems. These were
not financial problems or fatigue problems, but rather
questions such as "what is the significance of
going on like this?" As an artist, I ask you
what kind of ideas the artists were really able to
put forth. The artists had problems. To put it more
directly, I think the curators had problems. If you
don't admit this, I fear that if you set out again
you will have to stop once more. Yes or no?
Lu
Jie: I agree with your point. First of all I should
admit that this is about me. Whether we talk about
failure or problems, I should take responsibility
for it all, that's how it really is.
Zhu
Jinshi: I'm not saying it failed; I'm talking
about the issue of power struggle. If the Long March
continues, of course it will face problems of power.
Contemporary art is facing just these kinds of problems.
The better achievement of Long March is not looking
to free itself from the hierarchy in the international
system, but from a fundamental idea about people,
about our relations within and to the idea of art,
and the question of whether it has an independent
self-worth.
Zhang
Guangtian: You've talked about the problem of
artist's surface-level engagement and participation
in the Long March too many people who participate
in your project are looking to actualize their own
goals. As an artist, I would look after my own interest
too. If I were to participate, I would wonder whether
Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie were suspicious of my left-wing
agenda. Therefore, I do not want my left-wing label
bring more trouble to the already easy - to - be -
attacked identity of Long March project. Looking at
the works you just showed us, there were a few that
especially moved me. It is hard to place a value on
the materials you have left at the end. Still, I believe
that this process has been successful. And I believe
the dialogues that people have had surrounding it
are relevant and interesting. I'd like to make the
pedestrian point that this Long March corresponds
to Mao's Long March. As I think about it now, there
seems to be a huge parallel, even a parallel with
the Chinese revolution. When you arrived at Shi Dakai's
place (Luding Bridge), you decided you couldn't go
any farther. Chairman Mao went on; you didn't. Note
3
Lu
Jie: We never planned it that way.
Zhang
Guangtian: I'm wondering why you couldn't get
beyond this bridge. I feel like there is a very simple
reason. All of us who had never seen artworks like
this before have something in common: we all wonder
what this is about. No matter whether it is a peasant
or an intellectual, or someone from some other business,
they might feel confused by this thing. Now let's
think, now it's the 21st century, but if it were the
beginning of the twentieth century, the time of the
Long March, when Mao Zedong took revolutionary plays
to Zunyi and put them on, we might feel the same way.
Then they took Marx's picture and hung it in the Catholic
Church in Zunyi, and just like their reaction to your
project here, the common folk were seeing something
completely strange and foreign.
Wang
Hui: So it wasn't until Yan'an that we had to
"reform our studies."
Zhang
Guangtian: Fort this reason I feel that this project
has a bit of Moscow to it, note 4 , it's a set route.
I do not doubt everyone's idealism, and I do not doubt
the success of the works. But I think that this route
is a "Wang Ming route". Note 5 Twenty -
eight half - Bolsheviks, note 6 ， right. This is a
project run by twenty - eight half - artists. This
project needs to enter the life of the Chinese people.
You have done some successful things, like the display
on the train, things that involve dialogue with the
people. But the project you did in Maotai did not
succeed, because it was too forceful. This forcefulness
doesn't come only from you, but from the entire process
of the Chinese revolution. It's like the work by Wang
Jin, "Hanging Swords on the Cliff with Swords
Hung Upside-Down" where the person doesn't really
touch the ground.
Of
course I believe you do everything from the perspective
of idealists. Why else would you want to do things
like this? Because people will doubt you. You just
spoke of an entire project, and of some problems that
arose while curating it, including problems of authority,
like Zhu Jinshi just mentioned. You should first consider
that all of the people you are cooperating with in
China are extremely simple: they want fame and power.
If I participate in Lu Jie's project, they ask, what
good will it do me. Will it get me name recognition?
Will it get me money? If you can't give me these,
why should I deal with you? Even Chairman Mao posted
a notice in Zunyi during the Long March, which I imagine
you've seen, asking where everyone's wives had run
off to, saying that they had gone to sleep with the
landlords. Where did your food go? It went into the
landlords' warehouse. And thus we need a revolution.
If you work with me, he claimed, you'll get all this
back. Propaganda was about people's interests. In
this project, you haven't declared what people's interests
are. I'm not encouraging you to call people to persuade
their practical interest in order to follow your ideal,
but this is really a big problem faced by you and
me and all idealists. What should we do in such a
practical and ego bounded era?
I
suppose everyone who participated in your project
was looking to realize their own goals. And these
people's selfish goals, you can't even tell them whether
they can achieve or not. I think this must have been
a very different project to set in motion, from the
perspective of the curatorial system and the system
of authority in our country right now. That is to
say, you have to discuss all these things clearly
with the participants. Later I heard that many people
were paying attention to your show, saying it was
a very influential project, asking how they should
go to participate in it. Behind this concern these
people all have a worry. Where are you coming from?
Who you are and what can you deliver。 You must let
people clear about their payoff. Where did the Red
Army come from? Whence its legitimacy? If we say that
the Red Army was just twenty - eight half-Bolsheviks,
then they are able to bringing in " foreign bread."
From another perspective, the question might have
been, by joining the Red Army, will you help me go
to Moscow? Lots of people weren't willing to participate.
So what do they do? They go to Biennales, which is
also "foreign bread." What I would want
from joining your ranks, they ask. So finding resources
is a problem. I think there is a parallel here with
Mao Zedong; he thought this question out on the later
part of the Long March and made it clear to the people.
"I don't have resources, I have nothing, and
I am sitting on a folded python. I am a pure idealist".
If you would follow me you can only sacrifice or win.
Otherwise you don't follow." This was completely
clear. Of the people who followed Mao, of course very
few were "good". The "good people"
had better things to do. Those who followed were missing
arms and had lame legs, no? People with "talent"
decided not to go with Mao. But those who followed
Long March will be totally committed. This won't give
rise to any problems later. So when you talk about
"bread," then the problems become clear.
If you were making local bread available to starving
people while they are busy begging foreign bread from
the international biennales, this is a big problem.
This is my approximate feeling. But I still think
that there were several very successful works, which
finally established a dialogue. How to make this project
even deeper is a very good question, how to carry
on this work; it isn't over.
Wang
Hui: Last year when I talked with you, I remember
you saying that you didn't just want to go on the
road, but to turn the Long March into a long-lasting
system like a biennale. To take this Long March from
our history that society has forgotten, and suddenly
revisit this topic anew, bring it out for discussion,
using art, which has its own problems, and through
artworks look at this history, this attitude, to express
it through participation. I thought this sounded very
interesting, but I couldn't imagine at the time what
it would look like in the end. I didn't know if you
could find enough people who could discuss these topics.
As far as I know there aren't very many people in
our intellectual circle who can talk about these topics.
There are many knowledgeable people, but hardly any
who have penetrating insights about the Long March.
As I watched your presentation just now, I thought
there were a number of interesting works, and I began
to think that it is another problem altogether. Today
people think of the Long March as a utopia. In modern
history, it is not the kind of utopia imagined by
intellectuals, but something else-a development that
began slowly at the grassroots, under extremely harsh
conditions, that included foreign ideas, and that
produced a vision of utopia. If we return to the present
moment and look at the entire world, not just China,
where have reached a so-called 21st century culture,
if we make a comparison to the overall cultural and
intellectual and artistic situation of the early 20th
century, the biggest difference, experimentally, is
the disappearance of utopia. It's essentially gone,
although the impetuous drive for utopia is still with
us. If we look at the literature of the 1980s in China,
it's there. It is also in the literature of the 1990s.
I remember that period. Of course there were those
who denied utopia, but there were definitely people
who believed in it. Wang Anyi, Zhang Chengzhi, lots
of authors wrote directly about utopia. But as an
intellectual and artistic experiment, utopia cannot
re-establish itself. Utopia has only a past and not
a future. Utopia is also impractical, so as soon as
you create a utopia, every problem is neatly condensed.
In everything from its motive to its eventual end,
your Long March reflects a problem, and I think that
this is very interesting. The diligence required to
build a utopia, in the end, insures the destruction
of that utopia. This process is represents a typical
problem of the contemporary world, which is that certain
cultural and intellectual formulas actually cannot
be built, just as there is no way to re-build utopia.
Now if there is no way to build utopia, left-wing
intellectuals may criticize you, asking why we no
longer have utopia. Of course besides "economies
of desire," "capitalism" and similar
expressions, there are others who say that in the
academy one necessarily enters a closed circle of
people, and that this circle becomes a very important
factor in the deconstruction of utopia. That is, all
of one's power to communicate is lost. Everything
is confined to a set domain, and when people summarize
the failure of utopia, they often limit themselves
to a summary of this circle, saying for example that
we in the circle are doing this in our own interest,
or that we want power, making arguments in this genre.
But they don't notice what the broader context is,
what they see is rather small. I think of this question
because it is all I have been thinking of lately,
because I am about to go to Duke University for a
conference on the "future of utopia." When
they first sent out the announcement, there was serious
criticism, saying that the reason there is no longer
a utopia is that everyone in the academy is a Deconstructionist,
etc. They argued that the deconstructionism which
has become so prevalent in the academy in the last
few decades has made it impossible for anyone to be
serious about building a utopia. In terms of the circle,
this is correct, because all the tropes of theory
and culture move in this direction. But if we expand
our field of vision, we see problems inside. Why?
Because this phenomenon of the cultural elite is actually
a result of something else, we are not powerless because
people intrinsically like deconstruction, or because
everything is "post-." Rather, because we
are powerless, we choose this method. There is of
course an interactive relationship present here. Now
as we pass judgment on your summary, I think that
Zhu Jinshi gave the real introduction, and a few of
the things he said were quite interesting. One was
mentioned by Jinshi and Zhang Guangtian, the question
of power, which was certainly one reason why the utopia
of the historical Long March ultimately self-deconstructed.
In the process of history, actually, internal utopias
seem always to produce power relationships, which
in the end kill everyone's ability to believe in utopia.
This propensity for failure is tough to see when you're
working with art, on a relatively small scale. But
if you enlarge, you find that this is a problem which
cannot be overcome. In other words, the utopian experiment
fundamentally contains an inherent contradiction.
Whether you like utopia or not, you must face this
problem. Managing things like we are now, is, I think,
a good way of facing it. Because in the end you get
something. Because to a certain degree, it reflects
a judgment about internal logic. The second interesting
thing is the questions that Guangtian just brought
up, that the process of getting artists to participate
in this experiment requires complicity with the working
style of the broader society. If everyone were to
approach the project looking to go their own direction,
you would encounter two major treasons. One is your
own will, your will to lead. The second is individualism.
These are problems that the real revolution ran into
as well. In terms of these respects, in these important
themes, I remember looking at your earliest plans,
how you wanted to begin by discussing utopia at Ruijin
and go from there, taking in questions of nationality,
Trotsky, Wang Ming Route etc. The interesting thing
is, if you were to carry on marching, perhaps you
would think of explore these questions further and
deeper, since there is no way to enter directly into
the debates that happened at that time. If artists
enter into these debates, they do it in a way that
is inextricably intertwined with your process. You
need to keep this process going, keep talking, not
stop, but think for a second about how to resolve
the power issues, how to resolve the question of interaction
with the people. If you can incorporate your answers
to these questions into a new style, I think it would
be quite interesting. Furthermore, I just asked Zhang
Guangtian to speak. No matter how we view his play
"Che Guevara," note 7 whether we like it
or not, we all wonder how it got so hot, how it became
such a major social incident. Why is the Long March
art exhibition so difficult to enter our social life
and public realm? I really haven't thought of a reason.
Zhang
Guangtian: It would be hard for me to use "Che
Guevara" as a revolutionary example to provide
reference for your project, since the two are very
different. I actually think that the Long March project
had an even greater impetus. I think you should ignore
those elitists and professional artists. Those who
wanted to participate came of their own will. If they
don't know how to fight, you teach them, train them.
You should only use the armatures and outsiders. Mao
did it this way. That is to say, if you believe in
utopia, you come and make the revolution with me.
If you don't believe in utopia, all you are after
is your benefit and interest, you bug off, I don't
have you, I'm a poor sucker. Under these circumstances,
you don't mind that our guns and ammunition are broken,
that we have nothing, you just brainwash us everyday,
and then it all becomes possible. You distribute them
homemade guns and cannons, there you are, you ask
them do the Long March way, take the hardship and
have faith in it and build your own thing. If you
do it like this, how can you fail?
Zhang Guangtian: Back when Lu Jie first spoke
of the project with me, I was completely supporting
him. I said that this is great endeavor. Lu Jie's
work here is not unlike Mao's work of leading the
Red Army. The difference is that Mao killed people,
and he is not killing people. I guess the whole process
of curating is as difficult and revolutionary as the
previous Long March. I was very much worried about
you; you are challenging the powerful people and the
system by moving their ground. The Chinese art world
is a dark place. I tell you, it's not a place for
people.
Wang
Jianwei: Let me talk about this from a participant's
perspective. After 1997, the public environment in
China opened up a little bit and many artists jumped
directly into the public space. But in the end there
was a problem: the departure point for public art
in the West is a departure from the museum system.
We just don't have this feeling of departure. Entering
the public space for us was actually a matter of taking
a private, personal, closed space into the open, but
we never opened up these individual things; there
was no connection between the normal viewer and the
works. This process made it look as if everyone had
entered the public space, but it was a closed public
space. Let me mention the two points that hit me the
hardest when I talked about the Long March with Lu
Jie in New York. First, I think the utopia envisioned
here is the opening of a new space. China lacks the
support of a museum system, and we're not willing
to keep going back to the Western museums for more
of the same. China has to make some trenchant choices
about its context and about the questions it wishes
to consider, and we are forced to relate to those
choices. At this point, everyone starts to think,
good-since our cultural perspective and our ways of
thinking, and even our life experiences are not like
theirs, let's do a project like this one. I think
the utopia lies herein. The second utopian idea was
that no one is happy with the inner state of the art
world at the moment, and so we wanted, through the
Long March, to open up the essential concepts behind
our works. In Europe, contemporary art is certainly
not a movement by one circle of people; it is the
thing of an entire society. Why did so many museums
and famous artists oppose Documenta X? It was the
first time that an exhibition was challenging a system
of choosing works based on star system, a system on
which many museums depend for survival. At that time
everyone was cursing the exhibition. Works were placed
in public spaces, in hallways. Advertising for the
show was completely mixed in with local advertising.
Many things were destroyed. But in order to launch
this subversion, a massive apparatus was first necessary.
Museums, exhibitions, investors, and foundations-Documenta
X destroyed all of these in a very simple way. It
caused an important shake-up. But after seeing that
exhibition, many Chinese artists had another conclusion:
that the exhibition lacked atheistic value. And in
fact the exhibition had very little of this. When
I got back I started thinking, China has contemporary
art, but why? Being someone from the Third World,
or as a member of so-called cultural elite here, why
does one do art? Maybe Western artists choose to be
an artist, which is to say, they start making art
even though they have many other choices. But I think
many in our generation started making art simply because
we studied art-we were compelled by the system in
a way. That is to say that the hidden motives with
which we began is different from theirs. Back then,
perhaps art would win you a few things. If you were
from a small town and you were an artist, you had
a special identity. Now, as society has grown more
complex, people have more leeway for real choice and
their own values, and some of them no longer need
to choose art. But in Chinese contemporary art, the
vast majority of artists still feel limited. For example,
they wait for exhibitions to choose them. If you go
talk to a contemporary Chinese artist, they will give
you a CV that is a list of exhibitions, not a list
of works. They won't bring up one or another particular
work and discuss with you the problems it solves.
And so one year ago, I felt that by participating
in the Long March I would find a kind of utopia. When
I went to join the ranks and realize my work at Luding
Bridge, that night, we swayed back and forth, debating
whether or not to end the March. I said then that
I didn't think there was anything to finish, because
to a large extent, the Long March was not a Long March
of imitation. Therefore, I said, when you feel you
should finish the project, you can finish the project.
Also I felt that in some ways, the Long March is fundamentally
ambiguous. The historical Red Army similarly had no
idea where it was headed. And when you reached a point
on this Long March, you also said, let's go. I think
this is actually OK. And so on the bridge that day,
everyone had a very serious feeling, that to stop
before finishing was somehow inappropriate. But I
think good things always come out of "inappropriate"
situations. But now I am regretful that the project
seems over, and in the end it seems as if what Lu
Jie did is give a new platform to artists on which
to make products. I imagine Lu Jie is not satisfied
with this. For example, many of the works could have
been realized here in this room, with the result that
after traveling across provinces and spending loads
of money, switching to a new context, the works are
the same. I think this makes them meaningless.
Inasmuch
as you enter the Long March, certain unpredictable
and irreplaceable things will happen. If a work can
be realized here in this room, why is there need to
take it on the Long March? The corollary is that works
which could be realized on the Long March can't necessarily
be replicated back at home, that is to say the Long
March forces the artists to consider truly the issue
of public space. This is not a purely materialistic
consideration, not a question of how tall, how wide,
how good the light is. I think there are many other
non-material considerations that were not taken into
account.
No
matter how Mao Zedong made his strategies, when we
talk about cultural strategy today, I just wish people
will realize the meaning and value of your Long March
and following you. It's wrong to not participate or
support you, unless they have nothing to contribute.
The Long March is actually a kind of capital without
form. It is not a matter of me giving you ten dollars
in exchange for your support; it is a formless capital
that grows useful the moment it is placed in local
context. Since Lu Jie returned to Beijing, he has
been hoping for dialogue and debate. I agree with
what Wang Hui says that these questions imposed by
Long March must be considered in a realm that transcends
the tiny scope of Chinese contemporary art if the
debate is to be useful. Otherwise, there is no way
to debate this topic. I have also heard a lot of artists
talking about the Long March who have no real ability
to communicate. When Lu Jie wanted to debate Trotskyism,
and went to the art circle, the artists thought he
was crazy. They didn't know what connection it had
to them. And then there were all those movie screenings
during his Long March -Godard, Antonioni, etc-the
majority of Chinese artists think that these also
have nothing to do with them. Many artists care solely
and directly about their own interests. I think this
is not the Long March. It must be approached idealistically,
like Guangtian just said. If it's a matter of "come
with us, and you'll get a good opportunity out of
it," then it has become a different kind of utopia.
Zhang
Guangtian: If you have people march with you,
they can study on the road. I mean to say that the
ranks of the viewers might now have a connection with
the Long March. Of course, we "elite troops"
are also very important, because they start a dialogue.
They comprise an external system. Dialogue is extremely
important. Perhaps Godard and Trotsky have nothing
to do with the viewers, but if these works help you
to start an exchange, then they are interesting. You
make these people come along for the ride, and when
problems arise through your use of works by Trotsky,
and then Trotsky has entered your project.
Wang
Jianwei: Chinese contemporary art is actually
much more of an export than many other disciplines
here. Let's first not talk about whether this is right
or wrong. Speaking practically, it has more opportunities
to go abroad, more exhibitions in which to participate.
But these exhibitions bring with them a big problem-and
we really do feel it-that this is not our discourse.
That is to say, even if you appear often in these
exhibitions, they really don't represent you. In a
way, you can do nothing but be silent. The exhibitions
only take up the public discourses behind you, or
rather, the public discourses have already been decided
upon. Returning to China, you feel as if these things
have never been discussed here, as if there were never
an opportunity. So perhaps the utopia of the Long
March is the chance to find something between the
two extremes. It looks like Lu Jie is trying to hold
himself back right now, as if he wanted to say just
this. But I don't think the Long March is the only
way to resolve this problem, I think there will be
others. If you say for example that the contemporary
art is constructed in a fundamentally Western way,
based on the strong connection between people and
material goods that can only grow out of an industrial
society, then how do you bring it into our public
space? Sometimes when I see installation works by
Chinese artists, I look at them once and know that
they're not right. You have no connection to that
material; you have temporarily moved it into the space.
How are we to look at this question again today? We
are Chinese people. When we leave the country, everyone
says, "Hey, you're Chinese" and begins to
ask questions about China. Suddenly you discover that
your education has left you completely confused about
Chinese culture. I didn't know about China's tradition
of cave carving until I saw pictures in exhibition
catalogues in Japan in the 1980s. Before that, I had
no idea that China had something so good! Our generation
does not follow completely along with the West, but
it is also cut off from its own culture. Sometimes
we are not allowed to express it completely, but we
have a real confidence in our own cultural heritage.
And so perhaps the Long March is like sticking a knife
in from the center. Utopia is a strange thing, in
the last year it seems like every e-mail I receive
is about this topic.
Wang
Hui: The feeling I get looking at the works today
is stronger than the one I had when Lu Jie first told
me about the project. I think it really does have
a utopian significance. But if you look at the actual
process of participation, it seems that the works
are all opposed to utopia. It is clear that they are
all sarcastic, because this is a trend. In the last
20 or 30 years, this has been the fundamental trend,
opposed to tradition, including Qiu Zhijie's work
where he walks and left and right are reversed and
obscured. Note 8 .Can the "middle way" still
exists, when in the end even the most basic assumptions
underlying utopia have been deconstructed? Almost
everyone, all styles of doing works, they are all
sarcastic. Except for when the project is really working
with the folk-on projects that have nothing to do
with your high art, on projects that have no connection
to your artists. You suddenly discovered an old man
who takes photos, and took them for so many years.
Note 9 That is truly for the people-how could taking
so many pictures not be for the people? But other
than when men like that appear, almost all of your
artworks are against utopia. This shows that in a
way, there is no difference between the art circle
and the intellectual circles, and so this thing is
a trend. If you want to build a utopia inside the
trend, all of the materials available to you are anti-utopian.
If you build a utopia here, in the end it self-deconstructs.
Speaking this way, you get a very postmodern, very
strange result, not something you could have predicted.
But here I just thought of a difference, with no connection
to art, but just my own opinion. For example when
I went to villages along the Chishui River I discovered
that though the houses are made from dirt, they still
have satellite television. I was amazed, and confused,
about how such a poor place could have satellite TV.
Later I was talking with a man in our group, someone
who had spent a few years working there. He said one
thing that still sticks with me. He said, "You
know that during the Cultural Revolution when the
young intellectuals took to the mountains and went
down to the countryside, the influence on us peasants
by the Chishui River was greater than the influence
of any of countless education campaigns. All of the
'reforms and openings' in my village today, all of
the transitions to modernity, happened because the
young intellectuals came." And so the relation
of the world to the world of the village changed completely
because of a few young intellectuals. The most important
thing to consider is Mao's idea at the time of the
Long March as "sewer of seeds." He may not
have thought this way, but still in the end the Long
March became a route to power. But still at that time
when he had yet to control power, he had some very
open ideas. He thought that he would march, but was
never entirely certain just to where. But the places
he passed, because they had experienced this thing,
this exchange, because this change happened in the
world, there arose a kind of confidence in the time.
I can't postulate what method it should use, but I
think contemporary art has the ability to take this
idea and display it. And just like Wang Jianwei said,
you then open your entire circle, your entire profession;
you switch to a new place, for example, you march
through and perhaps you are not happy with yourselves,
but perhaps the scene in that village, perhaps just
because the Long March appeared there, has undergone
drastic change. But because it doesn't occur under
our field of vision, because it cannot be collected
by a museum, because it cannot be theorized by art
critics, it's as if it never happened. But how would
you ever go about trying to put this within your field
of vision? This question, to a certain extent, is
the reason why so many so-called intellectuals and
scholars debating utopia has no future, because their
ways of thinking are all oppositional, and cannot
produce anything.
Zhang
Guangtian: Actually, the greatest influence on
our art world since the 1980s has been the deconstruction
of utopia. Now we have this right-wing" liberalism,"
is deconstructing the left wing from the point of
view of aesthetic value. In the 1990s we deconstructed
everything, carelessly. Left-wingers deconstructed
right - wing liberals, liberals deconstructed the
left wing. Utopia was destroyed. In my public campaign,
did I not fuck the Statue of Liberty? Did I not deconstruct
liberalism? And yet at the same time they try to deconstruct
our Red Shoulder Chang Qing Leads the Road. Note 10
What
Wang Hui says is right. If we discuss utopia, all
our materials, all our styles of working, all our
fulcrums are already counter-utopian. Where is our
fulcrum? This is a very serious question. Looking
just now at that old man and his natural-light camera-it's
no wonder that he has become our last fulcrum.
Wang
Jianwei: That's right. What Wang Hui just said
is interesting. Looking back on the Young Intellectuals
Movement during the Cultural Revolution, whether we
say it succeeded or failed, at times it certainly
did open up the door to a certain place. But does
contemporary art really need to resemble what we think
of as "contemporary art" if it is going
to take on this capacity? Have we really entered into
this capacity? Could a work take on the form of education
or some other form, and then not resemble, not count
as art? The Long March didn't really open this up.
My personal feeling is that too many works from the
Long March resemble actual works of art. Say for example
that we go to some far-off place, and bring a bunch
of the same old artists to a restaurant or teahouse
out there. We take their same works, and perhaps because
the context has changed a chain reaction is set off,
and some detail of the work comes into clearer view.
But if there is no connection at all, then nothing
has been opened, and this is a problem. One reason
may be the difference between the countryside and
the city; another is that artists, including the people
behind this project, have some problems.
Huang
Ping: If you want to realize a Long March of contemporary
art, to find another life-force for art, this must
merge with all sorts of already existing folk art.
This is true if you decide to do alternative art,
if you connect art with history. Your departure must
be idealistic-regardless of from where, New York,
Beijing, Ruijin. This is not to say that only we can
do art, and that we are the sowers of seeds. The problem
is reversed-we go to the countryside looking for nourishment.
And these local artists, particularly the old man
photographer you talked about, are very obvious examples.
It's like what Guangtian just spoke of, the blending
of the elite and the masses in search of revolution,
although they might actually travel two different
roads. There is such a thing as virtual performance,
as in the case of Jiang Jiwei's "quotation mountain,"
which I have encountered often. I meet somebody on
the road of Long March, his father joint the Second
Battalion and left home, but he fled into the mountains
when the Nationalists came back to slaughter, a small
boy, and remained in the mountains planting trees
for decades. You could call this unconsciously planting
trees, a kind of zoology, a work of art in itself.
One man's work changing an entire landscape. This
kind of tree planting is different from art, no matter
whether one wants to be in biennales, or to be one
of the "twenty-eight half-artists" on the
route, or to search for utopia. I think that on the
road you need to search ceaselessly for nourishment
and build your confidence. Lu Jie just spoke very
teleologically, saying that he encountered some problems
and fought at them one by one. He fought through a
whole road's worth of problems, and there are problems
left over, and we are asking what to do next: this
is the integration of local and international. Fight
with the international hierarchy by using the local
context, this methodology was called "To Reform
Our Study" during the historical Long March.
The
necessity of Chairman Mao's Yan'an Forum on Literature
and Arts is something no one encountered until the
Red Army settled in Yan'an after the Long March. Because
when the Red Army settled in at Yan'an, youth came
from Beijing and Shanghai to join in the rear front
of the war against Japanese aggression. Before this,
when the Red Army was on the road, the most popular
art forms are originated from falk art, for propaganda
use. Such as talk shows "three and a half sentences",
but they were all created by young intellectuals came
from the city. Remember the images of those guys in
the old pictures wearing glasses? Liao Chengzhi wore
handcuffs and wrote three-and-a-half sentence excerpts
all along the road, always looking for a way to unite
with the locals, a way to entice young peasants to
join the struggle, so that it would become an honest
indigenous march. Of course at the beginning of the
Long March the leaders never thought of what they
were doing, they did it of necessity, nothing more
than retreat and evacuation, no one knowing where
they were headed. They didn't know how long they would
go, and they didn't know that they were going north
to fight the Japanese-these are constructs that were
added later.
Wang
Hui: I think one important question touched upon
by the Long March is that the reasons for constructing
a utopia are completely different from the utopia
we often debate. The latter is what we think up ourselves,
but the Long March was a forced march, and only later
did it really get beyond itself. The interesting thing
is that the Long March was actually abortive, even
though it declared itself a revolutionary victory.
The Long March later became a very serious issue in
Chinese art history, because the Chinese revolution
is truly a very important incident. The 30s and 40s
are essentially the period in which the modernism
created in the wake of May 4th could go no further.
When it could go no further, everyone thought that
in terms of historical accident, we had no social
movement like the Chinese revolution at the time,
which could discover the resources of the folk tradition
and incorporate them into the most mainstream of art
forms; this was a first. "Three and a half sentence"
slogans, Sichuan opera, Han opera, that's what people
were working with, and later a group of artists appeared-Zhao
Shuli, Li Xiangxiang, Tian Jian-and forms underwent
a great change. This change was later subsumed into
a broader tradition of "revolutionary arts,"
and thus failed. This extremism spelled its end, but
still the things it came up with had never been seen
before, they are something that should be explained
by Chinese art history. This question of mobilization
and power to discover combined with the reasons for
its ultimate failure are connected with the anti-utopian
currents of the present. Everyone feels that revolutionary
art in the end got only this far, then no one was
willing to go on, so it turned around. From this perspective,
the Long March is an unfinished experiment. From this
perspective, the current Long March is also like this.
Zhang
Guangtian: Do today's common folk not have culture?
Of course they have their folk cultural, but what
is that? I don't think the Chinese cultural circles
have been able to confirm it. What is today's folk
culture? When we think of it, we immediately bring
up "three-and-a-half sentences", but these
have already been used up, this resource has already
vaporized. Right now, it is very possible that the
real locus of folk culture is the "Big Character
Manifesto." Note 11
Lu
Jie: When we were in Hailuogou, we discovered
some incredible texts. There they have an old people's
club that meets in a temple which has served three
different religions. On the walls they have pasted
the lyrics to "Nanniwan," "The East
is Red," all of these revolutionary songs that
they have rewritten into advertisements for tourism
in Hailuogou. When they sung the songs, the tunes
were the same as the old folk songs, but the words
had been changed into slogans about how to sell the
revolutionary heritage of their town.
Our
Long March very easily gives people a false impression
that we are "taking paintings to the countryside",
note 12 bringing art to the people. People say that
we are like Bolsheviks using art we learned from abroad
to oppose the mainstream, the system in China. They
ask why we need to do something alternative here when
the museum system is still so week. They tell us that
our ideas are copied from old Western artists of the
60s and 70s. But it's not like this. We are not only
looking to take things to people, and taking things
to people is not to say that they are good things
which we provide for their enjoyment. We take them
there to be tested, and we bring things from wherever
we go back with us. The Long March has always been
concerned with this sort of bidirectional relationship.
Another layer is that we are not only going on - site
to do new things, but taking works from the 80s and
90s that had a so-called public nature, and exploring
their fraudulence, or rather their emptiness by bringing
them to the people and strolling them around. Is it
true that these works can't stand up to an attack?
Or do they have their own sensitivity? We are mindful
of both the artistic predicament at the current moment,
and to the meaning of artistic work that has happened
in the moments leading up to now. The third question
returns to the issues about utopia you were all just
debating. It's true; there is a certain romance behind
this project, which extends to its administration
and even its funding sources. To found this huge project
all by myself and my family, it is very sacrificial
yet romantic, and might even look crazy compared with
the way in which other people do things. But I want
to answer a point Guangtian just made that in running
a revolution you need to tell your participants what
benefit it can do for them, and another point that
Jinshi made about who I am and what I am doing. I
think my personal goal in doing this project is to
do constructive work; I am not interested in sitting
here and talking about utopia. Through this project
I want to set a few things straight, at least in the
realm of contemporary art. I want to pull out the
resources I have, first Chinese-of tradition, of socialist
memory, of the connections between folk and contemporary
art-and tidy up the connections between art and social
reality. Like Wang Jianwei just said, the flow of
artworks is generally from China towards the so called
global world, so you exist in a translated realm.
Before you really questioning the imagined self and
others by revisiting and reexamine the resources you
have, you floated directly on the surface. Even less
necessary is a discussion of your materials: you look
to reflect the people, but the people don't even know
it. It's a shame my collaborator Qiu Zhijie is not
able to be here today. At the Zunyi Conference he
had one very good line, saying that "art in China
is at a point where it cannot go on unless it goes
on a Long March.". I think this explains a lot.
What is our resources, and whether they are useful,
or whether they are used up? It gets at the idea of
re-understanding the folk; this is another important
working style of the Long March. There are artists
who refused to participate in the Long March, who
felt wronged. They said we have to speak the international
language so that we will be heard; we have to be practical
in order to survive in an internationalized cultural
environment. They thought we would take their works
in comparison of the powerful falk arts to humiliate
and against them, But I responded that we were finding
the folk in order to support them.
In
my curatorial outline I stress that in the art of
the 1990s through today, there are lots of joking
games and satires, but there is no real, direct confrontation
with our political resources and reality. This includes
utopia, and our understanding of revolution. Some
works in the 1990s rendered a simple verdict on politics,
but we are looking, through the Long March, to re-consolidate
and understand, and thus to re-depart. I want to do
real work. Just as in the international cultural arena,
you must participate in biennales or in the market,
I also support this, but is it possible to stand in
a richer position from which to examine your own perspective,
and not in a position in which culture is always there
to be consumed? For this reason we included materials
in every site that discuss Western representation
of China, and we included materials from the 60s,
70s, 80s, and 90s, and also many Chinese works that
touch on imaginings of the West. I'd like to make
an example: when we were at the Xichang Long March
Satellite Launcher Station in Sichuan, we fought hard
to gain access to the facility and hold a dialogue
with artists there. The scientists at this base sit
at the avant-garde of science and technology in China,
and the so-called language of science is utterly universal.
But when these people made art, they painted traditional
and local motifs of peonies and peacocks, so-called
unsophisticated subjects. I wanted to start this dialogue
because of things like early 20th century painter
Xu Beihong's massive failure in going to Europe and
mounting an exhibition of Chinese master painters
on the Republican government's dime. The rejection
and misunderstanding of those wonderful works in the
outside world has always troubled me. As has the government's
exhibitions before the reform era, when they took
paper cutting to Venice Biennale and exhibited it,
and which were also huge failures. I have always been
troubled by this. Taking paper cutting abroad is not
wrong. But in addition to the fact that there were
problems with the dialogue they wished to create,
there were also problems with their curating, there
were no problems with the materials. Xu Beihong brought
along incredible works by Fu Baoshi and Zhang Daqian.
Why were they refused? Why weren't they recognized?
I think there is a lot worth talking about here. The
state-employed artists of the satellite station are
supposed to paint rockets and weapons and other modern
things, but they refuse, preferring to paint peonies
and peacocks. You can speak a foreign language or
a peasant pidgin-neither is wrong. But as curators,
people who do cultural display, our strategies are
often wrong. In doing the Long March I made some of
these strategic considerations; I looked to create
interactive relationships between things people thought
were unrelated or even opposed. To make another example,
our curatorial plan made a lot of references to the
Wanderers of the Russian avant-garde and their connection
to the October revolution, to the connection between
communism and many Western artists, like Picasso's
declaration upon entering the communist party. In
doing this we were looking to bring up actualities,
to prove that contemporary or avant-garde art is not
opposed to the revolution. They are part and parcel
of each other. In our society now, I get worried by
everyone's lack of confidence in contemporary art.
The avant-garde has been turned into a so-called underground,
anti - mainstream thing by excessive sensitivity;
but actually it is just that its theoretical underpinnings
have a few problems which have created a problem whereby
not only the government or the dominant ideology but
also members of the society at large believe that
contemporary art is anti-revolutionary while it is
supposed to be revolutionary.
Qi
Jianping: Actually there are two different kinds
of utopia. When we started talking about the Long
March, I thought of the Long March television series
in 2000.In it there was one detail that particularly
struck me. Liu Ying, the wife of Zhang Wentian, was
in Zunyi receiving guests and talking with the masses,
memorizing poems. But she was memorizing not only
Tang Dynasty poetry but also poems by Pushkin. I thought
this was a very strange juxtaposition, that in front
of peasants she would recite poems by Pushkin. Actually
this is another so-called utopia, putting things from
two different spaces together. Why did they shoot
the television series in this way? Why would she recite
Pushkin? I think that Mao Zedong also represents a
kind of utopia. In the end, at least in terms of military
strategy, he succeeded. Just now when Lu Jie spoke
of conceptual changes in art, the differences among
the avant-garde, how the idea of entering the museum
system is gradually coming to be tolerated in China,
but that the idea of leaving the museum is apparently
difficult to accept in China, I thought this might
be because of some widespread problems in China with
the idea of art, with the museum system in China.
Perhaps there are differences in this respect between
China and some of the Western countries. Perhaps China
has not made sufficient preparations in this regard.
You just voiced some doubts toward Chinese officialdom's
approach to contemporary art, misunderstandings of
the folk, which the media have also had a hard time
interpreting. Perhaps Chinese people can accept this;
I don't think this is a completely unattainable utopia,
but there still exists question of how to go about
attaining it. And perhaps for Chinese society as a
whole, the larger issue is that our theoretical preparation
has not been sufficient-how to view, how to interpret,
how to explain-it is a phenomenon not dissimilar to
the juxtaposition I just mentioned of Pushkin and
the Tang poetry. Perhaps your Long March in China
is an opportunity, that to make Chinese people believe
in art. Perhaps this problem requires an approach,
and perhaps the media are that approach, a way to
slowly change these details, to create some foundations
for interpretation. So I think that if the Long March
has results like we've seen today, whether out of
misunderstanding or out of problems with the participants,
it still reflects the entire way in which things are
done in China, it still brings up some problems.
Zhang
Guangtian: I think what Lu Jie just said sounds
dangerous for him. I understand what he means; he
is telling us that revolution and modernist art are
twins, that there is no conflict here. But if you
want to display these symbols in Chinese society today,
how many people will throw bricks at you? In any case,
no one can listen to this talk. But if you succeed,
how badass you would be, the hordes would come and
support you, and their enemies would no longer be
able to go on and full around claiming being revolutionary
by anti-revolution.
Han
Yuhai: Of course that's true, this is obvious.
After watching the computer display you just showed
us, I think it is very good. The Long March is a topic
to which we keep returning in China. It is like the
Internationale, which talks about a unification, the
question of global unification. The Long March actually
talks about the problem of praxis. Because at the
time, the Long March actually had no goal. It went
somewhere and went on from there. Many high-level
leaders were along for the ride, and many young people
came along to play. It was this kind of a wandering,
it really did resemble a very special kind of performance
art, with a very experimental flair. So when Mao Zedong
summed up the Long March, he called it a manifesto,
a political manifesto, uniting the political potentials
of the leader class with the places through which
they passed, a way of making Bolshevist thought connect
with Chinese localities, a constant process of looking
for ways to connect the two. And so it is a manifesto,
but at the same time, it called itself a sower of
seeds. It was like a proliferation, a continuous transmission.
And so this theme is very good, as it always lives
on in reality. I remember a few years ago there was
an avant-garde biennale, a Beijing biennale, and they
asked me to write a preface. I wrote about the left-wing
art of China in the 30s. In his later years, Lu Xun
supported this; Lu Xun was very much a supporter of
print-making and film. He was very interested in these.
Lu Xun's support of this thing and the Red Army's
Long March have some similarities. One is that Lu
Xun died in October, 1936. One month before, in September,
the Red Army reached the Wayaiobao. These two things
happened simultaneously, only a month apart. Furthermore,
after reaching Yan'an, people doing left-wing art
in Shanghai had a place to gather. And so it was that
the leftist artists of Shanghai came to unite, because
they had a place to gather in northern Shaanxi that
the Red Army established for them. The Yellow River
Chorus and many similar things came out of this. I
wrote my preface in just this way. Many Chinese avant-garde
artists wish to erase this history, they wish they
could claim that avant-garde art never had such a
close connection to the Communist Party, they feel
they should leave this out. Like Wang Hui just said,
memory of this period, including the revolutionization
of the 1930s left-wing artists who got their beginnings
in the May 4th Movement, has been refused in a very
interesting way.
Wang
Hui: Actually the situation at that time resembles
the one today. Xian Xinghai lived in the cave dwelling
in Yan'an, unkempt, and people wondered how an artist
could be like this. When the locals view performance
art today, it is also like this.
Han
Yuhai: Today's avant-garde artists are rather
willing to refuse these connections. We went through
this in the 80s as well when everyone was studying
things in the West, and we feel this still today.
Later on we realized the Foucault and others were
all influenced by Marx, and even by Mao. How is this
possible? This is an interesting refusal. I once traveled
part of the route of the Long March with Huang Ping,
and in the process I was constantly enriching my own
understanding of the Long March. The Long March was
truly a utopia, but we also encounter many other utopias
in history, for example Shangri-la, a horizon which
once disappeared, an imaginary space in the British
style. But when I was traveling with Huang Ping, we
discovered the green mountains and waters along a
road that China had developed. It ran the route of
the "Go West" campaign, running west into
Tibet. In this process it is very possible to discover
that utopia is formless. It is also possible that
going further one discovers its shape and form, like
a China that grew out of the workings of Yan'an. Now
we talk in a very Western style, about the international
and Shanghai intellectuals and their plans for China.
And these plans were all quite similar. Why wasn't
Mao Zedong bold and assured before the Long March,
but only after he got to Yan'an? It has everything
to do with the revolutionary route he traveled on
the Long March.
Wang
Hui: We have held so many meetings at Dushu about
art. I feel like the biggest worry on everyone's mind
is the West. Every time we have one of these things,
the artists' biggest worry is that the shadow of the
West is too big. They want to get out and can't. Every
time we meet, whether the topic is the museum system,
artistic trends, whatever, the topic always comes
up. The history of the Chinese revolution provides
us with an important experience. To put it frankly,
no matter how you construct this "Western shadow,"
the more you construct it, the bigger it gets, and
the result is that art becomes elite. On the Long
March they studied everything, including the West.
Much of Mao Zedong thought comes from the West. Ignoring
for a minute its later problems, let's talk about
the successful pieces of Mao Zedong thought. It is
worth discussing why no one every felt worried about
the Western constructs therein.
Everyone
talks about the folk now, but of you look closely,
the arts of Yan'an collected folk songs and bound
them together, but the form they took was Western.
Bai Maonu's operatic form, the Yellow River Chorus
and others. And then there is what I was talking about
with Lu Jie last time, the Romanization of Chinese
written Language Movement, and on such a large scale.
Think about it, the Red Army was going to talk with
peasants, and they pulled out books in Latin letters
to read propaganda materials about the war against
Japan. There were so many of these texts, and no one
ever thought this was a problem worth worrying about.
This presents a problem to artists and intellectuals.
Not only artists, who have worried about his for many
years, but also to those of us in the academy, where
our biggest worry is that everything we do is Western.
If you do it this way, we think, it becomes Western.
And what is Western, really? Is it possible not to
be Western? What has the West really become? We need
to look at this as a process of realization, to re-consider
these problems, otherwise we have no way out, and
it's as if we block ourselves in. Going on in this
way is problematic. On the one hand, it is good for
everyone to be worried, because it is important to
be self-conscious, lest we float with the tide. On
the other hand, after ways of thinking grew excessively
elite, after the adversary of the West grew so exaggerated
that it no longer had form; it created the possibility
that we asphyxiate ourselves. Why is our time so different
from the people on the road of Long March or in Yan'an;
they really didn't have this problem. If they did
something, they did something. And after they did
it, you didn't think it was totally Western. There
was not the anxiety we have today about being Western.
I think this experience is worth talking about. In
any case in the last few years there hasn't been a
case in which we did not talk about it. The question
of power ultimately a question about the West, but
in the revolutionary experience, what does this ultimately
mean?
Zhang
Guangtian: Wang Hui's comments just now touch
upon the questions I was asking earlier about folksongs;
these problems are created when we deny these things.
That is to say, created when we have no interest in
our own time, but are completely confident about our
past and future. You ask why people at that time didn't
have this problem, whether it was the Long March,
or going to Yan'an to study and clear things up, there
was always a feeling that they were changing the world,
creating a new world, that they were participants,
the masses were participants, the leaders were also
participants. There was no comparison between past
and future. The future was a communist society that
was still unthinkably far off. It was like Baghdad
is today; the army was approaching. In these past
few days they have torn down the statues of Saddam.
Can you help but worry? The position at that time
was not the same. Then the revolution was successively
swelling, the anti-fascist movement was growing, and
the communist camp was getting larger. What is the
situation now? Only China is left. Only you. If Arab
culture doesn't win this battle, it will have proved
that it is not right. In the end the only one that
can hang with Western culture is Chinese culture.
Prepare to surrender.
Wang
Mingxian: Recent art historical scholarship talks
about a few important points in art in 20th century
China. One is the print-making of the revolutionary
era. Whenever I see Lu Jie I think of the Long March.
He prepared for years, and formally began to realize
it just last year. I think the problem with Chinese
contemporary art right now is precisely the closed
circle, and the art world itself has come to this
realization too. How to solve it? There really is
no route, so Lu Jie decided to walk the Long March
route. I have not seriously researched the Red Army's
Long March; I have only heard legends. At the time
it was a kind of exile, a kind of defeat, a time when
there were actually no routes, where you went somewhere
and didn't know where you would go from there. In
the end, they found a newspaper left by the Nationalists,
which said that Liu Zhidan's Red Army had made it
in Yan'an, and people went to join them. Actually
it was a sudden and necessary thing that arose from
chaos. So we can say that Mao had military and political
genius. This art Long March, although it has stopped,
when you were going, you must have discovered some
things. For example Yu Huiyong, who in the 50s researched
Chinese folk music, came to lead a resurgence of Chinese
folk music in the 60s. I wonder if your Long March
is not looking for something. You talk of connecting
with the common folk. For example, the scientists
who run the Xichang satellite launcher like to paint
peonies and peacocks, and now I'm thinking to myself
that peonie |
