July 18
Today's itinerary was simply to return to Guilin, but the group decided it wanted to check out the landscape of the Li River. Around noon, the group tried to rent a boat and travel up the river against the current. With this effort unsuccessful, they had no choice but to rent a mid-size bus.

They joked around in a mellow manner while on the bus, telling stories of the Long March to Guangxi artists Zhou Shaobo and Wei Jun. Zhou and Wei said that the other exhibitions they had participated in were the type that are set up and taken down at the same time; Long March is different, they said, because after an artist takes part in one stage, the core crew moves along to the next. Leaving an artist behind is no problem. The two curators explained that they hoped these two artists would continue to take part in Long March in a special way, turning Guangxi into a base. The curators also gave them two editions of Sui Jianguo's "Jesus in a Mao Suit" statue, trusting them to install these objects near the church in Nanning. Once they reached Nanning in the afternoon, Zhou and Wei helped the group arrange its accommodations, and reluctantly went on their way.

That evening, it was discovered that the portable GPS reader needed for Ingo Gunther's work had been left on the bus, so the group quickly gave a call back to Yangshuo to recover it. The manager of the hotel in Yangshuo, still earnestly distributing Long March postcards even after the group had moved on, took on a serve-the-people attitude and circled the city searching for the gadget.

July 19
Lu Jie flew to Kunming in advance of the group to take part in at the opening of the Upriver Loft. The exhibition contained works by Liu Hong and Fu Liya. This was the first of many Long March activities in Kunming. For this exhibition, Fu Liya had completed the first part of her work Water Asking, which would soon be continued in dialogue with Judy Chicago at Lugu Lake. People had obtained artificial eyelashes from Fu Liya. Male and female participants deconstructed the pleasing characteristics of these objects by attaching them to their faces in "wrong places." The participants also answered a questionnaire Fu had prepared on feminism, using blue and white strips of paper. Fu locked the answers in a glass bottle, and asked Lu Jie to seal it.

Qiu Zhijie and the ranks of the marchers boarded the train. Immediately prior to boarding, they recovered the GPS reader from a kind-hearted Yangshuo bus driver. Recovering the gadget, which stored data from the first three stops along the Long March, added a comic element to the journey, searching, and memory themes of the Guangxi stage of the exhibition.

"Qu Guangci" raised some concerns while trying to get his sculpture through the train station's security checkpoint. His bag was opened and searched, and only after he explained that he was carrying the sculpture for a TV show was he able to clear the checkpoint. Aboard the train, everyone slept right away, making up for lost sleep.

American artist Judy Chicago and her husband Donald Woodman arrived in Beijing. Lisa Horikawa, Guo Yu, Xiao Liu, and Yang Tao got busy with the preparations for her coming lecture at The Loft.

July 20
The Long Marchers arrived in Kunming, and settled into the Haofan Hotel, near the Upriver Loft. They met up with participating artists Ma Han and He Chi who had arrived earlier.

That afternoon, the Long March occupied the Upriver Loft office of owner Ye Yongqing, turning it into a base of operations. A delegation from the Long March Foundation New York arrived, including Shen Meng, Lu Jie's wife. She brought with her the latest results of the Long March Propaganda Team's work in Xu Bing's Brooklyn home-studio: a Long March logo designed by Xu Bing in his New English Calligraphy. The Propaganda Team members who helped with the logo included: Wang Gongxin and Lin Tianmiao, Shen Meng and her children, Cai Guoqiang's wife Wu Honghong and daughter Cai Wenyou, Chen Zhen's wife Xu Min, the biologist Yu Congrong, Ma Limei and others. Xu Bing also designed a special badge for the Long March, featuring a hammer, a sickle, and a calligraphy brush. Qiu Zhijie immediately got on his computer and used the new materials to design Long March T-shirts, flags, and stickers. He burnt these onto a CD and sent Ma Han to have them printed. In this way, the Long March gained a propaganda tool other than the original postcards, new materials that could be quickly distributed to passers-by. The working efficiency of the "Central Red Army" was enough to make observers faint in amazement.

Later in the afternoon, "Qu Guangci," carrying his statue of Qu Guangci, paid visits one by one to the Upriver Loft studios of artists Duan Yuhai, Luan Xiaojie, Liu Jianhua, and Ye Yongqing, as well as the studio of visiting British artist Chris Jones.

July 21
Prior to the group's arrival, Ye Yongqing had been in contact with Jiangwutang Military School about the use of their space.

Yunnan Southern Army Jiangwutang Military School (Jiangwutang means "hall of emphasizing military affairs") was built in the late Qing Dynasty, and remains a key national-level cultural preservation site. It was one of the earliest Western-style military academies in China. Most of its students were members of Sun Yatsen's fraternal organization, and the school played an important role in the 1911 uprising that overthrew Qing rule as well as the "Protect the Nation" movement several years later. It is the alma mater of PRC heroes Zhu De and Ye Jianying. The former site of the campus is now divided into three parts. One part has been rented to an extracurricular school for young people, one part remains as a museum of revolutionary history, and the third part is being converted into a long-term exhibition space for the works of early communist photographer Fang Suya. The Long March picked this site for an exhibition called Indoctrination, which was held just outside the history museum. All of the works exhibited there were installations having to do with the idea of the classroom, looking to interrogate the changes in both Chinese traditional education and the Western educational model, and thinking about reactions to the process of modernization.

Ye Yongqing and his wife Fu Liya came early to Jiangwutang to assist the Long March team in installing the exhibition. The display room in the museum of revolutionary history was quickly converted into an exhibition hall for Long March works. As soon as the works were hung, the historical meaning of the site came alive. The walls of the room in which the Prisoners' Ink Wash Works Cases series by Zhu Qingsheng and others was displayed were filled with images of revolutionary martyrs. As these "martyrs" were prisoners in their own day, venue and works were able to merge into a cohesive whole. Xu Bing's aides, the "Long March Propaganda Team," pasted the New English Calligraphy Long March logo all around the first exhibition hall. The pictures on the walls in this room were of the late Qing Yunnan Revolution, and across from these was the saying "Live Honorably, Die Gloriously" in the calligraphy of Mao Zedong. This original space raised the question of "indoctrination," and continually preserved a tripartite discursive tension among tradition, revolution, and modernity.

The exhibition having been installed, the marchers moved to the Upriver Loft, where in the second floor display room they re-installed the Li Tianbing-Li Jincheng Father-Son Photography Exhibition from Ruijin, the Long March's first site.

This exhibition was re-installed because it pertained to questions the Long March wished to discuss about the situation of artists in Kunming. In recent years, Kunming's artistic circle has been extraordinarily active. There is now an old factory on Xiba Road that is home to Jingpin Gallery, The Upriver Loft, The Nautica Center, and the studios of Pan Dehai and more than 30 other famous painters. Houxin Avenue is home to the Upriver Art Club, a multi-purpose club that includes a dormitory, studios, a café, and a small exhibition hall. These artistic facilities, combined with the new community of artists' studios in Dali and the Muwangfu Post Station in Lijiang, constitute a group of resources that is widely shared, creating a strong artistic network. Moreover, these facilities have built friendly, cooperative relationships with local government and media. These artists have built a self-sufficient, though not isolated, artistic system outside the so-called "art centers" of Beijing and Shanghai. And due to the international experience and connections of leading figure Ye Yongqing, this Yunnan art network is fairly globalized. When the Long March team arrived in Kunming, young British artists Chris Jones and Pauline Thomas were working in their studios at the Upriver Loft, and living in the Upriver Art Club. Their ongoing exhibition Right and Wrong, then taking place at the Upriver Loft, was included in an August 3 Long March exhibition.

The art scene in Yunnan is characterized by its relaxed and cooperative attitude, as well as its active development and utilization of all local social resources. This makes it an interesting starting point for a global dialogue, as well as a prototype for the maturing art system throughout China. It relates to photographer Li Tianbing, who, in the absence of electric power, shot all of his photographs with natural light, exemplifying a spirit of self-dependence. The Long March will raise this question once more in the Northern Shaanxi city of Nanniwan.

At night, Yunnan artists met at the Upriver Art Club, where they heard a lecture from Lu Jie introducing the activities of the Long March during its first three stages. Qiu Zhijie kept busy projecting pictures with his computer. After the talk, Qiu hurried to the dental hospital to fix a toothache that had been bothering him all day.

July 22
This afternoon, the Indoctrination exhibition opened at Jiangwutang Military School.

Xu Bing's New English Calligraphy Long March stickers were laid out one by one on the windowsills. Viewers were encouraged to take the brushes and ink which had been prepared and try their hand at writing in this script. Shen Maotou, Long March Propaganda Team member and son of Shen Meng, had studied New English Calligraphy under Xu Bing in New York. He became a "little teacher" at Jiangwutang, teaching other children how to write the characters.

Displayed in the same room as Xu Bing's New English Calligraphy was Wang Jinsong's video work, One History Class of Mine. After sitting before the camera for ten minutes without expression, the artist begins to write one line on the blackboard: "An accomplished fact cannot be contested."

In the second hall was Ma Han's work White Shirt Drawing Seminar. Ma Han starched a set of eighteen white shirts, molding them to resemble bodiless statues. The shirts were hung in midair like flying birds, and a group of school children holding sketchbooks were seated underneath. Ma Han gave the kids an onsite lesson in charcoal drawing. After the sketching session was over, the shirts were distributed one per student as a "homework assignment." Ma Han asked the students to draw directly on the shirts and return them to him as the third phase of this work. After distributing the shirts, Ma Han led the assembled viewers in recreating a scene from a famous Cultural Revolution era print of a struggle session entitled Blood Clothing by Wang Shikuo. Ye Yongqing willingly played the part of the old landlord being criticized in the picture. Lu Jie, posing as chairman, answered questions from the film crew, introducing the notion of curating by talking about the meaning of spatial and historical context and artistic education. In this re-enactment "blood clothing" was replaced by a clean white shirt; the shift symbolized the end of the connection between art and change.

In the third hall were two old works, Zhang Peili's classic video Standard Pronunciation-Water Cihai and Song Dong's Another Class, Are You Willing to Play with Me?

In the fourth hall, He Chi worked on his Large Character Pinyin Teaching Materials. He Chi rewrote thirty of Mao Zedong's poems using characters with the same pronunciation but different meanings from the originals, printing a set of posters to be hung in a classroom and a set of low-priced textbooks on cheap paper. A sunflower blossom was placed on each desk, and viewers sat on top of the blossoms, using the textbooks that lay open on the floor to follow He Chi in a guided reading of the poems. The children in the class had not previously studied Mao's Poem "Seven Rules, One Long March," so they were introduced to this history in an auditory experience with a set of identical sounds with variant meanings.

In the fifth hall, Zhu Qingsheng, Zhu Yan, Kong Chang'an, and Ding Binhe collaborated to produce the Prisoners'Ink Wash Works Cases series. These four artists realized this work long ago, in 1986, when they were graduate students at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The work is conducted in a manner similar to a sociological survey. Ink washes are used as an educational tactic for Beijing prisoners. Different prisoners' individual characteristics become visible on paper, bringing out the differences between amateurs and professionals, expressionists and aesthetes, regulated and divergent personalities. The exhibition included working photos, class outlines, and communications from Zhu Qingsheng and others. One handkerchief on which a prisoner had drawn a landscape scene was particularly able to attract the gaze of viewers. This exhibition would continue at Jiangwutang Military School for one week.

That evening Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie held a meeting at the Upriver Loft with the female artists who were to take part in the upcoming exhibition at Lugu Lake. They talked continuously of the substance and arrangement of the works to be exhibited.

August 2
The Long Marchers split into two groups, some heading to Kunming by plane and others by bus. Commander-in-chief Lu Jie and deputy Qiu Zhijie took the plane in order to quickly get started on their next set of operations in Kunming. Those going back on the bus caught up on their sleep during the 9-hour bus ride through the backwoods of Yunnan province. With their last visit still fresh in mind, the marchers felt at home back in Kunming.

Ma Han arrived in Kunming earlier than the curatorial team to begin preparing his work for the next site, on the train from Kunming to Zunyi, scheduled for August 6, in his hotel room. He transformed the entire room into a chaotic studio, enough to scare away the maid, whom he did not see for days. He planned to lend train passengers old books from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, giving them a chance to rekindle memories of those years through tangible objects. A huge movable bookshelf had been placed between the two beds, and hundreds of books covered the floor.

August 3
Installation began on a sound art exhibition at Luo Xu's The Native's Nest. As soon as the Long March curators arrived, the first thing they saw was Luo Xu himself and a pile of slogans chaotically littering the side of the street. Some had been written in lacquer directly onto the concrete ground, others were inscribed on paper. The characters were one meter high each, written in bold colors and strong fonts, and the content was a poem about the Long March by Mao Zedong and other Red Army slogans. Just inside the entrance was a sofa, on top of which was a note that read: "this sofa is the property of individual behavior; non-Long March activities not permitted." Luo Xu's naughty child demeanor and arbitrary and complicated personality vividly came to the surface.

Luo Xu is a sculptor in the tradition of the Yi minority, who several years ago borrowed millions of RMB to build a sculpture garden on the outskirts of Kunming. Called a sculpture "nest," this appellation accurately describes the character of the place; it was pieced together like a bird pieces together a nest. The rumor is that Luo first used white ash to paint a circle on this mountain slope, and then instructed the construction crew to build wherever he placed bamboo poles. It collapsed multiple times during the construction process, scaring the workers. Finally, multiple unsuccessful efforts led to an ideal structure, which looks like a loaf of steamed bread from outside, and appears from inside as if height, width, and depth have been set at random, creating the effect of a maze. The larger rooms mostly have domed ceilings, supported by girders in a cathedralesque manner. Light comes through skylights and holes set into the walls. This piece of architecture, which has grown like a plant, has become a display hall for Luo Xu's sculptures, in which works he has created over nearly twenty years in all imaginable sculptural styles are scattered into nearly every corner. The most conspicuous work in the place takes a thigh as its main element, and has an obvious air of life-worship to it, enhanced by and enhancing the arched ceiling, full of mystical power.

In the earlier process of investigating sites for the Long March, Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie made a preliminary visit to Luo Xu, and were stirred by the combination of his sculptures and their environment, moved by the way in which this man creates like an ant-king. He made them think of the palace of found objects built by that harbinger of surrealism Ferdinand Cheval. This sort of artistic site could not be shipped off and exhibited in an art "center" like Venice, Kassell, Beijing, or Shanghai. To contact this work of art, one must come directly to the scene, must experience it firsthand. On this account, the Long March curators especially chose to hold here the sort of activity that is most dependent on firsthand experience-a sound installation exhibition. The special geographic situation and architectural layout of Luo Xu's nest made it ideal for this sort of exhibition. The curators hoped to draw on both of these strengths, and to create value for the "site" out of the significance of the local culture and the physical location.

Works by Yu Xiaofeng, Ren Qian, and Ma Jie had already been installed, and interactive works by Li Chuan and Li Yong were still being installed. These five artists from Chongqing were also participants in China's first true sound art exhibition, held one year ago at the Mustard Seed Garden in Beijing, members of China's first generation of experimental sound artists. All are incredibly young, though their works grow more mature by the day. Their work on the site let the organizers relax, so the Long March team retreated to the city in order to prepare for that night's opening reception.

That night at the Loft there would be three activities: the Exhibition about an Exhibition at the Upriver Loft; an exhibition at the Nordica Center next door to last year's "Dali Ink Painting Studio" combined with an ink painting session; and an open studio exhibition by all of the artists living in the Loft complex. The result would be a large-scale open exhibition at the Loft, including a reportative exhibition by two visiting British artists, Chris Jones and Pauline Thomas, entitled Reality and Falsehood.

Exhibition about an Exhibition collected works by several popular Chinese easel painters, but arranged them according to a curatorial principal of circularity. In terms of works, this meant showing not the most well-known works, but works that showed the creative background, materials, and vestiges of the artists' earlier works, looking more at the process behind their "finished products" than the products themselves. In terms of artist selection, this meant choosing artists with no prior connection to the Loft in Kunming.

For example, Zhang Xiaogang, who explores the contemporary soul of China in paintings that have the flare of old photographs, was represented in this exhibition by a series of actual photographs entitled Credentials. Unfortunately, a planned installation by Zhang Xiaogang entitled My Mother Country was not completed due to time constraints. The Credentials series includes photographs of several dozen IDs and certificates held by Zhang since his childhood, including his student ID from Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, blood donor card, China Artists' Association membership card, marriage license, work license, graduation certificate from a short course on Marxist theory, and more recent driver's license, property deed, and a temporary residence permit for Beijing. The fact that the blank for "reason for coming to Beijing" on the residence permit is filled in "economic and commercial activities" makes the viewer think of Zhang Xiaogang's paintings and his fame. In addition to being extremely comical, this also makes the viewer think deeply about the unceasing rigidity with which society seeks to categorize people. An individual life is contained and controlled on all sides by a society stratified and divided into specialties, trapped in the complex webs of economy and ideology. Though the pictures in Credentials are all of the standard "passport photo" variety, what the installation reveals is the many masks a single person wears in relation to society. "Credentials" showed the multiplicity required by society's many requirements of its members even as it exhibited relics of the destruction implicit in the processes of individual maturation and social change. The system of authority whereby existing power structures have the power to determine identity also exerts an untraceable influence on the artist, creating a sort of restructuring amidst all the disintegration. Credentials presents traces of Zhang Xiaogang's personal career, and like his Big Family series of oil paintings, it ineffably faces the vicissitudes of the individual in relation to society.

During the activities in Sichuan, Ye Yongqing earned the title of "scout hero." He is a knight who has traveled far and wide to bring back for his Yunnan paesani an understanding of the international art scene. Every time Ye Yongqing, or General Ye as his friends call him, returns to China, those around him love to hear his stories about the world beyond. He has already filled five passports. These filled passports show him off not as a traveler, but as someone with a broad international vision, with a fine tuned plan for his own locality. He is an artist's artist, and for that reason he created the Upriver Loft space in Kunming where the current exhibition was about to be held. His installation From Here to There was the story of himself and the Upriver Loft: photocopied renditions of each of his passport pages created a long aisle along the floor, with a color photograph at the beginning and end of this aisle. At the beginning was a picture of an old factory, the site of the Upriver Loft before it was restored. In the middle was Ye Yongqing's own studio, brightly adorned with a few of his childish and natural paintings. The final photograph, at the end of the row of copied visas, was of the first exhibition held in the Upriver Loft after its restoration, a show of works by students entitled Unfinished. The photo depicts students standing in the space bearing placards that read "unfinished," the motto of this international traveler. Pasted amidst this mosaic of international travel was Ye Yongqing's personal artistic world, on the one hand linking with society's timeworn dicta, on the other connecting to the opening of space and the advent of new activities.

In one corner of the Upriver Loft, a tape of an interview with painter Song Yonghong attracted attention. A computer on a table showed slides of daily life amongst the Beijing artists' community: studios, kitchens, studios. It showed a system of personal relationships constantly in flux, a sort of common knowledge base, an excessively specialized system of identity, stratified along many different lines: age, place of origin, personality and experience, fame, money, even food preferences and artistic style.

Chengdu painter Yang Mian displayed a computer generated cartoon of an "ideal residential community," sarcastically mixing his terror and worry over the "beautiful new world." Kunming painter Zhang Zhongqi used a camera to record the lonely and quiet daily life of a former Red Army soldier.

Yang Shaobin's photographs Friends were taken to assist him in creating oil paintings. The photos show people fighting viciously and friends of the artist. Yue Minjun's video installation, on the other hand, did not initially resemble his paintings. It showed a visit to an elementary school in a poor mountain village, the lens repeatedly flashing in the students' dirty faces, tattered clothing, and simple gazes. They reminded the viewer of the faces in Yue Minjun's paintings, as the children's grins and laughter looked wise and sagacious in the context of utter poverty.

Another wall of The Loft was filled with small works left by the international artists who had previously lived and worked in the space: Bao Li's video Birds; Lisa's material work Jewelry; and Takahashi Tomoko's photomontage. The presentation of these works in combination with the open studio exhibitions taking place combined to present the history of The Loft over the past few years in a single exhibition.

At 7:30, people assembled in the Upriver Loft. After Ye Yongqing had introduced Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie, he especially introduced Shen Meng who had come all the way from New York. She is one of the creators of the Long March foundation and an important participant in the Long March's activities in Kunming. She was the maker of a work depicting the Long March Propaganda Team's activities the previous week at Jiangwutang Military School in Kunming. Her appearance elicited a round of applause. After the opening ceremony, people moved next door to Sweden's Nordica Center to participate in another Long March activity: Degeneration: Works by the Dali Ink Painting Studio.

The Dali Ink Painting Studio was opened two years ago by Li Xianting and Ye Yongqing, and was funded by Soo Bin Chua of Singapore with the aim of creating a modern genre of ink painting. Zhang Xiaogang, Zhou Chunya, Mao Xuhui, Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Wang Guangyi, Yue Minjun, and Yang Shaobin are some of the famous oil panters who have participated in the project, converging on Dali for a week of ink painting. These painters, all trained in the Western academic style, ran into the problem that the very materials of Chinese ink and wash painting raised their expectations, and creating in this sort of collective studio atmosphere caused the painters to reflect on their own education. They wondered whether the creation-display model was truly the only paradigm for artistic creation, whether other ways of playing the game existed, perhaps psychological frameworks that would incorporate local culture. Thinking about these questions, people came to appreciate the many works of alternative ink and wash painting on display at the Nordica Center. From beginning to end, the viewers looked to the works for traces of classic ink and wash, ever and again looking to the paintings for a connection with old styles, and feeling astonished at this break with tradition.

This "gathering of scholars" style of exchange made the curators of the Long March quite happy, and so, at 20:30 that evening, there began an ink painting session. Lu Jie, who began as a student of Chinese painting, painted a Red Army flag waving in the grasslands of a snowy mountain. Picking up where he left off, Zhang Xiaogang added the overcast eyes often seen in his paintings, and Yue Minjun, Mao Xuhui, and Cai Simin one by one took turns. This precious sheet of rice paper became invaluable, and after the painters had all added their contributions, Lu Jie's son Maotou and Zhang Xiaogang's daughter Huanhuan had a chance to paint.

At 22:30 that evening, the children had grown tired as the adults sat in the Upriver Loft drinking and chatting. The large sheet from the ink painting session contained traces of everyone present. A slightly drunk Qiu Zhijie took his place at the front of the table and coined a verse of doggerel directed at Upriver Loft owner Ye Yongqing. The poem read: "The Red Army doesn't fear distance or disorder, because the Upriver Loft is their headquarters." Ye Yongqing responded that "the event's over, there's no need to keep sucking up." Everyone broke out into laughter, and with that went their separate ways.

August 4
At midday Kunming artists rendezvoused at the Loft and boarded a bus for Luo Xu's museum The Native's Nest. Upon arrival they discovered that the previous night's rain had already ruined the slogans written on paper and taped to the floor outside the museum. Characters that had been written on those papers stayed imprinted on the cement ground, making everyone laugh. The sound exhibition took up three rooms of the maze-like gallery.

In the large room, Luo Xu's clay sculptures were displayed in rows like members of a choir. The raised dome ceiling of the hall gave the feeling of a church, and here were projected several video works relating to sound that had been brought along by the Long March ranks.

Wang Gongxin's Karaoke, from a technological perspective, was foremost a visual game. A lens approaching a mouth shows huge teeth, forcing the viewer into a state of physiological discomfort. Digital enhancement had placed images of people singing into microphones onto each of the teeth. Particularly striking was the image of a bare-chested male singer, who carried associations of the vernacular culture of Beijing's alleyway denizens. Putting these images inside of a mouth formed a violent contrast: the mouth, a necessarily sanitary and extremely personal space transformed into a public space, a venue for entertainment. The people singing karaoke use their own mouths to produce similar sounds. In imitation of the moving noise icons on karaoke videodiscs, which invited viewers to sing along. This video actually invaded the mouth of one viewer. Intricate sound editing is a specialty of Wang Gongxin's works, and the work was successful in that the loud screams lead to subconscious imitation.

Wu Ershan completed a work for a Jazz stage entitled Evolution Jazz, its screen filled with dizzying numbers and all sorts of scribbles. Accompanying this work was Chen Dili's MiDi-produced music, which turned The Native's Nest into a very strange place.

Chen Xiaoyun's Who is an Angel is a classic example of the inversion of sound and image. The image portrays people hopping in many different situations, but because the floor has been digitally removed from below them, they appear to be jumping in midair. The images were set to the sound of barking dogs, at once inexplicable and suggestive of a distant causal relationship.

Yang Zhenzhong's Light as Fuck presented images of the artist holding a shrunken version of the television tower in Shanghai. In order to prevent the tower from toppling, he constantly adjusts his position. His attention is concentrated on the "famous pearl of the east" balancing atop his fingers, leading him to make rapid subconscious movements. The noise of his footsteps has been enhanced, creating a threatening relationship with the rocking tower at the center of his lens.

Zhou Xiaohu's Nursery Rhyme was another work about vocal transmission. Children standing in a circle repeat a sentence one to another; when the sentence is misheard, it gets repeated incorrectly, sometimes completely transforming in meaning.

These videos, from a psychological, physical, and social perspective reflected the important role which sound plays in contemporary art, providing a background for the several works of sound art which premiered at The Native's Nest.

Moving in from the main hall, viewers were led into a deep maze by oil lamps in rough clay bowls. One dark room after another was hung with gloomy oil lamps, with an occasional scarecrow hung upside down in a corner. In the dark, ears could pick up the sounds of tiny bells from afar, and as one moved further in, the oil lamps became increasingly frequent, to the point where the viewer consciously avoided bumping into them. The noise of the bells also became clearer and clearer. Tiny star-like dots of light appeared in the distance. In the midst of this light and noise, the viewer suddenly felt a burst of hot air, like the breath of an animal. Borrowing on the subtle weakness of the oil lights, viewers discovered a bull nibbling on a scarecrow, with small bells hanging both from the scarecrow and the bull's tail, producing noises in synch with the bull's chewing. This work was by Ren Qian.

Compared with the scattered nature of Ren Qian's work, Yu Xiaofeng's Explosive Laughter seemed crazy and abrupt. In a round space, viewers saw a large round vat full of ink and mist, with a dozen or so small portable radios suspended above, emitting noisy, scrambled news broadcasts. The portable radios were hung by filament near several sticks of burning incense, so that each time a stick burned through to the head, it severed a filament, causing the radio to drop, splashing into the pot of ink. The sound of the splash ended the sound of the radio, and the space suddenly erupted into a moment of fantastic laughter. This was an "automatic" interactive sound work, its internal design having predicted this sort of movement and transition. Owing to the large quantity of incense and small tape recorders, as far as the viewers were concerned, this sort of movement was similarly unpredictable.

In other spaces of The Native's Nest hang works by Li Yong, Li Chuan, and Ma Jie.

Li Yong's work Entering the City, Leaving the City was the most turbulent of the entire exhibition. He whimsically drove three three-wheeled motorcycles into the space of the Native's Nest, the sort of motorcycles with canopy covers very common on the far outskirts of Chinese cities. Such vehicles make a great deal of noise and emit much exhaust, are uncomfortable to sit upon, but are cheap and convenient-commonplace objects in a China on its way to wealth and happiness. Li Yong took his inspiration for this work from the trip he made on such a vehicle from Kunming to The Native's Nest. He shot two segments of video, one segment moving from beyond the city into the city, the other moving from the center of the city toward the outskirts. The gradual changes in the scenery narrate the differences between the city and the countryside, the vast discrepancies between postmodern civilization in urban cities and low standards of living just beyond these cities. The birth pangs of economic reform and the postmodern mixture of urban and rural give rise to restlessness and coarseness, a demented energy and desire put clearly before the viewer. Two televisions played the videos, actually placed atop motorcycles, and the viewers were forced to sit atop the motorcycles in order to view the piece. Afterwards, the motorcycles were started up in the space, which is quite small, as assistants dragged the electrical cords attached to the televisions to make for smooth riding. But this proved impossible, as the space was filled entirely with Luo Xu's sculptures, so the vehicles had nowhere to safely go. Furthermore, the two vehicles often blocked each other's route. Everywhere was congested and awkward, moving forward or backward was equally difficult, and the roar of the vehicles filled the viewers' ears. Movement was suppressed, and only the desire for movement manifested itself.

Moving from Li Yong's work, viewers came to the work of Li Chuan. They walked through a hallway onto a red wooden path, embedded with a row of white footsteps. Stepping on these footprints, the space emitted sounds one by one. The dozen or so footprints formed one sentence: "Go forward along the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics." Originally, sound equipment was connected below each footprint. As each footprint was stepped upon, it would emit the sound of a single character in the sentence. In reality, a person could traverse the hallway without stepping on each footprint, but viewers were intent on trying this. The white footprints were tempting in and of themselves, and attracted the participation of all present.

After passing through Li Chuan's hallway, people entered a room decorated like a conference hall. Exactly in the center was a massive table, covered in a white tablecloth. One large grass shoe in the style of those worn by the Red Army, though two meters long, hung above the table, shaking left and right. The shoe's mate was tiny in comparison, the size of an actual grass shoe. The small shoe was installed atop an electric toy that moved chaotically back and forth atop the table. The exhibit used a red string to connect the two shoes. The small mobile shoe controlled the movement of the hanging large shoe, but the red thread still controlled its range of motion, and the large shoe, swinging back and forth, influenced the movement of the small shoe. The two shoes moved in awkward but interactive relation, an illustration of Karl Popper's idea of "situational logic." The shadow of the large shoe covered the tablecloth, and the electric car with the small shoe was in its shadow. A brush had been affixed to the back of the toy car, and the car had been filled with colored dye, so that when the car moved, it left traces behind on the table, like blood marks. Because the relationship between the movement of the large and small shoes was mutually causal, the final form of the traces left behind on the table could not have been predicted, a sort of authorless abstract painting. The coloring ranged from dry to wet and light to dark, the result of artist Ma Jie constantly adding new dye, leaving dilemmatic traces of the vehicle's presence.

Encounter with "influence" and "anxiety" as core narrative principles: this was the common point among the several sound works exhibited at The Native's Nest. These influences and anxieties were sometimes as concrete as a red line or an electric cord, and other times hidden as an auditory temptation. In these works, no movement was automatic, and the forms of influence were many, including Long March itself as a catalyst for a sort of "red memory." Other times the influence was a certain kind of ideological discourse, and yet others it was a local experience. Sometimes it was a specific technology expressed as a component of space.

Having come to appreciate several of the new sound works on display, the viewers came to realize that sound is perhaps only a pretext-the more important concepts of movement and site.

When people returned to the main hall of The Native's Nest, it suddenly began to rain heavily, and water leaked in through holes in the roof, dripping on the projectors and computers, destroying everyone's blind faith in the architecture of the building. The sound works were exhibited amidst claps of thunder in a sort of interplay between man and nature.

The original plan for the evening was to move several kilometers to Cuotuo Village and hold a screening of Jiang Zhi's documentary work Shi Zhi. Cuotuo Village became famous in the 1980s after the movie Cuotuo Years, which reflected the situation of young intellectuals in the post-Cultural Revolution period. Today, the village is a sea of Karaoke bars decorated with Roman columns and "peasant" restaurants. Many young intellectuals have become wealthy businessmen, and the town has become a place where they come to remember the spirit of their youth and spend money. Jiang Zhi's documentary depicts the life of Shi Zhi, a representative of the young intellectual poets. Shi Zhi's poems were once circulated among young intellectuals around the country, and the poem "Believe the Future" consoled countless hurt and hopeless youth during the Cuotuo years. Shi Zhi became hopeful owing to his poems, though his body was destroyed by his ideology, and to this day he remains in a mental institution in Beijing, writing his life story. The curators were thrilled to be bringing a documentary about Shi Zhi straight to Cuotuo Village.

After a few phone calls, the curators learned that because of heavy rains and road repairs, the road to Cuotuo Village was no longer passable. After much deliberation, Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie decided to change their plan, return to Kunming, and show the documentary there in a young intellectuals' restaurant. There was a massive Mao statue in the restaurant, and the documentary was projected just below it.

August 5
The ten-plus artists who would exhibit at Lugu Lake continued their preparations, with the support of the Yunnan Academy of Fine Arts. After several days of running around by Fu Liya and Shen Yu, the exhibition appeared to be in good shape. This exhibition was organized proactively by participants of the Long March, without effort from the curators (who were of course happy to see something like this take place that would broaden the scope of the Long March). Objectively speaking, it was yet another example of the positive art atmosphere prevalent in Kunming.

The museum of the Yunnan Academy of Fine Arts very openly accepted all of the proposals by female artists at Lugu Lake, and in a few short days, installed a very informative documentary exhibition. To call it a documentary exhibition, however, is not entirely accurate, as things like Judy Chicago's prayer flags were exhibited directly in the museum after being shown in Qidi Shanzhuang, and Sun Guojuan's installation of cotton candy was moved from the Mosuo people's vicinity to the exhibition site. The context of a matriarchal society, it seemed, had disappeared only physically; it would exist throughout conceptually. These works would be seen as re-manifestations of the original works. The richness and vitality of the exhibition had people thinking about the potential of an eventual comprehensive exhibition about the Long March project. If just the results of the activities at Lugu Lake could be exhibited this resplendently, and this being only 1/20th of the entire Long March, the future seemed bright. Furthermore, since the Long March was about creating discourse, the power of a coherent narrative of all 20 sites might far exceed the sum of its parts.

Liu Hong came to Lugu Lake as an observer, a friend of artists Fu Liya and others. This bystander raised an interesting question: during each of the performance works realized at Lugu Lake, video and still camera lenses were present. Would performance art fundamentally change in nature, lose its natural quality, owing to the presence of the lens? But if there was not a good record, performance could not be transmitted beyond its initial site. In the information age, is the value of unrecorded performance underrated? Liu Hong took a series of photographs relevant to this question. Her photos took up a series of questions faced also by the curators, and while her stance may have been oppositional, in the curators' eyes, she brought to the fore a set of unavoidable questions about the internal contradictions of the contemporary art system, and revealed tensions among the notions of happening, first-hand experience, and performance which underlay the debate. Therefore, the curators gladly provided Liu Hong with many images to use as "fodder."

At three that afternoon, the exhibition opened, and after introducing the artists, Lu Jie gave a speech of thanks to local Kunming artists for their support of the Long March project. Fu Liya read aloud a letter left by Judy Chicago, who had already returned to the U.S. The soft sculpture of Qu Guangci sat quietly in the front row through it all. Returning to Kunming, the Long Marchers thought about all that had happened in Lugu Lake with depth and serenity, thinking that the meaning of the Long March had more clearly expressed itself in the space between the works, and that it had made a pleasant atmosphere come over the group. In the exhibition hall, the female artists donned newly distributed Long March T-Shirts, signing each other's, and taking group photos, even with the two male curators.

That evening, the Long March group invited local artists to a banquet, and Yue Minjun brought along his digital camera, engaging in spontaneous creation. He shot dishes, and he shot people, almost as if establishing some connection between the food on the table and the friends surrounding it. Ye Yongqing worried Yue would misconstrue this as "conceptual photography" and give up painting. He flashed a piece of paper, the text of an incredible story about a bird that his teenage daughter had written in classical Chinese. The group members were amazed when they read it, gasping in admiration.

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