The Great Snowy Mountain

The Village of Dawei

Dawei Bridge

Buddhist Temple, Dawei

Hugh Eakin, "Picasso's Party Line," Art news, 11/2000

Pi San, "Lessons on Contemporary Western and Chinese Art," Flash

Xu Zhen, Video

Liu Dahong, "The Four House Guardians," 1991

Frida Kahlo

Kahloism Website

Long March on the Road

When the Red Army ascended the glaciers of the Great Snow Mountain at 16,000 feet, rain, snow, and fierce wind whipped their bodies. Not accustomed to high altitude, many were too exhausted to walk; they sat down to rest, never to get up again. Mao wrote a poem about the passage through these mountains of the Kunlun range:

Towering aloft
above the earth,
Great Kunlun,
you have witnessed
all that was fairest
in the human world.
As they fly across the sky
the three million dragons
of white jade
Freeze you with piercing cold.

In the days of summer
your melting torrents
Fill streams and rivers
till they overflow,
Changing men
into fish and turtles.
What man can pass judgement
on all the good and evil
You have done
these thousand autumns?　

But today
I say to you Kunlun,
You don't need your great height,
you don't need all that snow!
If I could lean on the sky
I would draw my sword
And cut you in three pieces.
One I would send to Europe,
One to America,
And one we would keep in China.
Thus would a great peace
reign through the world,
For all the world
would share your warmth and cold. 1

Mao - A Calligrapher and Poet

Modern China has been a battlefield of Western influence and interest, power and ideology. The Manchus colonized China and built the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Borrowing from Christianity, the Taiping Rebellion tried to overthrow the Qing Dynasty but was crushed by Manchu forces supported by the British army. The anti-Christian Boxer Movement was suppressed by the joint forces of the Qing and the Western powers who possessed territorial concessions, inland rights of navigation and missionary stations in China after the Opium War. In 1912, China took its first serious step toward modernization by deposing the Manchu Imperial system. Success was achieved because at this time, the Nationalists worked together with the Communists.　

During World War II, when Japan invaded, China was ruled by the Nationalist government and was still a semi-colonial country. The Nationalists betrayed their pact with the Communists, determining war with the Communists as more important than with the Japanese invaders. During this power struggle between the Red Army and the Nationalist government, both sides were aided by foreign military advisers.

Later during the civil war, the Communists fought against the Nationalists, whose supporting power engine was American. Therefore, although the Communist Revolution was a war between the people of China, it was also a war between Communism and Capitalism.

The Long March and the eventual victory of the Communists are the result of the thirty-year struggle between the Left and the Right, the fight for hegemony to modernize this ancient country. The Long March confirmed Chinese Communists' suspicious attitude towards the Soviet Union. Their fierce independence of Moscow's tutelage first began with the distrust of the idea of the city as a modern institution. Urban life, Chinese believe, is a corrupting and demoralizing force. A peasant-focused policy, which later helped to promote Mao as the leader for world Communist revolution, insisted that Marxism would only succeed if combined with locality. All of these ideas have their roots in the Long March.　

Was Mao a Nationalist or Internationalist? Was he both, or neither of them? His aim was to overthrow 'the Three Mountains that lay on the people of the world - Feudalism, Colonialism and Imperialism.'

The small village of Dawei witnessed the convergence of the Second and Fourth battalions of the Red Army, led respectively by Mao and Zhang Guotao. Following the immediate celebration between them was conflict and mistrust. Was the conflict based on ego or a difference of vision and philosophy regarding the Chinese Revolution?

1 Jerome Ch'en, Mao and the Chinese Revolution, Oxford University Press, p.338-9.

Exhibition - Convergence of Communism and Modern Art

A workshop will be held with the participating artists, the curatorial crew, and local residents, including Hans, Tibetans, Qiangs and Muslims. We will present and read excerpts from some of the most 'popular' books on Chinese Modern art: Michael Sullivan's Twentieth Century Chinese Art;; Julia Andrews' Art of the People's Republic of China; and Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen's A Century of Crisis - Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China; Gao Minglu's Inside Out: New Chinese Ar t. The reading will be followed with a slide show of Chinese art since 1989.

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

Texts related to Marxism, Communism and Modern Art. The list of texts is as follows:

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Party Organization and Party Literature, 1905

David Siqueiros, A Declaration of Social, Political and Aesthetic Principles, 1922

Red Group, Manifesto, 1924

Leon Trosky, Literature and Revolution, 1924

October (Association of Artistic Labour), Declaration, 1928

V.N.Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 1929

John Reed Club of New York, Draft Manifesto, 1932

David Siqueiros, Towards a Transformation of the Plastic Arts, 1934

Francis Klingender, Content and Form in Art, 1935

Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, 1934

Fernand Leger, The New Realism Goes On, 1936

Herbert Read, What is Revolutionary Art?, 1935

Meyer Schapiro, The Social Bases of Art, 1936

Andre Breton, D. Rivera, Trotsky, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, 1938

Francis Klingender, Marxism and Modern Art, 1943

Pablo Picasso, Why I Joined the Communist Party, 1944

Fernand Leger, The Human Body Considered as an Object, 1945

George Dondero, The Congressional Record, 1949

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Politics of Freedom, 1950

Alfred Barr Jr., Is Modern Art Communistic?, 1952

Art Workers' Coalition, Statement of Demands, 1970

Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1970

Jean Baudrillard, Ethic of Labour, Aesthetic of Play, 1973

Fredric Jameson, Reflections on the Brecht-Lukacs Debate, 1977

Jurgen Habermas, Modernity - An Incomplete Project, 1981

To end the workshop, we will hold a re-reading ofWorks by Mao, Volume 1-4.