| Site
2, July 8-12
Jinggangshan Mountain, Jiangxi Province
Newly renovated Tomb of the First
Chinese Emperor, Yan
Room where Zhu De and
Mao Zedong converged
The Red Army Museum of Posters
and Script, the slogan reads:"Red Army
is the pioneer who brings rights to peasants and
workers."
Tourists in Red Army Uniforms,
Jingganshan Mountain
Ruins of Catholic Church
The Residence of Mao and his
second wife, He Zijian
Yang
Shaobin, "Untitled
No. 3," 1993
Yang
Shaobin, "Untitled
No. 4," 1993
Zhang Xiaogang,
"Bloodline: Family Portrait No.2," 1994
Ingo Gunther, from the Exhibition,
"Global Change, " Bonn, 1992
Ingo Gunther,
"Refugee Republic, Tokyo," 1997
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History
Musical based on revolutionary
history
In October 1933,
Nationalist Generalisimo Jiang mobilised for the
fifth and what would be the greatest of his Anti-Red
Wars. One year later, the Red Army was finally forced
into retreat in what was then widely regarded to
be its funeral march. In this Fifth Campaign, Jiang
deployed 900,000 troops, while the Red Army only
had a combined strength of 180,000. Even with an
additional 200,000 partisans and Red Guards, the
Communists could only muster a firing power of somewhat
less than 100,000 rifles, with limited grenades,
shells and ammunition.
The Route of the Long March
Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai- Shek) launching
the Fifth Campaign
The
Nationalist army's Fifth Campaign was planned
by Jiang, German
advisers, notably General von Falkenhausen. It
was an expensive war: Jiang's army marched slowly
and effectively. Their blockade of supplies was
successful, resulting, for example, in a lack
of salt for the Red Army. But the peasants remained
loyal to the Red Army, smuggling goods for them,
in the hopes of retaining the land they had recently
been allotted. The Kuomintang (the Nationalist
government) press releases estimated that about
1,000,000 people were killed or starved during
this Fifth Campaign.
 
Stills from East is Red, 1959
Show:
Michelangelo Antonioni's
famous four-hour documentary of China, Chung
Kuo Cina (1972). Like other Chinese, the
villagers who will view this film had daily meeting
for one month in 1973 to criticize the film by the
'anti-China Clown,' the most criticized Western
artist in China. Most of these villagers had never
seen the film.
Because
of his revolutionary approach, Antonioni had been
invited by the Chinese government, after many years
of its closed-door policy, to make a documentary
that would depict the fruit of its revolution to
the West. Antonioni's resulting work, however, was
a disappointment of proportions to be vilified.
Official criticism focused on the belief that Antonioni
belittled enormous industrial and economic accomplishments
as quaint expressions of peasant ingenuity. The
Communists had no interest as being perceived as
either quaint or ingenious, but as accomplished.
As Umberto Eco wrote
in De Interpretatione, or
the Difficulty of Being Marco Polo, ''when
his Chinese escorts told Antonioni, with pride,
that a refinery had been built from nothing but
scavenged material, the film emphasizes the miracle
of' 'his humble factory, made with discarded materials.'...
But the Chinese see in it an insistence on an 'Inferior'
industry, just at the historical moment in which
they are successfully closing their industrial gap..."1
Overnight, Antonioni
became a figure despised by 800 million Chinese.
He had created 'an
openly anti-Chinese, anti-Communist and counter-revolutionary
work,' and labeled as one 'out
of the pack of imperialists and social imperialists.'
Posters of him appeared on the street defaced with
swastikas.
Antonioni, stills from Chung
Kuo Cina, 1972
Was the attack on
Antonioni a failure to understand his work due to
historical reasons, or due to reasons of political
desire and ideological difference? Was the attack
a problem of East meets West, of mutual incomprehensibility,
of a notion of an oriental world that could never
be fully known by outsiders and that would therefore
remain forever mysterious, as Antoinioni repeatedly
narrates in the film? Had he been able to go beyond
the mere 'glance
of a tourist,' would his work have bridged the cultural
distance of the film and achieved the didactic needs
of the Chinese?
The movie
will be shown in a yard nearby an old well and bamboo bridge, in the village where
Mao lived. Showing movies in rice fields or public yards was one of the rare cultural
activities allowed in 70s when Antonioni made his China tour. Village people lived
a life that remained largely similar from the 1930s through the 1970s and until
today. What do the peasants of today think of Trotsky, Antonioni and the Long
March? Both Trotsky and Antonioni were Westerners who influenced Chinese history,
both were reviled, and yet most Chinese people have never seen their works.
Discuss:
We will analyze why and how art in China developed
from propaganda illustrations and revolutionary
posters to the pastoral, humble gaze of daily life
as seen in Antonio's film
narration and in Andrew Wyeth's
extreme popularity
in China during the 70s and 80s. We will also examine
the more recent trend of Political Pop and Cynical
Realism artists, who were, during the 80s and 90s,
the first movement of Chinese contemporary artists
to be embraced by Western curators; the phenomenon
of their rise being a revisitation of the traditional
propogandist art genre. No matter how 'renown'
we might perceive these artists, the people living
in the mountains of Jiangxi have likely never encountered
their art.
In addition to the continuing works
of Xiao Xiong and Song Dong, we will add an additional
project -- distributing flyers and posters of relevant
art works to the following sites:
1. The Revolution
Museum
2. The Red Army
Money Factory Museum
3. The Red Army
Hospital Museum
4.
Mao's former
residence
5. The Red Army
Relics of Posters and Script Museum
6. Temple of Taoist
Nun Residence - where Mao and his second wife, He,
a Guerrilla leader famous for fighting with two
pistols, were married.
7. The Bridge of
Joint Forces - where soldiers from the country and
city uprisings joined to form the Red Army
8.
The Fourth Segment of the Red Army's
former headquarters
- the only public museum in the area which is operated
through private funding.
9. The Memorial of Emperor Yan -
the first ancestor of the Chinese people.
The tourists and workers
in these revolutionary spaces will be confronted
with experiences they would never likely associate
with these sites, specifically, local and international
contemporary visual art. It is impossible to predict
the outcome of this encounter; our only certainty
is that we will continue to progress on our Long
March. Shall we call the action 'to
seed the art for future harvest,' as Mao suggested?
Note
1 Seymour Chatman, Antonioni,
or, The Surface of the World, University of
California Press, London, 1985, p.174.
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