The Long March – A Walking Visual Display – Reports from the Road

After a long period of preparation, the Long March project, “The Mapping of Yanchuan Paper-cuttings,” will officially begin. Over the past year, Long March director and curator Lu Jie has continuously traveled between Bejing and Sha’anxi, conducting investigations, creating contacts, and making preparations. Under the consultation and support of Central Academy of Fine Arts professor Jin Zhilin, and the assistance and help of Yanchuan residents, the large-scale investigation is thoroughly underway. Lu Jie, Long March exhibition director Xiao Xiong, and international director David Tung are presently in the working on the front lines of Yanchuan county. We will continue to send reports from the road in Sha’anxi shortly – the Long Marchers are still on the road. We would like to thank all the friends who have supported us for the past two years by continually asking, “When will you be back on the road?”
To reach Lu Jie on the road, please call 86-13601289995

The Long March project - “The Mapping of Yanchuan Paper-cuttings”

Yanchuan County is located in the northeastern part of the Yan’an municipality. The county is comprised of 17 townships and 346 administrative villages, and has a total population of 170,000, of which farmers comprise 144,000. The total area of the county is 1941 square kilometers. Under the organization of the Long March project, and with close assistance of the Yanchuan County government, cultural cadres from the entire county and art leaders will conduct a thorough survey and collect a sample of every person’s paper-cutting in the entire county. Each individual will be asked to make a cutting – one that they are most familiar with – which, along with each individual’s picture, written or oral biography, economic conditions, as well as documentary video footage, audio recordings, textual documents, and images produced throughout the implementation of this cultural project, will be collected together to form an art work entitled “The Mapping of Yanchuan Paper-cuttings”.

According to preliminary field investigations by the project curator and initiator, Lu Jie, there are approximately over ten thousand individuals in Yanchuan County who are able to make paper-cuttings. Of them, include those who were heavily influenced by the events of the Cultural Revolution, or carry with them the remains of cultural movements from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. The interaction between art and politics were strongly influenced by the formalization of professional art and art criticism during this period. Furthermore, the study will reveal the changing discursive practices and themes influenced by professional artists and from market and commercialism during the 80’s up until the present. At the same time, it will reveal the remains of tradition, especially the ancient symbolic systems from the Hua and Xia dynasties that still stubbornly remain and continue to grow within the changes and development of political and religious factors in the past few decades.

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