Lasting several years and still ongoing today, “The Long March – A Walking Visual Display,” aside from having contemporary art go to the countryside “from a top to bottom, outside to inside” approach, has also tried to create a fundamental connection between artistic creativity, display, narration, and history and the contemporary from the perspective of visual culture by continuously constructing a subjectivity “from the bottom up.”

For half a year in 2004, the Long March team, in conjunction with the Yanchuan County government, worked in the field covering over 1,940 square kilometers and surveying over 180,000 people to conduct a thorough investigation of the state of papercuttings in one Chinese county. Papercutting samples and survey forms were collected from 15,006 individuals throughout Yanchuan County, which along with documentary film material, sound recordings, textual documents, photographs and images, as well as objects produced throughout the survey process combine to form a vast visual and textual archive entitled “Long March Project – The Great Survey of Papercuttings in Yanchuan County.”

The entire archive is currently on an international touring exhibition with previous stops at the 2004 Shanghai Biennale and the 2004 Taipei Biennale. For the stop in Vancouver, the archive will participate in an exhibition entitled “Classified Materials: Accumulations, Archives, Artists”, which will examine how artists employ, transform and challenge the processes of ordering and classification through which conceptions of the world, and our individual positions in it, are deeply embedded.”The exhibition will include works from the museum’s permanent collection along with contributions by contemporary artists from Vancouver, Asia, Europe, the United States and the Middle East, including “The File Room”, an electronic archive of censored material compiled by Spanish artist Antonio Muntadas over the past 10 years. The work serves as an evolving archive recognizing acts of censorship in relation to their social settings, political movements, religious beliefs, economic conditions, cultural expressions and personal identities. Christian Boltanski’s work was a collection of works looking at art after the Holocaust, documenting the experiences and remains of Jewish communities post World War 2.

The Long March is proud to present, in its first North American showing,“The Great Survey of Papercuttings in Yanchuan County”,at the Vancouver Art Gallery from October 14,2005 – January 2,2006.

View of the gallery

Installation	Taiwanese volunteer Ms. Qiu Yuzhen	Canadian artist Regan (left) and actor Rory (right) support the Long March showing
Canadian audience viewing in the Long March section at the Vancouver Art Gallery	Canadian media viewing Long March works 1	Canadian media viewing Long March works 2
View of the gallery 1	View of the gallery2	View of the gallery 3
View of the gallery 4	Four TV’s simultaneously display the papercutting survey documentary in the gallery	Scissors used during the papercutting survey
Lu Jie presenting a lecture at the Vancouver Art Gallery on the Great Survey of Papercutting in Yanchuan County	Presentation of the Long March project