·Dan Mills·Beijing

《(Miss) Understanding the Long March》
Prints
2004
Historic Site of Lu Xun Art Academy
May 20, 2006

The work is comprised of multi-layered images of maps, images and language focusing on The Long March. Combining maps and diagrams, and superimposing images and language onto the maps, the project investigates The Long March events, its history and legend, and also explores how we learn, understand, and interpret historic events. This project is my attempt to understand and visually interpret The Long March, from the perspective of a westerner, over a distance of time and space. Characters, letters of the alphabet, visual symbols and diagrams are vehicles we use to record the events of history and to tell its story. For the reader and viewer, the information is also understood based upon existing knowledge, cultural understanding, and personal ways of comprehending information. For example, when viewing a basic map of your country, printed in your language, the informed viewer may consciously (or not) fill in known but omitted
information. The same activity occurs when reading. Print the map in another language, or depict a distant country and much of this disappears. Layer esoteric and ambiguous symbols onto the map and the meaning, and the viewer’s understanding, is not so clear. Thus my take on the Long March alludes to the conditionality and subjectivity in the interpretation of history.