Marching Between the Local and the International: The Long March Project and Long March Space

The emergence of an international platform for artists could be called the defining characteristic of Chinese art in the 1990s. Other sociological questions about art in China—questions like the relationship between the masses and the elite, between tradition and reality—fell to the back, as the ‘differentiation of China and the West’ came to occupy a premier position, becoming a guiding parameter for both theoretical debate and artistic creation, systematically producing our feelings of awkwardness and grievance. This is a classic example of artistic consumption coming to drive artistic production. It is unreasonable to expect the problem to be solved with foreign collectors eventually stepping up their level of comprehension of Chinese art, or to wait for the Chinese economy to develop such that domestic art consumers can support contemporary art. The excuses of the market hide the true problems of art itself—the rift between the masses and the elite, and the disconnection between tradition and reality. We must begin from our own understanding of ourselves as practitioners of art in China, raising anew these issues, which have been set aside in recent years. In this process, one important task is to revisit our memory of the Chinese revolution and assess the impact of socialism on contemporary visual culture.^[1]

Above is one of the opening passages from “The Long March Project—A Walking Visual Display: Curators' Words," written by Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie in 2002. Today, nearly two decades later, this  analysis of the Chinese art world and speculation about its future still resonates. The critical awareness proposed by the Long March Project remains an effective tool, and despite sea changes in the overall environment, one can readily observe—from the varied vantage points of museums, the press, galleries, and even the market—that the art system is still undergoing progressive acceleration. Like every inhabitant of this ecology of art, the Long March Project also participates in its construction. To review the trajectory of the project amounts to confronting a charged segment of the two-decade history of contemporary Chinese art amid the continual evolution of which it has been a consistently committed practitioner, mediator, producer, and observer, always considering its role as that of an agent, always mediating between the global and the local, posing questions within and between multiple situations and moments in time to continuously update and reposition itself.

Throughout the work of the Long March Project—revisiting in 2002 the historical route of the Long March of the Red Army, re-intervening within the international scene with the 2005 Chinatown series, launching the Ho Chi Minh Trail project against the backdrop of the petrified art system in 2008, and taking the rich archive of a canonical figure in Chinese art as case study to re-interpret the “international” in the 2015 Sheng Project—the notion of the “local” and “international” has persisted as intertextual dialogues. Rather than simply an inevitable outcome of globalization, this relationship is, more crucially, a result of the indivisible structural relationship between civilizational, historical, and geographical processes. Local practice can only attain its efficacy when it sets itself the task of bridging past and present, local and international, and continuously examines its role within these dialectics.

Parallel to its journey-based projects, which are devoted to the search for local agencies, the Long March Project has also been developing and constructing a physical base. This essay explores local conditions in confrontation with the international milieu in different periods by tracing the work of the Long March Project with respect to “walking,” “space,” and the correspondence between the two, as well as the way the Project has sought to distill from their interactions effective methods of local practice.

1. Long March: Inverting East and West

The Long March Project is an art and curatorial initiative conceived by Lu Jie in 1999 and officially launched in 2002. Instead of relying on a physical space, it has employed “walking” as its key methodology.^[2] At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Chinese art world was undergoing rapid transformation: it was plain to see that “a major characteristic of art in contemporary China [was] that art [had] left the audience . . . moved from the broad masses of the people toward the elite, from private studios toward hierarchical structures (things like biennials, blockbuster exhibitions, and other authoritative spaces), and from China toward the world beyond China . . .  [leading] the avant-garde directly into the trap of the global market and the maze of mutually determinant relationships that it implies.”^[3] Thus, as the inaugural activity of the Long March Project in 2002, Long March—A Walking Visual Display followed the historical route of the Red Army’s titular slog, seeking to respond to the particular context at the turn of the twenty-first century. In the end, the team navigated twelve of the twenty sites Lu Jie had envisioned in his original 1999 curatorial plan; at each of these sites the team organized displays, screenings, artistic workshops, and sharing sessions that responded to the historical context of the locale with the aim of reimagining the present. The project emphasized the ideas and discourse generated through such a journey and practice, and took the local-international relationships within the nation’s collective memories as departure points from which to reflect creatively upon the conventional paradigms of display and discourse in contemporary art. In the essay “Why Do We Long March” (written in 2002, right before they set out on their journey), Lu Jie observed that it “is a walking [project]. . . . Through artworks and texts, historical and geographical locales, it connects display with memory, and looks at artistic practices in relation to visual culture . . . It employs key themes in contemporary art and the history of the Long March to speak of juxtaposition, displacement, mistranslation and geographicalization.”^[4]

As the Reform and Opening Up policies swept across China in the 1980s and 1990s, the Chinese intellectual milieu often advocated looking to the West for China’s own modern enlightenment and cultural and political vindication. This rhetoric positioned the West as the “Big Other” while failing to offer any critical, independent reflection on the West from a Chinese vantage point. In the 1999 curatorial outline, Lu Jie proposed a slate of programs in Ruijin including the exhibition Visual Imagination of China in the West in the 1960s, a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Chinoise by the village film unit, and a slideshow presentation of Icelandic artist Erró’s oil paintings depicting Mao Zedong’s visit to Venice to attend a meeting; these events sought to invert the West’s gaze on the East and re-enact in front of the public the revolutionary echo of Mao’s thoughts in Paris. “Geographically speaking, there is no such thing as the West; psychologically speaking, the West is only a cultural symbol forged by various methods of display, and the East is created in the service of the existence of the West. Just as there is not an absolute West, we are also always in a state of conflict and mutation.”^[5] Such was the modus operandi of the project: examining the East under the Western gaze, putting the singular standards and stereotypical understandings to which we are accustomed under scrutiny within local contexts in the East, reflecting on the oscillation of meaning, and working through polyvalent gazes to find its own blind spots and subjective positions.

2. Local Spaces: Platform and Community

In August 2002, on the Luding Bridge in Sichuan, China, the Long March Project made the decision to put A Walking Visual Display on hiatus. In September, as the team returned to Beijing, they ended up in the 798 factory complex in Dashanzi; inspired by the Maoist guerrilla tactic of encircling cities with villages, the team chose this location as their stronghold to prepare for the next leg of the march. At the time, 798 was starting to transform into a meeting point for emerging cultural producers of a new scene—what we might call, in hindsight, the first wave of “alternative spaces” in China. Back then, neither the galleries nor the museum system was established within the local contemporary art world. In the then Dashanzi Art District (later renamed 798 Art District) most spaces served multiple functions, ranging from commercial to entertainment and educational at once, and the socialist memories attached to the 798 complex meant its transition into a cultural and creative district did not follow the standard urbanization paradigm seen in Western capitalist societies. It was, instead, rooted in the structural transition and development of Chinese society, with all its uniquely distinctive characteristics. The necessity of building such a physical space was clear: it was imperative to preserve the message of the Long March in a more open system, to leave it in a state of perpetual incompletion. Here, in Beijing—the epicenter of contemporary Chinese art—the Long March project would hone those unfinished walking thoughts into tactics by participating in the construction of an art ecology.

The following April, the physical base for the Long March Project was inaugurated in the Dashanzi Art District under the name 25000 Cultural Transmission Center. This 250-square-metre base became home to many early experiments within the local ecosystem, efforts that came into being more or less organically but nonetheless served the larger purpose of expanding and enriching the Long March. For instance, in the first solo exhibition ever held at the space, Wang Jingsong: Operation Ink Freedom, the artist combined ink (a medium belonging to the historical literati tradition) and mural painting (a form often associated with larger-than-life socialist revolutionary aesthetics) into massive, experimental compositions. Wang Wei, for his solo exhibition, brought bricks from downtown hutongs all the way to the provincial Dashanzi, where he erected a “temporary space”^[6] (also the exhibition title) four metres tall and without an entrance, only to knock it down. A special presentation of films by Cui Zi’en attempted a comprehensive investigation into gender issues at the time.^[7] Together, the rich slate of exhibitions and diverse themes featured at the 25000 Cultural Transmission Center in its early years reflected the personal experiences of the artistic and cultural community that produced them and offered unique perspectives on the public and the social at the urban-rural intersection amid accelerating processes of urban development. During this period the Long March Project sought to distill into various displays the ferment of thoughts accumulated while walking along the historical route of the Long March and turned to folk culture as a way to respond to the aforementioned—distinctly urban—solo projects: the exhibition series The Power of the Public Realm brought together Guo Fengyi, Li Tianbing and Wang Wenhai, whose respective artistic practices exist beyond the art canon, to establish the urban and the folk as two distinct modes of cultural circulation in the context of Dashanzi. In the last two iterations of the series, artists Liang Shuo and Yue Luping’s original use of traditional forms and techniques attempted to disrupt the otherwise rigid line between so-called folk art and contemporary art. 

To further explore the position of “folk” in contemporary culture concurrent with the operation of 25000 Cultural Transmission Center, the Long March Project again set off in 2004 for The Great Survey of Paper-Cutting in Yanchuan County in collaboration with scholar Jin Zhilin and the Yanchuan Country government. This was at once a work of art in itself and a form of social engineering, for it encouraged contemporary artists as well as local art and cultural leaders to revisit the villages in question, helping to launch a comprehensive survey of the county resident’s paper cutting practice by combining conventional survey methods with an artistic twist. The project culminated in a large-scale visual display that captured the state of folk culture at the time while providing invaluable material for sociological and anthropological research. The fundamental aims of the “Great Survey” were the reinvigoration of the existing spaces and history of socialist China, the generation of new questions by way of mobilization, the establishment of relationships between local and dispersed subjects—between foreign and local—and the opening of discussions on visual resources and cultural tourism.

By the beginning of 2002, the 25000 Cultural Transmission Center—at this point already better known as the Long March Space—relocated to a bigger location more suited for exhibition display in the 798 Art District and entered a new period devoted to the conscious exploration of collaboration with local artists and engagement with the cultural ecology. As it produced its exhibitions, one after another, the Long March Space gradually established a mutually constitutive relationship with the surrounding art scene. Its organizational methods also appeared different from the journey-based curatorial initiatives of the Long March Project and, indeed, began edging somewhat closer to the building of a platform. While many of the exhibitions during this period were thematic, they tended to be grounded in the local context. Building Code Violations (2006),^[8] for example, set out from the perspective of urban planning to explore certain activities and designs that deviate from a unified, sweeping social norm. Renovation—Relations of Production (2005)^[9] took the renovation of the new space as an occasion to invite the foreman of a well-known local renovation company as curator, building an exhibition that systemically revealed all roles involved in artistic production. Their unique departure points enabled these exhibitions to be exceptionally welcoming to each individual artist under the umbrella of the thematic context, operating without exclusion. The 2007 exhibition NONO^[10] frankly proposed a collective experiment organized by the artists themselves, without curator or theme. The exhibitions from this period, it must be noted, oftentimes advocated a remarkable degree of artistic autonomy, challenging the institutionalized demarcation between curator and artist through their very form. As Lu Jie noted, “[The Long March Space] is a web-like artistic organization; through the comprehensive display of various elements within the always interconnected relations of artistic production, it establishes the ties between artworks and their makers, between the making of a work and its social significance, in visual terms.”^[11] These solo and group exhibitions, each with its own rich host of elements, took turns occupying this gradually evolving platform; this process not only grew into a localized “long march” but also helped to incubate a community.

3. Aphasia in the Face of the International: Art Fairs and Biennials

As the Long March Space steadily furthered its professional involvement in a local web of artistic production with the aid of its physical venue, the Long March Project began to intervene in the international biennial and triennial network by posing questions and testing possibilities within the art system. One of the most representative of these endeavours was the Long March Project—Chinatown series, which took place between 2005 and 2007 in three locales—Yokohama, San Francisco, and Auckland—and combined the varied forms of exhibitions, educational activities, workshops, surveys, and lectures into its walking journey. The project participated in the Yokohama and Auckland Triennials not for the purpose of realizing a curated or thematic display, but to adopt the existing biennial framework and resource for local engagement and mobilization. The various initiatives carried out during the Chinatown series helped restore in the Western imagination the multiplicity of the East, introducing the complex layers of the notion of “Chinatown” to the respective local communities and prompting public reflection. In his essay “Localizing the Chinese Context—Contemporary Chinese Art in China and Abroad,” Lu Jie once observed that “[a] deeper understanding of local context is necessary—especially its centuries-long encounter with modernity, the gain and loss of its quest for utopia, the completeness or incompleteness of its revolution, and the mutually constitutive relationship between nationalism and internationalism, and the contributions, errors, misreadings, rebirths, restructurings, and localizations of Western ideologies in the process of entering China have already deeply entered China's social and individual consciousness.”^[12] In the same spirit, projects such as Long March Project—Avant-Garde (2006–07)^[13] and Long March Project—Korea 2018 (2007— ),^[14] as well as the participation of the Long March Project in a 2005 exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery and in the São Paulo Bienal in 2016, all took into consideration the roles of the context and localization of the happening within the system to ensure the efficacy of their actions and presentations.

The 2000s saw the rise to prominence of two currents: the internationalization of art fairs and the institutionalization of biennials. While in the first case the globalization of a commercial scene prompted interest and attention to the regional, the institutionalization of a curatorial undertaking in the second exhausted its critical potential. This phenomenon destabilized the original identity and purpose of the two scenes; from their display and reception to their organization and language, the boundaries between fair and biennial became blurred and subsequently problematized both, rendering them unique contexts full of potential. Looking back from 2020, we believe that viewing these two loci in juxtaposition can help us better grasp the crux and modus operandi of Long March as a whole. We might consider artistic production as a spectrum, with creation at one end and consumption at the other, and observe that the increasing influence wielded since the 1990s by the consumption end over its productive counterpart gradually became the new norm. In this new context, artists must learn to negotiate their role between artist-as-identity and artist-as-profession. In 2008 the Long March Project proposed “walking on two feet”^[15] as its new tactic: on the one hand, it would continue its involvement in the production of a visual economy, responding to the call of the physical entity that is the Long March Space; on the other, it would strive to seep into the roots of artistic creation through the discursive dialogue of the Long March Project. By interacting with various sectors of the art system from these two positions, Long March would become more thoroughly enmeshed in the chains of artistic production.

Starting in 2004, Long March Space began “walking” across many local and international art fairs, from Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei to London, New York, Miami, Basel, Paris, etc. In these international scenes, each with its distinct regional specificities, Long March Space played the role of a mediator, dealing with a slew of misreadings of China by both local and international audiences, while continuously reexamining its own stake in the visual economy from the front lines of the market and reconstructing its regional subjectivity against the conditions of increasingly flattened global aesthetics. Through erecting stages of varied characteristics and appeals amid their global search for actors, these fairs proved that behind the seemingly simplistic and brutal face of the market lay many possibilities, resulting in unexpected opportunities for creativity. Globalization is an all-engulfing phenomenon that traverses multiple sites: as it found its way into various art fairs in different forms and to varying extents, it also began to permeate biennials in multiple configurations. By this point, biennials had become worn out by their own swelling modulation and homogenization and had grown increasingly attached to the specificities of branding and development in their respective host cities. While international biennials faced the challenge of becoming even more international, local biennials had to compete with other local fellows. Inevitably, all of this further exacerbated the institutionalization of biennials, leaving them with a growing need for operational capital. Curators attempted to question and challenge the system with radical and creative strategies, but this very radicality was soon assimilated by the system, becoming one of its universal “contemporary” qualities, most notably as ostensible support of political correctness and a dividend of peaceful times.

As the impotence of the institutionalized biennial system grew increasingly discernible, Long March Project began to consider ways to break down the communication barriers between international curators and local artists in response to the staggering conditions. This was not an easy task; rather, it demanded a detailed, systematic and comprehensive critique of art and society, addressing issues such as elitism in art, the power of collecting, and culture and capital, all of which we have long been concerned with. Like the first project in 2002, the title Long March Project—Ho Chi Minh Trail (2008–10) alluded to its goal: Positioned within a grand historical narrative, it established a platform for ongoing art and educational activities across China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and inviting thinkers and art practitioners to walk in situ. The Ho Chi Minh Trail project sought to raise questions about the stagnant relations of artistic production through committed exchange with other histories and geographies, throughout which participating critics, curators, and artists would become interlocutors on an equal footing in an expression of soul-stirring conversations and ideas. These conversations and exchanges were not geared toward the production of artworks, for they were already modes of production in themselves. This inversion of status between discourse and artwork in the order of production challenged the streamlined conventional model of the biennial system. In the journey, debates and topics discussed at length did not immediately crystallize into artworks, but instead slowly ripened and seeped into the artists’ studio practices upon their return. The result was a direct questioning of the institutional receptive system (an inverted relation of production where the demands of monopolizing institutions determine production). Regarding the unique organization of the project, Gao Shiming observes in “On The Ho Chi Minh Trail” that “[the] Ho Chi Minh Trail Project is not a direct social action: nor is it a utopian vision. Rather, it attempts to call forth a continuous, reflexive revolution within the self. It aims both to clear away the ethnic/national monopolization of identity and politics, history and tradition, and to wash away the capitalism—the device of a media-culture spectacle created by the globalization of management, consumption, and planning—that has permeated the depths of our being.”^[16]

On the surface, the last two decades or so of development in the visual arts, may look, from either a commercial or an institutional standpoint, like natural and legitimate progress and expansion. The reality, however, is that our accomplishment is effectively nothing more than a writing of ourselves into history with strokes of a ceaseless, functional consumerism. This is evident in the progressive homogenization of viewpoints in the art world, the upgrading of hardware alone to the exclusion of anything else, and a polarized fixation on price instead of value—as though the market is to be the sole determinant of the writing of art history from now on. While contemporary art continues to exude significant force in global culture, contemporary Chinese art in particular, driven by market and institutional currents, has lost its self-awareness and has become muddled into a belief that it is still inferior to the international scene; this is entirely at odds with China’s incontestable ascent economically and politically on the global stage. If it remains blinded by this timidity concerning its intellectual rigour and power, contemporary Chinese art can interact only with the international scene superficially, lacking confidence or concrete purpose. While the power imbalance between West and East that epitomized the early years of Reform and Opening Up has certainly changed in the realm of international politics, culturally we have fallen into a deeper trap of silence and negligence. Perhaps the most urgent question we must ask ourselves today, time and again, is: How can we free ourselves from this international predicament?

4. A Case Study: Sheng Project and Two Internationals

Back in 2002, the relationship between the local and the international, like that between the East and West, was one of mutual observation and misinterpretation; China, at that point, was eager for international recognition. Eighteen years later, now that a multitude of elements and characters have come into play within the context of a globalized art industry, the accessibility and speed of the exchanges of information, goods or ideas between China and the rest of the world have accelerated the local art world into an unfamiliar landscape. Naturally, with this new reality propelling us into an uncharted territory, there is a rising desire to reorient our focus, reopen the archives, and reread history. Our practice at Long March does not take place in some theoretical vacuum. Rather than a methodical model deduced from varied strands of scholarly investigations, theories, and ideas, we are most convinced by engaging equally in theory and practice and by the simultaneous journey of discourse and the body. While our practice was certainly born and raised in the context of contemporary art, nurtured by its soil, we hold a historical perspective that refuses canonization—Long March does not subscribe to existing divisions of discipline, geography, and periodization. Be it that between humankind and geography, humankind and culture, or humankind and the times, history and nature, every relation has its own stories, and every narrative stands in relation with another—it is these entwined histories and relations that together give birth to every individual being.

To use personal history as a departure point or entry point to a greater history, and to piece together fragmented historical narratives via the continuous thread of an individual’s lived experience: this is the precise intention of the Sheng Project, which we began in 2015. The Sheng Project is a collective research initiative centred on the personal archive—including both tangible and intangible materials—of Zheng Shengtian. To be launched with a publication as a curatorial proposition, it sought to inspire further exploration and parallel research, as well as the realization of a visual presentation. The research project—co-founded by the Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thoughts at the China Academy of Art and the Long March Project, with Vice President of the Academy Gao Shiming as chief organizer—employed Zheng Shengtian’s rich experiences and artistic encounters as subjects of inquiry to “tie together the entangled historical divisions of revolution/post-revolution, cold war/post-cold war, empire/new empire; to illuminate the ‘two kinds of modernisms’ throughout the revolutions and art of the 20th century; and to relink the ‘three thirty years’ that have long remained divided in standard historical accounts.”[17] As a crucial actor and eyewitness in several decades of Chinese contemporary artistic engagement, Zheng Shengtian has played practically every role imaginable, and in his work we discern the conscious effort of a single individual to unify a multitude of a seemingly schismatic system. One of Zheng Shengtian’s major sources of influence is the cultural exchange between artists who were also socialist revolutionaries (Renato Guttuso, José Venturelli, David Alfredo Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera, to name a few) and pre-1980s China, which led him and his peers to turn to Mexico for an ideal socialist realism in the global imagination; this thread, which departs from the internationally standardized narrative centred on the East-West binary, courses throughout his artistic inquiry. Starting in the ‘80s, Zheng Shengtian—already playing the multiple roles of artist, educator, curator, and scholar—became involved in various organizational work, first by introducing international currents to the Chinese art world, and subsequently by bringing Chinese contemporary art practices to European and American discourses.

If we consider the inaugural Long March—A Walking Visual Display and the slate of projects that ensued as a united series of committed curatorial attempts to open up dialogues between the local and the international, then the Sheng Project in particular stands out in its capacity as a research initiative aiming to reconnect with local historical perspectives. For too long the Chinese art milieu has accepted the standard narrative that takes the turning point from modern to contemporary times as the end of history, and appealed to the “avant-garde” as its only criterion to guide contemporary practices and discourse. These norms have naturally resulted in an inadequate understanding of the social context of local histories, and a naive reading of the notion of “the international”; they have, to varying degrees and in different times, suppressed the ability of contemporary Chinese art to germinate locally, while slowly turning “rupture” into a universal contemporary experience. The Sheng Project attempts to bring people back to a plethora of historical events, using a vivid personal history as portal. It encourages us to leave behind our preexisting ideas, values, and discourses, to again unleash the contradictions, contingencies, and diversity of these historical moments in order to reprocess the present. The synchronized momentum of its two international threads therefore constitute the driving force behind the Sheng Project: Zheng Shengtian’s endeavours in China and beyond are products of a coupling between the fate of an individual and his times, with patterns that mirror the core of the Long March Project. By launching “Sheng Project” and keeping it as an ongoing, open proposal, we intend to link different times, localities, and histories, to pose relevant questions about extant narratives and systems from a present standpoint, and to reposition ourselves and our sociohistorical moment in the ocean of history and social movements. One should not underestimate the power of the individual amid their own times; in fact, the emancipation of history can be achieved only through the continuous discovery and understanding of the relations between every individual committed to the pursuit of truth, critical thinking, questioning, and action and the times they live in.

^[1] From “The Long March Project—A Walking Visual Display: Curators' Words," 2002, first published in Museum of Art issue 3, 2002.

^[2] Apart from its common definition as the physical action of moving on foot, “walking” also implies traversing space and time, a process without a precise beginning or end, and it involves intricate alterations. It was one of the key tactics of the Long March.

^[3] From “The Long March Project—A Walking Visual Display: Curators' Words."

^[4] Lu Jie, “Why Do We Need the Long March,” 2002, Artco China (September 2002).

^[5] Lu Jie, “From Outside to Inside,” 2000.

^[6] Wang Wei: Temporary Space was curated by Philip Tinari and was on view from July 1 to July 20, 2003.

^[7]  The special presentation of Cui Zi’en’s works was part of the Media Center Project curated by Li Zhenhua. The Media Center Project included the screening of a series of films from the 2002 and 2003 World Short Film Festival, as well as a special drag dance performance by Gary Lee. The exhibition was on view from June 21 to June 28, 2003.

^[8]  Building Code Violations was on view from April 8 until May 16, 2006, and included works by Luo Fengyi, Hu Xiangcheng, Lu Jie, Qiu Zhijie, Wang Gongxin, Xu Zhen, Yang Shaobin, Zhan Wang, Zhao Gang, Zheng Guogu, Zhou Xiaohu, and an anonymous artist.

^[9] Renovation—Relations of Production was curated by Shan Zi and was on view from December 17 to February 26 2006. The participating artists were Gao Feng, Huang Xuebin, Liu Ding, Li Songhua, Qin Ga, Shi Jing, Shi Jinsong, Shi Wanwan, Sui Jianguo, Sun Yuan + Peng Yu, Wang Mai, Wang Peng, Wu Xiaojun, Wang Yiqiong, Wu Yuren, Xiao Xiong, Xue Yu, and Yan Jiao.

^[10]  NONO was initiated by Colin Siyuan Chinnery and was on view from April 22 to June 17, 2007. The participating artists were Chinnery, Chu Yun, He An, Jiang Zhi, Kan Xuan, Liu Wei, Shi Qing, Wang Wei, Xu Zhen, Yang Zhenzhong, and Zhu Yu.

^[11] Lu Jie, “Long March Capital,” 2003–2006.

^[12] Lu Jie,“Localizing the Chinese Context—Contemporary Chinese Art in China and Abroad,” Nicolas Troutas ed., Knowledge + Dialogue + Exchange: Remapping Cultural Globalisms from the South (Sydney: Artspace Visual Arts Centre, 2004).

^[13] “Long March Project—Avant Garde” was presented between September 16 and October 1, 2006, and between October 27 and November 20, 2007, at the invitation of China Time 2006 in Hamburg and PERFORMA07 in New York, respectively. 

^[14] ”Long March Project—Korea 2018” was part of the exhibition “Tomorrow,” held at Kumho Museum and the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, Korea, from October 4 to November 4, 2007.

^[15] The slogan “walking on two feet” first appeared in a 2008 press release from Long March, announcing its new direction.

^[16] Gao Shiming, “On the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” 2010, Long March Project – Ho Chi Minh Trail (Beijing, 2018).

[17] Gao Shiming, “Curatorial Introduction of Sheng Project,” 2016, http://longmarchproject.com/sheng-project/]