Lu Jie with Jitish and Reena Kallat

Understanding Art Practice as Witnessing

Will there be any collective effort to bridge the theory/practice binary in the Indian context remains a matter of debate, asks Amrita Gupta Singh while placing the presentation of the Beijing based curator Lu Jie on ‘Long March Project’.

Lu Jie

How do we understand “art practice as a witnessing act”? Who is the participant and who is the witness? To what extent is this participation and witnessing valid especially in context of the public sphere? How can the politics of location be contextualized in this witnessing, within the frameworks of site specificity, community involvement and collaboration? What are the shifts, both in practice and the consequent meanings that are  generated , that take place in collaborative projects be understood, especially in the problematic interface of the rural and the urban, which is very much part of contemporary cultural discourse? The notions of power, urban imposition, commodification and social inclusion are intrinsic constituents of any urban visual art intervention that is attempted into the rural sectors, but it also opens out platforms for creative opportunity, intellectual challenge, a demonstration of sensitivity to community issues and a social responsibility towards the participatory public in terms of social cohesion.

Rural arts are often celebrated and ‘used’ in festivals and events which are not dedicated arts events. To develop new urban/rural social and cultural partnerships, one needs to garner the wealth of creative resources and skills built up by urban creative industries, to regenerate an active interest in rural communities and aesthetic practices, while building dialectical relationships between ideation and execution, within the framework of collective social change. This also constitutes an important new critical site and area of intellectual engagement for the arts and cultural agencies, around which future key philosophical, aesthetic and cultural issues in society have the possibilities of being debated and take on new forms. Jurgen Habermas defines the public sphere as “a network for communicating information and points of view which eventually transforms them into a public opinion”. Much of the thought about the public sphere relates to the concept of “identity and identity politics”. This term also encompasses a variety of meanings and it implies to a “spatial concept, the social sites or arenas where meanings are articulated, distributed, and negotiated”. It is in this context that the Long March Project conceptualized by the Beijing based curator, Lu Jie, can be situated. In conjunction with the Biennale International Conference, Elective Affinities, Constitutive Differences: Contemporary Art in Asia, Lu Jie presented in Mumbai at the Mohile Parikh Center for the Visual Arts, articulating the modalities of this curatorial project within the political and social transformations of contemporary China.

Lu Jie is the founder and director of The Long March: A Walking Visual Display. Initiated in 2002, the curatorial project was conceived to take place along the route of Mao’s historic Long March, with exhibitions, performances, symposia and discussions taking place in public sites that were selected for their historical, political or cultural significance. This lecture presented the structure and concept behind the Long  March Project (2002- onward) by focus on the 'Western Imagination of China and the Chinese Imagination of the Western Imagination of China', contextualized with the history of revolution and the contradictory social situation in China. It also explored the collective consciousness of socialist memory by looking into new subjectivities.

With the opening of international art markets, contemporary Chinese Art, like India, is witnessing an increasing transaction of images, within the often conflicting arenas of the local/national/global. Within these structural changes, The Long March Project seeks to look back to rural communities and folk cultures and to embrace an inclusive, cross sectored and culturally diverse definition of rural creativity. As Lu Jie says, “While still taking advantage of the market's positive aspects, how do we maintain artistic originality and an engagement with society in an atmosphere of consumerism and transformation? This context is also indicative of a greater uprooting of contemporary Chinese art as it moves further into the international system — an unmooring from history, tradition, and the creative capacities of folk culture”. The core concept of this project is two-pronged - of the autonomy to move into public spaces and also providing a platform for the general public to cross the threshold into traditional spaces.

“The Long March Project was initiated in 1999 when I was a curatorial studies student at London University. During that time I developed a critique of the representation of politics in the context of international Chinese art exhibitions, and I was thinking about the ways that contemporary art practice could connect with social development and social change. I developed the Long March Project as an organic structure that could parallel the grand narrative of the historical Long March initiated by Mao Zedong. I developed the idea that a number of sites could be created according to this historical Long March—this search for utopia, this sharing of resources, this going beyond the limits of body and ideology”.

The historic Mao Zedong Long March was a massive 6,000 miles military retreat undertaken by the red armies of the Communist party of China, as an evasive strategy from the pursuit of the Nationalist army. Lu Jie established the Long March Foundation in New York in 2000. He spent two years visiting the six thousand miles historical Long March route, charting out sites where public art interventions and performances by local and international artists could be enacted. In 2002, the 25,000 Cultural Transmission Center in Beijing (the Long March exhibition space) was inaugurated before launching the project that summer.

One of the significant interventions was the paper-cutting survey in the Yanchuan district, North China which re-examined the age-old paper cutting folk traditions of China. In a culture that invented paper- back in the 1st century AD, Chinese paper arts have existed for thousands of years, spanning from painted or pattern cut paper fans, lanterns, to decorative designs and structures accomplished by folding and/or cutting.  It originated from the 6th century and was especially used in sacred rituals and decoration. In this project, these paper-cuts were carefully collected and re-installed and exhibited in the urban exhibition space of the Long March Foundation, positing questions of this thriving tradition that exists but is not given any aesthetic value by curators and institutions, and that despite global transformations and exclusions, it is important to understand that different historical frameworks could be connected to be able to create a new understanding of contemporary Chinese Art, and to re-establish lost connections and a rooted-ness with the past, including the creative aptitudes of folk cultures.  There was a tremendous response towards this project without any political intrusions by the Chinese government and after a three-month journey; twelve of the twenty planned sites were completed. Artists, writers, curators, theorists and art activists from China and abroad took part in this project, and exhibitions, symposiums,  panel discussions were arranged to generate discussions of contemporary cultural production and cultural exchange.

Given the expansion of creative networks in Asia, and the assertion of multiple creative practices outside the hegemonic trends of the West, one could question how the Long March Project is addressing these shifts. Lu Jie states that  while the growth of urban art scenes in China like Beijing has facilitated the growth of smaller centers, yet when he started this project, the audience for Chinese Art was an international one or urban/elite centric. His position was to address the individual parameters of specific locales and contexts, of including multiple ways of thinking and reacting, and addressing the “narrowness of identity politics and post colonial debates”. The Long March now no longer physically follows the historic route, but encompasses a broader metaphorical realm, its methodologies focus on shifts and migrations not in a linear manner but locating them as criss-crossing patterns and fragmented spaces, of finding new models that address aspects of collaborative art, new ways of production and display, suited to specific localities, histories and contexts. 

Many of the projects of the Long March have been included in major international Biennales and Triennales. One of the interesting and challenging aspects of this project is the movement from the public realm into the private and institutionalized spaces of galleries and museums. What happens in this process, does the public/localized aspect get subsumed in this translation? There is also the danger of commodification and imposition of hegemonic values, given its journey from the folk to the urban, and the fact that these projects have inherently challenged the premises of fixed display. Lu Jie clarifies that when any Long March project enters international spaces, it enters as an intervention into a new site, as “a simultaneous arrival and departure point”. The Long March does not propose to be a thematic surveillance or a national pavilion of contemporary Chinese Art “but rather an international campaign that enters into the different temporal and spatial sites of experience and action, as well as construction and reproduction”. He also states that any such intervention also entails a social responsibility and all the projects are documented and archived and published online and in print, are not given out for commercial usage.

The Long March Foundation has also initiated a teacher’s training program on paper-cutting in villages and is in the process of formulating an educational curriculum based on the same for the local context. The Long March Project has become dealer, artist-run space, gallery, commercial enterprise and publishing house, supported and motivated by contemporary Chinese artists. In the Indian context, the Santiniketan model which brought in an inclusiveness of folk cultures and world traditions has similar ideological parameters, but this is more in its historical context, the ideas of this model could be re-read, re-contextualized and re-affirmed in the contemporary context, in the sense of art as a collective activity, art as a social inclusive phenomena ; The Long March project is indeed inspirational, but most public art interventions in contemporary Indian art are few, and given the lack of funding agencies and the myopic views of private galleries, the dependence of artist-run initiatives and public charitable trusts on international grants, the lack of trained curators and visionaries, such a movement seems a distant possibility, apart from the interventions of individual artists. The Biennale International Conference did indeed bring together a wide array of critical ideas, the gathering of Indian scholars, artists, theorists and writers was commendable, but will there be any collective effort to bridge the theory/practice binary in the Indian context remains a matter of debate, bringing the question of how much of this ‘witnessing’ in a seminar hall could be participatory/inclusive in nature.