Site 02 Jinggangshan, Jiangxi
In October 1933, Nationalist Generalisimo Jiang mobilised for the fifth and what would be the greatest of his Anti-Red Wars. One year later, the Red Army was finally forced into retreat in what was then widely regarded to be its funeral march. In this Fifth Campaign, Jiang deployed 900,000 troops, while the Red Army only had a combined strength of 180,000. Even with an additional 200,000 partisans and Red Guards, the Communists could only muster a firing power of somewhat less than 100,000 rifles, with limited grenades, shells and ammunition.
Musical based on revolutionary history
The Route of the Long March
The Nationalist army’s Fifth Campaign was planned by Jiang, German advisers, notably General von Falkenhausen. It was an expensive war: Jiang’s army marched slowly and effectively. Their blockade of supplies was successful, resulting, for example, in a lack of salt for the Red Army. But the peasants remained loyal to the Red Army, smuggling goods for them, in the hopes of retaining the land they had recently been allotted. The Kuomintang (the Nationalist government) press releases estimated that about 1,000,000 people were killed or starved during this Fifth Campaign.The Nationalist army’s Fifth Campaign was planned by Jiang, German advisers, notably General von Falkenhausen. It was an expensive war: Jiang’s army marched slowly and effectively. Their blockade of supplies was successful, resulting, for example, in a lack of salt for the Red Army. But the peasants remained loyal to the Red Army, smuggling goods for them, in the hopes of retaining the land they had recently been allotted. The Kuomintang (the Nationalist government) press releases estimated that about 1,000,000 people were killed or starved during this Fifth Campaign.
Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai- Shek) launching the Fifth Campaign
Michelangelo Antonioni’s famous four-hour documentary of China, Chung Kuo Cina (1972). Like other Chinese, the villagers who will view this film had daily meeting for one month in 1973 to criticize the film by the ‘anti-China Clown,’ the most criticized Western artist in China. Most of these villagers had never seen the film.
Because of his revolutionary approach, Antonioni had been invited by the Chinese government, after many years of its closed-door policy, to make a documentary that would depict the fruit of its revolution to the West. Antonioni’s resulting work, however, was a disappointment of proportions to be vilified. Official criticism focused on the belief that Antonioni belittled enormous industrial and economic accomplishments as quaint expressions of peasant ingenuity. The Communists had no interest as being perceived as either quaint or ingenious, but as accomplished. As Umberto Eco wrote in De Interpretatione, or the Difficulty of Being Marco Polo, ”when his Chinese escorts told Antonioni, with pride, that a refinery had been built from nothing but scavenged material, the film emphasizes the miracle of’ ‘his humble factory, made with discarded materials.’… But the Chinese see in it an insistence on an ‘Inferior’ industry, just at the historical moment in which they are successfully closing their industrial gap…”1 Overnight, Antonioni became a figure despised by 800 million Chinese. He had created ‘an openly anti-Chinese, anti-Communist and counter-revolutionary work,’ and labeled as one ‘out of the pack of imperialists and social imperialists.’ Posters of him appeared on the street defaced with swastikas.
Was the attack on Antonioni a failure to understand his work due to historical reasons, or due to reasons of political desire and ideological difference? Was the attack a problem of East meets West, of mutual incomprehensibility, of a notion of an oriental world that could never be fully known by outsiders and that would therefore remain forever mysterious, as Antoinioni repeatedly narrates in the film? Had he been able to go beyond the mere ‘glance of a tourist,’ would his work have bridged the cultural distance of the film and achieved the didactic needs of the Chinese?
The movie will be shown in a yard nearby an old well and bamboo bridge, in the village where Mao lived. Showing movies in rice fields or public yards was one of the rare cultural activities allowed in 70s when Antonioni made his China tour. Village people lived a life that remained largely similar from the 1930s through the 1970s and until today. What do the peasants of today think of Trotsky, Antonioni and the Long March? Both Trotsky and Antonioni were Westerners who influenced Chinese history, both were reviled, and yet most Chinese people have never seen their works.
Antonioni, stills from Chung Kuo Cina, 1972
1 Seymour Chatman, Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World, University of California Press, London, 1985, p.174.
We will analyze why and how art in China developed from propaganda illustrations and revolutionary posters to the pastoral, humble gaze of daily life as seen in Antonio‘s film narration and in Andrew Wyeth‘s extreme popularity in China during the 70s and 80s. We will also examine the more recent trend of Political Pop and Cynical Realism artists, who were, during the 80s and 90s, the first movement of Chinese contemporary artists to be embraced by Western curators; the phenomenon of their rise being a revisitation of the traditional propogandist art genre. No matter how ‘renown’ we might perceive these artists, the people living in the mountains of Jiangxi have likely never encountered their art.
In addition to the continuing works of Xiao Xiong and Song Dong, we will add an additional project – distributing flyers and posters of relevant art works to the following sites:
1. The Revolution Museum
2. The Red Army Money Factory Museum
3. The Red Army Hospital Museum
4. Mao‘s former residence
5. The Red Army Relics of Posters and Script Museum
6. Temple of Taoist Nun Residence – where Mao and his second wife, He, a Guerrilla leader famous for fighting with two pistols, were married.
7. The Bridge of Joint Forces – where soldiers from the country and city uprisings joined to form the Red Army
8. The Fourth Segment of the Red Army‘s former headquarters – the only public museum in the area which is operated through private funding.
9. The Memorial of Emperor Yan – the first ancestor of the Chinese people.
The tourists and workers in these revolutionary spaces will be confronted with experiences they would never likely associate with these sites, specifically, local and international contemporary visual art. It is impossible to predict the outcome of this encounter; our only certainty is that we will continue to progress on our Long March. Shall we call the action ‘to seed the art for future harvest,’ as Mao suggested?