Long March Capital III

This exhibition brings together works from contemporary Chinese artists whom the Long March Project has collaborated closely over the past five years. These works, regardless of whether they were realized for solo or group exhibitions; or produced in collaboration with Long March Project associated activities, they are all 'Long March' in nature. This nature seeks to challenge systems of authority, subvert assumed constructions of identity and methods of cultural production, reinterpreting the imagined notion of our supposed opposites and in turn, imagining their response; such complex ideas are central to the Long March Project and its provocation of what constitutes the 'contemporary'.

'Long March Capital' is a term that seeks to re-assess the role and purpose of a work of art as an item in the social landscape of our lived visual economy. The production of visual materials, from commercial branding to political slogan, from gaudy fashion trends to technological gadgetry, all could be argued as a form of visual economy whereby signs and symbols determine certain functions and values in a consumer society. How can visual art play a meaningful role in this arena? Long March Capital consists of artworks, words and actions that can be viewed as a visual cultural asset, as a social endowment of memory, and of course, as a form of financial capital. Far too often the realm of visual arts is not recognized as a vehicle in which social relationships can be activated, or a means by which structures of cultural logic can be re-determined. The idea of Long March Capital seeks to posit economy and aesthetics in direct conversation. Karl Marx once said 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.' How do humans collectively make the material means to live? The language of art is one visual articulation, and though commonly understood as the efforts of one individual, its production is always a collective effort — it is inextricably linked with history, and is never value free.

'Long March Capital' reflects the idea of economy as not only concerning money and trade, or the art market, but a broader emphasis on the relationship between artist and the social production of their work. Through an examination of the means of an art works creation, certain ideas of interpretation, display, consumption, transmission of ideas and their transformed linkages to history and structures of re-distributed meanings are given space for contemplation.

SpaceA: end of June – end of 2008
SpaceB: May 25th – early September
SpaceD: May 25th – early October