The Impossibilities of being Marco Polo

Speaker: Lu Jie
In association with Biennale Society and School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, New Delhi

March 14, 2007 | 4.00 pm
Audio Visual Room, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Lu Jie is a curator, and 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. Recently there have been a series of exhibitions internationally, including the Shanghai, Yokohama and Prague biennials, presenting artworks and archives from the project. Based in Beijing, China, Lu Jie is also a writer and on the editorial board for Yishu – A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.

This lecture will present 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’, contextualize with the history of revolution and the contraditional social situation in China, exploring collective consciousness of socialist memory by looking into the new subjectivity, the lost of translation and the surplus of cultural imagination which create rupture and dislocation, forming the condition of being local and global.