The China Project

153 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection HONG Hao Long March in Panjiayuan A and Long March in Panjiayuan B are two large digital images that Hong Hao produced in 2004 as part of his involvement with the Long March Project. 1 They continue a personal project that began with the 2002 series ‘My things’, in which every object shown was digitally scanned at 1:1 scale, and then inserted and arranged within a larger frame to produce the final image. Early works in ‘My things’ show various ordinary objects — medicine packets, tubes of paint, bottle caps, buttons, rolls of film, razor blades, bath plugs — arranged in a grid according to size, colour or shape. As the title of the series suggests, ‘My things’ started as a way of documenting Hong Hao’s personal belongings and as ‘a source for portraying personal daily life’. 2 A shift from self-presentation to collection-representation was marked in My things no.6: the hangover of Revolution in my home 2002, in which various items of Mao idolatry and communist propaganda are dispassionately arranged. During Hong Hao’s childhood — he was born in 1965, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution — the personal became the collective, with most households sharing the very tangible legacy of ideology that permeates daily life in China. Long March in Panjiayuan A and Long March in Panjiayuan B are tableaux of memorabilia and commemorative propaganda celebrating the 1934–35 Long March. The distinctive portrait of a young Chairman Mao, which adorns badges, posters, postage stamps and pamphlets, appears across the entire surface of the works, as does the symbolic ‘Little Red Book’. Hong Hao collected these items at the enormous Panjiayuan outdoor markets in Beijing. Considered a major attraction for international tourists, these markets proffer vast quantities of Maoist propaganda and memorabilia. They epitomise the transformations Chinese society is undergoing and the ideological anomalies that arise from capitalist expansion — what the Long March Project initiator and chief curator Lu Jie and co-curator Qiu Zhijie have called ‘cultural losses and ideological voids’. 3 Hong Hao’s Long March in Panjiyuan works have the analytic clarity of the scanner’s eye, documenting and recording without distortion. The images are nevertheless a metaphor for the contemporary Long March Project as a whole, in the sense that they materially manifest the original march’s historical legacy, and imply the way it is embedded in the visual and material culture of contemporary China. Hong Hao’s taxonomies of Long March memorabilia are collective portraits of today’s China — the impulse of capitalism and commerce contrasts with the ideological legacy of a society founded on principles of collectivism and mass struggle, aimed at overcoming hierarchies of wealth. In these works, we see how yesterday’s emblems of heroic sacrifice and struggle become junk in today’s flea markets and thrift stores. Hong Hao restores some visual splendour to these objects and, in doing so, resurrects some of the idealism that their wearers, holders and readers would have invested in each badge and book. endnotes Adapted from Miranda Wallace, ‘Marketing Mao’, in The 5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2006, pp.114–17. 1 Initiated in 2002, the Long March Project is an ongoing initiative that organises international exhibitions, community-based programs and artist residencies. 2 Hong Hao, ‘Brief statement’, in Ai Weiwei (ed.), Chinese Artists, Text and Interviews: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards 1998–2002, Timezone 8, Hong Kong, 2002, p.105. 3 Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie, ‘Long March: A walking visual exhibition’, Yishu , vol.1, no.3, p.58. opposite Long March in Panjiayuan A 2004 Long March in Panjiayuan B 2004 Type C photographs, ed. 1/9 / 2 sheets / 119.4 x 225.3cm (each) / Purchased 2006