【Gallery Introduction】Long March Space

Founded by Lu Jie in the 798 Art District of Beijing in 2002, Long March Space plays a vital role in pursuing new avenues of production, discourse, and promotion of contemporary art in China. Working to advance the careers of over twenty artists, the gallery values the well-established artists as its great asset and continually scouts for emerging talents.

Long March Space has produced over 80 exhibitions and projects in its nine-year history. The gallery tirelessly revolutionizes the ways in which art is perceived and presented, offering one of the most comprehensive resource platforms for the local arts community in China. Its 2500-square-meter space provides a leading exhibition venue to progressively showcase intellectually and culturally significant works.

As one of the first Chinese galleries participating in prominent international art fairs, Long March Space shows actively at both local and international art fairs, such as ShContemporary, ArtHK, Frieze Art Fair, and Art Basel.

Further artists represented:

Chen Chieh-Jen, Chen Jie, Chen Qiulin, Dong Jun, Guo Fengyi, He Jinwei, Li Tianbing, Lin Tianmiao, Liu Wei, MadeIn, Qiu Zhijie, Shao Yinong and Mu Chen, Wang Jianwei, Wu Shanzhuan, Xiao Xiong, Xu Zhen, Yang Shaobin, Yu Hong, Zhan Wang, Zhang Hui, Zhu Yu

【Artworks of Artist at Art 42 Basel】

Zhou Xiaohu: Against Montage, 2010/11

Resin installation, claymation, including 8 sculptures and 8-channel claymation(Each: 50 x 90 x 65 cm)

Zhou Xiaohu: Against Montage-Intolerance, 2010-11

8-channel video and sculptural installation. Dimension variable

Against Montage – Intolerance continues Zhou Xiaohu‘s investigation into the plastic possibilities of sculpture and its relationship to the language of film. The work features eight animation videos and sculptural pairs adapted from D. W. Griffith‘s film Intolerance (1916), presenting four parallel stories that depict acts of intolerance in different periods of history: 1) The Fall of Babylon 2) The Crucifixion of Christ 3) The St. Bartholomew‘s Day Massacre 4) Modern America (circa 1914).

The scenes are chosen from the climax of Griffith‘s film, where the use of montage and the editing technique heighten the tension. The winding of the sculptural column alludes to the final scene, in which the viewer is pulled along as if by some unseen inertia. Viewers see all four parallel stories at once within the space, and assemble their own readings and montage through the ‘intercutting‘ and combination of the different videos and sculptures, creating new variables, reroutings, deviations, and cyclical returns. It is in these processes that Zhou Xiaohu sees a possibility for pluralism beyond the political correctness that dominates international political and artistic discourse.

The conventional understanding of montage as a method to suggest the passage of time elides its possibilities and usage as an ideological tool. Griffith’s pioneering use of montage to create psychological and moral linkages between disparate stories became an important tool for filmmakers influencing the likes of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Wells. This power of the montage was further developed by Soviet filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Vertov, who used the technique to create symbolic meaning and would become an important element in Soviet Montage Theory and was heavily capitalized upon in Soviet propaganda film.

To Zhou Xiaohu, the "tolerance" suggested by Griffith in his film, became a declaration of American ideology and values, and a weapon to confirm the validity of a particular ethical standard, one that would come to dominate Hollywood and be transmitted throughout the world. The crusade for ‘tolerance’ has itself become its own negative: it is a restrictive tolerance that conditions the readings towards reality allowing only those voices that fall within its framework. Zhou Xiaohu terms this normalization of thought into an unconscious collective paradigm as a "concentration training camp."

Zhou Xiaohu pushes the boundaries of sculpture, video, animation and interactive media. Through theatrical narrations, his work examines the disguised spaces between observed living situations and their mediated realities as told through popular media. Engaging with ideas of conformity, progress, censorship and power, Zhou questions the structures of social control in the face of human corruption and greed. His malleable clay theatre ruminates on the fickle nature of memory and on the principles of truth and knowledge, elements that struggle for validity in a regulated media environment.

Chen Qiulin: Garden, 2007. Video(14 min. 45 sec.)

The video begins with two men stepping off a boat onto the shores of an urban sprawl. They remain anonymous, differentiated from the crowd only by the vase of pink flowers they each carry. As they travel through the city, it becomes apparent that the brightly colored “garden” is incompatible with the urban landscape. The contrasts played out visually between the rural and urban, past and future are further highlighted by the appearance of characters from traditional Beijing Opera. Futuristic electronic music overlays the entire vignette; a reference to the present day confusion caused by rapid urbanization.

Huang Ran: Blithe Tragedy, 2010. Video(14 min. 56 sec.)

The video takes off from film genre conventions, and moves into a mixture of self-generated mythology and history with extravagant use of cinematic languages. Ambiguity and complexity are the strongest sensations when experiencing this piece. Through beautifully arresting images, the film explores the uncertainty and complicity between love, sex, violence and death, provoking a temptation of the inextricable aesthetical dislocation of contemporaneity. Further, Huang pushes this subject to a limit by using all male actors in the film rather than conventional syntax of such, which is a malicious deconstruction of power, order, regimentation and value. The outcome of film is complicated in its own beautiful superficiality; the ambiguity makes us quickly question our own feeling towards the queerness of image but also the instinctive blithe reaction to the beautiful fact of image. The viewer has to complete the story for themselves somehow, and so elicits their own desire. Huang produces an intoxication of the rationalised aesthetical irrationality of contemporaneity.

【Artist Information】

Zhou Xiaohu
*1960, Changzhou, Jiangsu, China
Lives and works in Shanghai, China

Selected solo exhibitions:
2010 Word Chains, Long March Space, Beijing
2009 Concentration Training Camp, Long March Space, Beijing
Military Exercise Camp, Biz Art Centre, Shanghai
2007 Renown, Biz Art Centre, Shanghai

Selected group exhibitions:
2010 10,000 Live, Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju
Celebrate 10 Years of Tate Modern, Tate Modern, London
2009 Europalia China, Royal Museum of Fine Art, Brussels
2008 Bourgeoisified Proletariat, Shanghai Songjiang Creative Studio, Shanghai
Long March Capital III, Long March Space, Beijing
2007 China – Facing Reality, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna
Geopolitics of Animation, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla
Thermocline – New Asian Waves, ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe
The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool
2006 Asia Pacific Triennale, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
Building Code Violations, Long March Space, Beijing
Never Go Out without Your DVcam, ICO Foundation, Madrid
The Reality of a New City, Rotterdam