Q: How did the odyssey unfold?
I started out from Yanan with a statuette of Chairman Mao Zedong , which I'd bought in Beijing, and used it to begin a series of exchanges with people who I randomly met along the way to Ruijin , where the Long March actually started. I exchanged the statuette for a pack of cigarettes that carried the brand name 'Yanan' from a plumber I bumped into at a local Muslim restaurant. From there, the pack was swapped for something else and the series of exchanges continued until I'd completed the journey.
What other items were involved in the string of exchanges?
A tax officer swapped his uniform cap for a Tibetan girl's necklace. A calligrapher gave me his work of a Mao poem, which was exchanged for a prescription from a barefoot doctor. A soldier gave me a blank notebook in exchange for a Hakka history book. A Tibetan pastoralist gave me a badge with a portrait of a living Buddha, and a female taxi driver in Jinggangshan who, despite cursing Mao for his ignominious past, offered me a series of Mao cards designed as an amulet.
What did you set out to try to achieve?
I called this work 'In and Out', which not only refers to the exchange procedure but also indicates the artist's living condition. Too many modern artists merely create works indoors or just create art on a whim. But to me, it's a fundamental necessity to get out of the urban areas and get deeply in touch with the intrinsic and inspiring lives of those people who live in rural, minority-populated, revolutionary or underdeveloped areas. Only in this case, the performance art was alive as life itself.
