Long March Project

The Long March Project – Ho Chi Minh Trail (Duong Truong Son)

offers a unique platform to begin artistic and educational discussion and imaginative collaboration between Long March Project and participants.

This undertaking could be considered a nomadic ‘residency’ where artistic practice and historical fact is challenged and ‘taken on the road’. Such dialogue could occur at the site of ‘Long March Education’ in Beijing; it could occur in the home of a Cambodian artist; on a train traveling south from Nanning to Hanoi; or over a blog site.

from the website:

The Long March Project – Ho Chi Minh Trail (Duong Truong Son) extends a contemporary campaign of critical discourse surrounding art and culture for the Long March Project, investigating the common threads and divergent perspectives of lived and historicized experience between creative thinkers from China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and the international diaspora.

Taking the creation and legacy of the ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’ as a departure point for discussion, it aims to be a progressive educational exercise built on the value of process and exchange, rather than an assumed investment in result and object making (though undoubtedly a valid part of an artistic process).

The full context of the creation of the ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’ or ‘Duong Truong Son’ in Vietnamese, offers a unique platform to begin artistic and educational discussion and imaginative collaboration between Long March Project and participants. To take Vietnam as an example, successive Chinese dynasties had political, economical and cultural connections with Vietnam in its early history. This country’s independence was under continual challenge, subsequently taken by the French in the late 19th Century, forming part of Indochina along with much of the Mekong Delta region, to be later problematized by the Japanese and the US (indirectly by China and Russia). Today, China and Vietnam is entering a new phase of understanding and cooperation, spurred by common historical and geographical metaphors of political colonialism; the historical and social consequence of immigration on economic and cultural platforms at home and abroad and many more complex realities that offer a multilayered set of meanings for defining contemporary ideas of society. Where is the everyday experience anchored in Vietnam today? What drives the direction of its progress?