VANCOUVER, BC.-New York-based artist and curator Lu Jie will be featured at the Vancouver Art Gallery on October 12, 2005 to discuss The Long March Project: The Great Survey of Papercuttings in Yanchuan County, included in the Gallery’s upcoming exhibition Classified Materials: Accumulations, Archives, Artists, opening October 15.

Starting in 2002, Lu Jie led The Long March Project, guiding a group of more than 60 international artists on an expedition retracing the 6,000-mile route of Mao Zedong’s epic Long March of 1934-35. As a part of the project, Lu Jie and his team engaged residents throughout China’s Yanchuan County, situated in northeastern China, to survey the state of papercutting – a traditional Chinese art from. A total of 15, 2006 case studies and associated papercuttings were collected from the county’s 180,000 residents, along with objects, notes and historical materials created or discovered during the survey process, several hundred photographs and more than eighty hours of film footage documenting the journey. The resulting installation reveals a great deal about traditional and ancient symbolism in the context of China’s cultural revolution, and the re-examination of papercutting through the lense of contemporary art.

Joining Lu Jie in conversation will be Shengtian Zheng, a Vancouver artist, curator and participating artist in the Long March Project, and Hsingyuan Tsao, an art historian who teaches historical and contemporary Chinese art at the University of British Columbia.

Lu Jie is the director of The Long March Foundation, New York City. He is the founder and director of The 25,000 Li Cultural Transmission Center in Beijing and has curated numerous contemporary art exhibitions in Asia, Europe and North America. He has presented papers at art conferences and seminars in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and North America, and his art criticism has been extensively published.