Editor’s Note:
Yishu 43 marks the second time that this publication and the Long March Project in Beijing have collaborated on a special full issue. The first was in the fall of 2006 with the publication of the Yan’an Forum on Art
Education, an ambitious event organized by Cai Guo-Qiang and Lu Jie and consisting of lectures, discussions, and on-site artworks. This forum took place in Yan’an to coincide with the sixty-fourth anniversary of Mao Zedong’s famous lecture presented for the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art in 1942.
This current special issue of Yishu focuses on the Ho Chi Minh Trail Project, which has been ongoing for the past two years and is intended to generate ongoing dialogue between China and some of its geographically closest neighbours—Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Most discussions about contemporary Chinese art in relation to the international have tended to fixate on its relationship to the West, which is understandable considering that the evolution of contemporary Chinese art in the 1970s and 80s was strongly influenced by information coming from the West. But in recent years there has been a move to examine contemporary Chinese art in relation to its neighbours in Asia. This relationship is more deeply embedded in social, cultural, and political histories than in art histories, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail Project explores how these histories affect philosophical perspectives, creative processes, and the making of art.
As the texts in this issue reveal, those participating in the Ho Chi Minh Trail Project have not been without their disagreements, but the project has been carried out in a spirit of cooperation with the aim of proposing new approaches to the relationship of art to society, of looking beyond what has become an overbearing art industry, and embracing both shared and unshared experiences relative to the context of Southeast Asia.
I would like to thank all those who contributed to the realization of the Ho Chi Minh Trail Project, and thus this issue; their names are listed at the back of the journal, with special thanks extended to Lu Jie, Sheryl Cheung, and the Yishu staff.
Keith Wallace
