Long March Project: Dance! Dance! Doll of Mine!

Artists: Chen Yin, Cui Yanran, He Zhongxian, Kang Kaiwen, Luo Xinling, Lv Yijie, Mao Zehao, Ouyang Haoming, Wang Jiaxin, Xu Yifan, Yang Sitao, Yang Zimin, Ye Zihang, Yu Hao

Curators: Chen Xunchao, Xie Benhao, Xie Yuxin, Xu Mengyi, Yuan Mengru, Zhang Nuoxin

Long March Project presents the group exhibition, Dance! Dance! Doll of Mine! on August 13, 2022. Curated by six young curators from China Academy of Art, the exhibition features 14 artists from departments across the China Academy of Art.

Following the presentation of Zheng Shengtian – I Was Supposed to Go to Mexico in 2021, Dance! Dance! Doll of Mine! is another large-scale exhibition of Long March Project, focusing on how young creative types confront and translate real life dilemmas. This show extends the organization’s long-standing focus on art education, including projects such as, Yan’an Art Education Symposium in 2006, Long March Project: Why Go To Tibet in 2007, Long March Education: Ho Chi Minh Trail in 2009, Trembling Surfaces in 2016, Long March Project: The Deficit Faction in 2019, etc. Long March Project has been providing young creators and students a platform to present and to produce through various projects and looking forward to inviting the spectator to gain insight into how fresh experiences and thoughts are translated into curatorial practice and creation.

From the works of their contemporaries, these six curators discovered sensuous observations on life, self-reflection of the individuals, and their somewhat bewildering imaginations about the present and the future. These contemplations on reality, profound and romantic, inspired the curators to adopt H. Christian Andersen’s (1805–75) story published in Copenhagen’s Children’s Illustrated in 1871, Dance! Dance! Doll of Mine! (Danish: Danse, danse, Dukke min) as the title of the exhibition. In Anderson’s story, the children play with their dolls, singing and dancing. Yet the joy that belongs only to the children and their dolls cannot reach their aunt, which is delightful and unique. The riddle-like conversations between them lead to the pleasure beyond words.

In this exhibition, the “dolls” do not simply refer to toys that embody human or animals characters, but the individual who is gradually lost and assimilated through gazing, fantasizing, manipulating and performing. “Dance” here refers to the stretching or twisting of body under the spotlight, as much as the artists’ vision of possible solutions through self-exploration and social experimentation. Among the works by the artists born between 1990 and 2000, we discover the younger generations’ self-perception, view of the world and visions for the future, prismatic of the diverse and complex portrayal of human syndromes.