(b.1964, Fujian, China)


In London, as a student at Goldsmiths College in the late 1990s, Lu Jie conceived the Long March Project. One of the first two people from mainland China to study creative curating abroad, he had travelled vast distances not just physically but professionally, having moved from being a traditional painter to being a curator of contemporary art. This journeying led him to think about the ways that contemporary art could connect with social development and change.

In 2002, Lu initiated the 'Long March Project - A Walking Visual Display'. This participatory programme, involving over250 artists, writers, theorists, curators and scholars from China and abroad, aimed to retrace Mao Zedong's historic Long March, creating public performances, exhibitions and discussions at points along the six-thousand mile route. Since then, the Project has also established the Long March Space in Beijing and has set up international projects. The most recent of these is the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a collaborative contemporary arts project investigating collective memory, migration, history and identity in China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.