In the summer of 2002, I was invited by curator Mr. Chiu Chih-Chieh and the Chairman of Long March Foundation Mr. Lu Chieh to take part in their Long March project. This gave me the opportunity to retrace the route of the Long March, in which Ching Kai-Shek's Chinese Nationalist troops drove the Communist army to flee their bases in Jiangxi province in south China for 25,000 kilometers (15,500 miles). Three months before I embarked on the journey, I had selected about a dozen sites of historical significance in which I would be conduct performance art, so I started doing some intensive research on the historical backgrounds of these sites, including the former site of the original site of Zunyi Conference (Guizhou Province), Golden Hill Ya'an Red Army Monument (Guizhou Province), The Red Army General Staff Headquarters (Guizhou Province), the Memorial Monument for the Red Army's Four Cross-Chishui-River Battles (Guizhou Province), Moutai Distillery (Guizhou Province), the People's Liberation Monument (Chongquing, Sizhuan Province), Zhazidong (Chongquing, Sizhuan Province), Xichang Satellite Launch Center (Sizhuan Province), Chairman Mao's Residence at Hailuogou, Moxi Town, Sichuan Province) and Luding Bridge (Sichuan Province). These were the main locations from which various Communist armies in the south escaped to the north and west of China during the course between October 1934 to October 1936. We retraced the entire Long March route to experience the viciously savage battle between Chiang Kai-Shek's Chinese Nationalist troops and Mao Tzedong's Communist armies during the Chinese Civil War. After I had completed my “fieldwork” there and decided on the camera angles I was going to direct, I had some photographs taken with myself standing up-side-down – an act which I had practiced for some time in Taipei prior to the trip) – and had these photographs enlarged and printed in reverse in black and white. Like most young people in Taiwan, I knew little about this history and have never shown the slightest interest in it. What fascinated me about this part of history was : “can historical events such as this be reversed?” I chose to highlight the ridiculous nature of the history between Taiwan and China by means of performance art not because I wanted to illustrate history or to challenge certain ideologies, but partly I wanted to reveal the ridiculous sides of something that is far beyond the control of human will. Living in the midst of post-Cold War media culture, I often ask myself these questions: how much truth and facts are actually presented in the recorded history that we know? How did such ideological antagonism arise? Aside from addressing these historical considerations, what I was trying to do was to reveal something far more absurd than my own acts of absurdity. (Yao Jui Chung)