TRANSASIA

TRANSASIA was an art. project in a form of travel by train across China and Siberia.
Duration:
October 1st - November 3rd, 2000
252 hours spent in trains.
Route:
Beijing - Shenzhen - Hong Kong - Shenzhen - Kanton - Guilin - Yongfu - Guilin - Zhengzhou - Xi'an - Beijing - Irkutsk - Moscow - Warsaw - Gdansk
Length of the route:
15 800 kilometres

The project was open and had a character of a process, without exactly defined artistic purpose, describing its content, arrangement or composition. It was a kind of action, in which I isolated a fragment (a month) from the rest of my life and put it into a space of art. The action was to be an improvisation, this is why I didn't organized anything in advance, didn't make reservations of train tickets nor hotels. I wanted to absorb for needs of my project everything happening on the way. An outline was very rough: I wanted to go by train across China and Russia in a crucial year 2000, in the period when both of the countries were on a stage of intensive political and economical changes, there was still a lot left from their old systems when new ones only sprang up.
The project had two aspects:
1/ directed inward, exploring a problem of a travel as a personal experience. On this stage, it was a study of survival in extreme conditions carried out on myself: of lasting many days closing with an accidental group of people in hardly comfortable conditions.
2/ directed outside, aiming at an observation of Chinese and Russian societies in a period of breaking up of previous values. I was interested whether private lives of members of those societies had a chaotic structure or they were ordered and according to what system of values. Moreover the project supposed a trial of communication with people (passengers of trains): non-verbal - in China and verbal - in Russia.
During preparing and working out this project I was aware that a lot of phenomena would stay incomprehensible for me. Yet I think that questions without answers are equally meaning as those I managed to find an answer for.