Feng Mengbo

Every schoolchild in China learns about the Long March of 1934–35, the Red Army’s sacrificial trek of retreat from the Nationalists that secured Mao’s power and became the CCP’s birth saga. Its stark tales of solidarity through adversity—losing comrades to frost or enemy fire, boiling leather and roots for food—show how far the nation has come. A video-game version might seem mere facetious political parody. Yet the bright 8- and 16-bit adventures blinking onto two eighty-by-twenty-foot screens in Feng Mengbo’s Long March: Restart, 2008, feel both buoyant and poignant, as we follow a plucky Red Army soldier’s progress against imperialist US rockets, Soviet tanks, and a giant purple hexapod scuttling across Tiananmen Square. Subtending the work is a keen wistfulness—for a righteous, unified historical purpose as well as for the wide-eyed glee of starter technology.

Feng wrote the code himself; anyone can play. A single-player wireless console controls the game on one screen, and the screen opposite zooms in to an extreme close-up on the soldier, so when not pacing along and rooting him on, visitors can surrender to the gentle dazzle of an epic pixel mosaic. Scenarios reference storied episodes from the march (a sabotaged bridge, fatal bog, and icy mountain range evoking heavy casualties that took place at these sites), China’s mise-en-scènes of industrialization (steelworks), and bygone agons of the cold war (the Sino-Soviet split and the space race). Well-loved revolutionary songs percolate in MIDI. At unpredictable intervals, like a glitch or dream, Cultural Revolution–era footage commemorating the event flashes through to a recitation of Mao’s “Long March” ode.

The levitating walls and weedy islets, Lego-contoured figures, and snow-dots and rain-dashes (punctuation as weather) remind us of the loveliness of low-tech. Yet in contrast to Cory Arcangel’s Nintendo modding, Feng’s work inhabits this contemporary populist medium to revisit his country’s older, bruised ideals of collectivity. When Super Mario himself makes a cameo, cheerily shuffling about the Great Wall, we might recognize this plumber to be our soldier’s proletarian friend.