YANG FUDONG

Born 1971 in Beijing, China. Lives and works in Shanghai, China.

Yang Fudong, East of Que Village, 2007 (video still), six-channel video installation, black-and-white, 20:50 mins. Courtesy the artist and ShanghART, Shanghai

Yang Fudong’s films, photographs and video installations are born out of an interest in the power of the moving image to explore subjecthood, experience and thought. He draws stylistically on different periods in the history of Chinese cinema to create open-ended existential narratives that interweave quotidian ritual with dream and fantasy states.

Yang trained as a painter in the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. In the 1990s, he started to work in the medium of film and video. He is known for his cinematography and mastery of cinematic style, using 35mm film to produce powerful and poetic works about the human condition with its malaise and fantasies of everyday life. He possesses a sensitivity to the traditions of Chinese art, cinema and the place of the intellectual (the literati). Each of his films is philosophical and open-ended, engaging questions around both history and contemporary life, mostly depicting the lives of young people from his own generation, albeit with historical resonances that sometimes span many centuries. Through vignettes staged with classical precision, Yang’s works propose a poetics of place and a critique of time that is determined through the interaction of individuals rather than by political doctrine.

Yang has produced a range of film and photographic works which capture besuited men practising military exercises with toy swords (Backyard – Hey! Sun is Rising, 2001), track the chronic hypochondria/boredom of a young Hangzhou intellectual (An Estranged Paradise 1997–2002), and cite the glamour of 1930s Shanghai (Ms. Huang at M. Last Night, 2006). The five-part series of black-and-white films, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003–07), shown in its entirety at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, is an adaptation of the traditional Chinese tale known as ‘The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove’, about a group of third-century Chinese scholars and poets living in exile to escape political unrest. Using a consciously romantic framework that is both contemporary and slightly out of time, Yang examines China through the eyes of young urban intellectuals as they try to establish what they really think and feel. He updates traditional narratives and settings to examine the ways in which the turmoil of the recent past, present and possibly future can be understood.

Included in the 17th Biennale of Sydney is East of Que Village (2007), a six-channel film that captures a pack of wild dogs who scavenge in a bleak landscape around a small settlement in Northern China. For Yang, this stark black-and-white film reflects, in a lyrical but also brutal documentary style, his own experiences of growing up in rural China, as well as his thoughts about the vicissitudes of contemporary life. As the dogs, who literally have to eat each other to cling on to survival, are juxtaposed with a group of villagers who metaphorically have to struggle in the same way, the film poses harsh questions about the meanings of the collective and the individual in an unforgiving environment that is not limited to this time or place. Yang draws on his own experiences to consider the isolation and loss increasingly prevalent in communities today and to reflect upon the expectations, rights and fantasies of different individuals.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 ‘Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest’, Asia Society and Museum, New York, USA
2009 ‘Yang Fudong: East of Que Village’, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, USA
2008 ‘Yang Fudong’, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Spain
2006 ‘No Snow on the Broken Bridge’, Parasol unit, London, UK
2005 ‘Yang Fudong’, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Torino, Italy

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘The Symbolic Efficiency of the Frame’, Tirana International Contemporary Art Biennual Tirana, Albania
2008 ‘Farewell to Post-Colonialism’, 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou, China
2007 ‘Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind’, 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
2006 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia
2004 54th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA

Selected Bibliography

Marcella Beccaria, ‘Yang Fudong: Towards a New Abstraction’, Parkett, Parkett-Verlag AG, Zurich, 2006, vol. 76, pp. 72–77
Yuko Hacegawa, ‘The White Cloud Drifting Across the Sky Above the Scene of an Earthquake’, Parkett, Parkett-Verlag AG, Zurich, 2006, vol. 76, pp. 78–84
Pi Li, ‘Yang Fudong: Dreamlike Reality’, ART iT, Tokyo, 2006, vol. 10, pp. 64–67 Zhang Wei, ‘All in a Thought Life is Actually Quite Beautiful’, Parkett, Parkett-Verlag AG, Zurich, 2006, vol. 76, pp. 94–97
Zhang Yaxian, ‘Interview: The Power Behind’, Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, exhibition catalogue, Jarla Partilager, Sweden, 2008, pp. 170–89