Yang Fudong

Young Man, Young Man unfolds in a fragmented structure, reconstructing Yang Fudong’s recollections of his 1980s adolescence in a Beijing military compound, along with scattered memories of collective life in the post-socialist era. In the film, young boys run, practice martial arts, wait for the bus, splash in water, and play in cornfields. There is no fixed narrative; instead, the boys seem to drift through an endless summer. Yet an undercurrent of distance and estrangement suggests that childhood has already quietly slipped away. These moments of adolescent innocence and loneliness, crystalized within the film, form a dreamlike allegory.

The 13th Shanghai Biennale cooperated with the artist Yang Fudong in a public welfare short film - "Art, Art, Art...".

Multi-channel video, 35mm, B&W, 8-11 mins...She rises gently, her hair tousled by the wind; gracefully, she picks up a handkerchief and wipes her brow; sunlight catches the wall across from her and lingers there for a while.

At the Summer Palace follows a mysterious man and a young boy as they wander through the Summer Palace, clad in clothing recalling styles from the 1980s and 1990s. The work unfolds like a hazy moment between dreaming and wakefulness, recalling the stillness of a languid afternoon. The era-specific details present in the setting seem to anachronistically clash with their pair’s clothing and behavior. Through this dislocation of time and space, Yang Fudong evokes the complex emotions of childhood, specifically the mixture of curiosity and unease a child feels upon encountering the strange and unknown.

The film 'Seven Intellectuals In Bamboo Forest' is based on the history of seven talented intellectuals from the ancient Chinese Wei and Jin Dynasties. Ruan Ji, Ji Kang, Shan Tao, Liu Ling, Ruan Yan, Xiang Xiu and Wang Rong were famous poets and artists at that time. Open and unruly, they used to gather and drink in the bamboo forest, singing songs and playing traditional Chinese musical instruments, in the hope of escaping from earthly life. They pursued individuality, freedom, and liberty. Their remarkable talent and passion made them a notable group in Chinese history. Part 5 is about the return to the city and to reality. We live in the city and belong to it. If any problem arises, we are able to solve it.

Two young men wear the uniform of 70’s policeman, sometimes they look like runaway criminal. They want to escape reality which is impossible to cast off. They yearn for the bright sunshine life, expecting the time to be captured, to exchange for a calmness of the heart.

Dawn Breaking is the opening chapter of Yang Fudong’s Museum Film Project. "The film in its final version is something different from the dailies showing the process of making it."

Yejiang / The Nightman Cometh features a cast of strange figures who slip between historical eras. Strewn with symbols of past and future, civilisation and wilderness, dream and reality, the work is laden with filmic, artistic and literary meanings but surrenders to none. An ancient warrior is seen wounded and forlorn after battle, in conflict about his path in life. Yang dramatises the clash between the hero's social role or 'mask', and the more authentic face of his instincts and aspirations. For Yang, the visible world presented in this work is not an objective one but rather the externalisation of internal sentiments.

Multi-channel video installation (4 overhead projectors, 19 TV sets). Yang Fudong captures the poetic sentiment that arises in moments of individual encounter with the real world, and his own expression of the world inside him. His artistic practice engages in a temperamental dialogue with the traditional culture and literature of China. Yang Fudong constructs a potential platform for dialogue and negotiation between the self and external reality. In so doing, he does not propagate ？xed believes or dogmas. His work is based on process, on what he learns from ceaseless study, observation, and involvement with his social environment and the way it relates to the individual.

The film 'Seven Intellectuals In Bamboo Forest' is based on the history of seven talented intellectuals from the ancient Chinese Wei and Jin Dynasties. Ruan Ji, Ji Kang, Shan Tao, Liu Ling, Ruan Yan, Xiang Xiu and Wang Rong were famous poets and artists at that time. Open and unruly, they used to gather and drink in the bamboo forest, singing songs and playing traditional Chinese musical instruments, in the hope of escaping from earthly life. They pursued individuality, freedom, and liberty. Their remarkable talent and passion made them a notable group in Chinese history. In Part 3 these 7 young people try to change their identity and have a different life. They choose to live in China's Southwestern villages, where they can get closer to nature, and to their own hearts.

“For my work for films4peace, I considered certain visual metaphors. Compared with the eternity of the universe, human life is short, very short. Our existence is like a grain of sand in a desert or a speck of stone on the rock that makes the world. Conflict and destruction seems absurd if you consider the insignificance of our time on earth. Let us distance ourselves from oppression and slaughter. The creation of world peace is more important for all humankind. In my film, huge boulders slowly rise up amidst a chaotic noise that drifts in and out. Human life is not always beautiful, more often than not, we are simply trying to survive, allowing our lives to continue and nothing more.” —Yang Fudong

A 15 part film featuring scenes from Xianghe, running from the mundane to the surreal: people parade in opera costumes, slaughter pigs in public and dine on the fields; they bury the dead and get married, tickling the bride and groom, everything done without speech. Sitting somewhere between intimate personal reels and detached ethnographic records, the work creates a simultaneous sense of immersion and distance – of the type you might associate with end-of-life flashbacks. Yang gives nostalgia a fantastic, mystical bent, as if to suggest that to revel in memory is a creative act.

The film 'Seven Intellectuals In Bamboo Forest' is based on the history of seven talented intellectuals from the ancient Chinese Wei and Jin Dynasties. Ruan Ji, Ji Kang, Shan Tao, Liu Ling, Ruan Yan, Xiang Xiu and Wang Rong were famous poets and artists at that time. Open and unruly, they used to gather and drink in the bamboo forest, singing songs and playing traditional Chinese musical instruments, in the hope of escaping from earthly life. They pursued individuality, freedom, and liberty. Their remarkable talent and passion made them a notable group in Chinese history. Part 4 is about the idea of living on an island with no one else, avoiding the hustle and bustle of the busy metropolis. In Chinese legend, there is an island of Peach Blossoms - the very ideal place to live, where one's thoughts can fly freely.

In “S10” (2003), two female office workers wearing uniforms covered in zippers, zip together their arms and various other parts of their bodies. At this point we have entered the realm of a modern-day Shan Hai Jing inhabited by "exaggerated" creatures, a realm that is at the same time a metaphorical expression of a new concept of "subject" that is in the process of evolving organically from the individual to the other, and to the group. If we are all interconnected, just how far does the territory of the "individual" extend?

Implicitly a reaction to the forms of individualism in a developing modern mass society. Yang Fudong strings together takes with different characters so quickly one after the other that they “lose face.” A man explains to a woman the sentence"I didn't force you". Separate movements of 12-14 people are combined/cut to form a fictive man who repeats the words "I didn't force you" to a woman.

Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest has five parts. The series was finished in 2007 and shown as whole in the Venice Biennale the same year. Yang Fudong uses myths, individual memories and experiences as means to study identity and how it may be formed. In his films the spectator can sense the contradictions in the present and past China. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, Part 1, was filmed on the Yellow Mountain. The mountain has a significant status in the traditional Chinese painting. The scenery, the not so clear motives of each character in the film combined with the music creates an almost poetic atmosphere.

Liu Lan tells a story about the break with tradition in China. An intellectual in a white suit meets a traditionally dressed woman in the countryside. Despite their mutual love, their lives seem incompatible. A woman’s voice sings a folksong, Why are people in love always separated from one another?’ The film’s atmosphere is melancholy and the landscape veiled in mist. Here Yang Fudong shows his connections with Chinese landscape painting.

Father’s Fireworks is a short film the artist edited out of footage of daily life that he had previously shot. The film first depicts a worrisome and loving letter written by Yang Fudong's father to Yang Fudong through textual still frames, after which it shows the artist’s father setting off fireworks in celebration of the New Year.

8 channel-video installation, sound, 8- 14 mins. Music by: Jin Wang. "The light that I feel" series refers to an eponymous film shot during the summer 2014 on the island of Sandhornøy in Norway where Yang Fudong directed local actors and dancers. The Light That I Feel was first shown in situ on eight screens arranged within an architectural structure purposely built for the occasion on a beach on the island, and editing it at the Nordland College of Art and Film, Kabelvag. Influenced by Ingmar Bergman’s work, this project enabled Yang Fudong to direct European actors for the first time in a magnificent Scandinavian landscape. The artist seeks to show how the wind and trees can express a narrative. As in many of his films landscapes play a paramount role equivalent to that of the protagonists.

Yang Fudong, one of the most influential contemporary artists in China, is known for his epic black-and-white films and photographs, which straddle the worlds of contemporary art installation and cinema. Moving Mountains is a 46-minute, black-and-white film, accompanied by photographs from the film set, drawings and props. The film is inspired by the ancient tale of a man, seeking to move a mountain, and extolls the virtues of perseverance and collective action. The artist makes this story a poetic reflection upon human nature and the shifting values to which it can be subjected.

7-channel video installation, 35mm, b&w. Music:Jin Wang. In making the film noir drama The Fifth Night, Yang used different lenses for each camera, but filmed everything at the same moment, creating a labyrinthine, live-feed effect. The work recalls the narrative structure of a traditional Chinese hand-scroll, while its multiple perspectives are suggestive of an M. C. Escher drawing. The synchronous scene was captured in a single take, with the work running for 10 minutes and 37 seconds, the exact length of a reel of film.

10-channel video installation. Sound by Jin Wang. A concert is being staged at the seaside. Accompanied by various musical instruments, the love story of a young couple is unfolded on the same location. The videos set on the centre display two scenarios taking place simultaneously: one shows a young couple riding a horse along the sea and the other a pair of lovers struggling for survival from a ship accident. The other eight screens deliver at the same time the performance of diverse instruments, a trumpet and a cello played on the rocks, for example. The background music, which is hallucinatory, dreamlike and even uncoordinated, reflects the conflicts between ideals and reality. The young lovers, despite the threat of death, continue with their discussion of ideal, faith and anticipation.

This video appears to be a humorous stylistic reference to spy films. All the clichés – tension, eroticism, grave, cigarette-smoking men and atmospheric music – are present. The woman wears fishnet hose and a fur coat with her military uniform. This ambiguity of seduction and deceit is not only the earmark of espionage, but possibly also a metaphor for the present ambivalent situation in China.

3-channel video installation. Sound by Miya Dudu. An illustration of the words of the romantic song of the same name, and a commentary on it. We see a young man and woman in a large city, dreamily staring. Just like the song, they reflect hope, idealism and emotional purity. But the changes in the city proceed rapidly, and it is a question whether their ideals and feelings will remain untouched by this. Detail pictures: