"Art is definitely not my profession, but it has become an integral part of my life. It's like going to sleep every night and dreaming. It's something that is always going to happen, something that ends and then begins again. It's like when you wake up in the morning knowing that you had a dream last night, but you cannot recall what it was that you dreamed. Still, a feeling lingers in the back of your mind that you had a strange or even frightening dream last night. You know if you try to tell the dream to someone else, they just won't be able to relate. So you can only keep it inside you. You live in a big city, hiding in your little corner, and it's doubtful that even a few people know of your existence. Yet you are a part of the city. It's you and a lot of other such people that make up this city. The feeling of the city depends on all of these people living in their own dreams. My relationship with society to a large degree is a kind of metabolic relationship. Society needs ever-changing relationships, just like those that are occurring today. I too am ever-changing. I was unable to choose which generation I was born into, yet I have to learn to adapt to the times." -- Yang Fudong
32-year-old
Yang Fudong, whose work is currently on display at
TRANS>area Gallery in New York, January 29-March 27, and was recently featured in the Museum of Modern Art's
China Now survey, February 12-16, is among a new generation of Chinese filmmakers currently making a splash in the art world.
"Part of the fascination surrounding Mr. Yang," wrote Jane Perlez in a
New York Times profile of the artist from December 3, 2003, "is founded on his place at the center of a digital whirlwind in China, where a new generation of artists have spurned the canvases of Mao-like heads that the West considered so avant-garde in the 1990s. Instead, he and his friends are creating videos about personal feelings and anomie amid the warp-speed change in China."
Born in Beijing and currently living in Shanghai, Mr. Yang, a 1995 graduate of the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, may edit on a G4, but he still prefers to shoot film -- mostly 35mm B&W -- and one would be hard-pressed to characterize his work as "modern." Although Yang's work features depictions of alienated youth ubiquitous in contemporary Chinese independent cinema, his films are distinctly reminiscent of an earlier era.
"The relationship between my work and the films of the '20s is pretty vague," explains Yang. "Artists today can appropriate any medium to express their way of living and seeing, and make that choice according to their need to say something specific. I see the sensitivity that marks my films as a personal thing having its roots in my past and my experience."
Yang's first feature, the semi-autobiographical
An Estranged Paradise, opens with a dissertation about a Chinese landscape artist. As a brush painting is created on-screen, a voiceover lists various rules used to establish harmony between the visual motifs. The story that follows depicts a young hypochondriac in Hangzhou -- China's "Paradise on Earth" -- as he wanders between home and hospital, and between encounters with his girlfriend. The film is poetically structured with recurring visual motifs that echo the rules of Chinese landscape painting, but the harmony of the film's structure lies in subtle contrast to the story of the film's protagonist, whose restlessness arrives with the rainy season and disappears with its end.
"After graduation, my friends and I were not sure what to do with our lives," says Yang. "We felt lost." Like the character in his film, which was begun in 1995, but only completed in 2002 with the assistance of a curator from Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, "I had the feeling of being a long way from my family in a city that isn't really mine, unsure of the direction life would take me."
In his latest work, the 30-minute
Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, Part I, "Mr. Yang films actors and actresses (all his friends) as they ascend Huangshan Mountain, talk with one another and meditate on life. An original musical score accompanies their musings. Some of the dialogue seems a bit hokey: 'I believe in nothing except fate and constellation,' and, 'If you leave next week, be my lover this week.' But the overall effect of the well-dressed wanderers on a misty mountaintop is dreamlike, eerie and compelling," writes Perlez.
"Every educated Chinese person is very ambitious, and obviously there are obstacles, obstacles coming either from society or from inside oneself," says Yang, who claims he has not experienced any pressure from Chinese censors in shaping his work, despite his growing international acclaim. But then, his visually elegant films are not overtly political and are rooted instead in personal stories deceptively complex in their modesty. "I'd like to move into cinema, but not to go completely into a narrative mode. I'm tempted by the idea of seeing my films shown in movie houses, but at the same time I want to stay experimental."
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/19/2004 12:44:00 PM
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