The China Project

185 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection YANG Fudong Over the last decade, Yang Fudong has achieved international recognition with his extensive video and film practice. He graduated in 1995 from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and moved to Shanghai in 1998. Fudong’s lyrical, fragmentary works draw on varied sources, including traditional Chinese painting and literature, the French New Wave, and Chinese cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. Yang’s practice is primarily motivated by the narrative language of film and its ability to convey complex and profound human emotions. The short video work City light (Chengshi zhiguang) 2000, shot in Shanghai, embraces the concept of ritual and daily interaction in contemporary city living. Its characters convey an indecision stemming from their physical alienation — they appear almost lost, as if existing in their thoughts alone. Much of metropolitan China has undergone rapid development since the late 1980s, with the destruction and reconstruction of the cityscape resulting in residents being uprooted from their family homes, many of which are ancestral, and relocated from the city to its outskirts. As Chinese academic Wu Hung describes: In theory, demolition and relocation were conditions for the capital’s modernisation. In actuality, these conditions brought about a growing alienation between the city and its residents: they no longer belonged to one another. 1 For Yang, City light expresses the feelings of an individual who sometimes feels like two different people. A man with an umbrella moves forward, while his shadow or second self remains behind, as if stalled or indecisive. A man and woman dance in close embrace, and then the camera acknowledges only her, caught in an absent gaze, her mind elsewhere. Yang explores the feelings associated with living in a big city, and his characters act as if their minds desire something other than what they see. A gun is held stationary, while the holder’s second self proceeds with the action he might be considering. The dreamlike state that Yang creates lacks a linear narrative, and he portrays the daily rituals of city living through absurd humour. For instance, people dance in an office or on the median strip of a busy highway, or run holding umbrellas when the weather is clearly fine. Yang seeks inspiration from what he refers to as ‘literati short films’. The Chinese literati were scholars and painters trained in Confucian classics, poetry and history. One of the most important aspects of their profession was their ability to express their relationship to culture, in its past and present state, creatively through word and image. This ‘literati’ concept is an important influence on Yang’s choice of moving image as his medium. Just as men of letters saw poetry as a conduit to their inner thoughts, Yang Fudong sees the moving image as a necessary part of his artistic expression. His reflection on contemporary life in City light is realised as a cyclical repetition of waking and sleeping; in a whimsical, trance-like sequence of actions that parallel a daydream, his characters illustrate the banality of urban living. endnote 1 Wu Hung, ‘Self and environment’, in The First Guangzhou Triennial: Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art 1990–2000 [exhibition catalogue], Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, 2002, p.252. City light (Chengshi zhiguang) (stills) 2000 Mini DV, 6:40 minutes, colour, stereo, ed. 3/10 / The James C Sourris Collection. Purchased 2003 with funds from James C Sourris through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation