Yang Fudong
1971– · Chinese contemporary artist, filmmaker and video artist
Yang Fudong (born 1971 in Beijing) is a contemporary Chinese artist who began working with film in the early 1990s, shooting on 35 mm stock. He directs films, makes photographs and creates video installations that examine historical, social and political themes by setting current tensions against cultural norms. He graduated in oil painting from the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou in 1995.
His sequences are long and suspended, with fragmented storylines and black and white as a constant. Works such as East of Que Village, filmed with stray dogs in a town on the outskirts of Beijing, or Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, based on the poets of the Wei and Jin dynasties, blend the lyrical harmony of traditional handscrolls with the expressiveness of new wave cinema.
He has shown at institutions such as Kunsthalle Wien and Castello di Rivoli, and in 2013 Kunsthalle Zurich and the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive co-organized his first retrospective. His legacy lies in portraying the isolation of a Chinese generation caught between tradition and modernization.