Yang Fudong

Recently I went on an international tour with The Australian Ballet to China. We went to Beijing and Shanghai for a couple of performances in each city. Although I did write about the whole trip and the performing side of things in my private journal, today I wanted to talk about a specific artist that I discovered whilst over there.  On my last day in Shanghai, before jumping on the plane back to Australia, my friend and I decided to visit the Yuz Museum.  This gallery is new in the modern art field in Shanghai and is owned by a modern art patron.  We went to the Rain Room by Random International, which was really interesting (Although I had already been to the one in London at the Barbican). It’s afterwards that we decided to quickly check out another room before going to the airport. That is when I stumbled across a work by Yang Fudong.

The work of art was called The Fifth Night.  The introductory text by Yang Fudong himself says :

 There is a saying in Chinese ‘show real emotion unintentionally’ (Zhen Qing Liu Lu), How do actors achieve this? However, there is another phrase in Chinese ‘Show the real and fake emotion unintentionally’ (Zhen Jia Liu Lu). How to achieve what you want by adopting both real and fictitious approaches is what I’m realizing gradually.

The Fifth Night was a night with singular number; would it be a night in the past? It was about boys and girls pondering on the square in the night, each night each person or walking in each night with a solitary mood. They met, they knew each other but they don’t recognize each other. Maybe it was a fantasy in dream and they are missing each other on their pass by. Has it really happened? Or they met somewhere else?

Yang Fudong works with films. The room was dark with 7 screens on which was projected the film. Each screen follows a character. It is impossible for the viewer to see all seven screens at once so you always have to miss out on something yet your eyes are juggling in between screens to try and follow some individual narrative (the artist and each viewer have a different vision).

Each character is wandering on this portion of street that could be called a street theatre. There is a stage with a staircase on it.

To me, it made me think of the fact that life is just a show, we perform a show on the street, we want to appear a certain way. These people seem worn from that. At the end of the day I feel like we are all wandering in the grand scheme of life by ourselves, not really sure whether we actually know people or not.

There were two women wearing light-coloured dresses with some floral pattern on them. In my opinion they represented this sort of purity or this ‘wanting to be pure’ feeling. To me they represented the Woman in society, or the depiction of it. Walking past men in suits. At some point, one of them climbs the staircase  (which leads to an unknown place, the sky? Acceptance?) but she goes down before reaching the top, isn’t that what we do as human beings? Too scared to go further with our ideas. More particularly, isn’t that what women are pushed to do in a society dominated by men?

The male characters were either pictured as business type or working class type. After having been to China, I can really appreciate those two distinct aspects of the society. Two men seemed to be waiting for something, but for what? It made me think of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. They had suitcases (emotional baggage?) and they were wearing suits, it made me think of how the emotional world and the business world are two different worlds and the rush for money can make us lose ourselves.  Supporting this idea, the working class men made me think of the Industrial Revolution and the chain working policy. Here again, people lost their humanity or it’s been taken away from them.

When I saw this oeuvre, I also thought of Pina Bausch’ Caffé Müller and also many works by Pina Bausch where different actions that have nothing to do with each other happen at the same time which then become one big action (as it happens at the same time on the stage).

It has become rare for me to be emotionally transported by art and only a few artists have done that. After reading an interview of Yang Fudong about his work East of Que Village by Wu Hung, I realised how much I could relate to the artist’s own idea of his own art. I find myself bored by things that are too thought through, in a sense that I don’t want art to be made in order to please people, it should just please naturally as well as disturb them and challenge them. Usually when a work is made about a particular event in history (WWII for example), I find it hard to relate to it and to relate to the artist, and what I think is the shame is that often, the artist doesn’t relate to his own work.

Sometimes people want to talk about something that is going to make people interested or sad or happy … when everyone’s personal story to me is the most interesting thing, it’s not boring, because we all have a personal story and somehow we can always relate it to other’s. Reading about Chinese born artist Yang Fudong was no exception. 

I obviously could relate to a lot of aspects in his work and yet it is not about people dying, or war or anything like that. It is about people, childhood memories and also all the in between things that people consider as unimportant. How about the memories of a tiny village in the country? Picking flowers on the sand dune? The smells of our past and what they mean?

Those topics are so rich and that's what inspires me to create more.

François-Eloi Lavignac

Source: Yang Fudong : Life Water Leaving Traces edited by Li Zhenua, December 13-17, 2010