Yang Fudong

Yang Fudong (杨福东; born 1971 in Beijing) is a Chinese contemporary artist. In the early 1990s, he began to work with film. He began creating films and videos using 35 mm film. Currently Yang directs films, creates photographs, and creates video installations. Yang is known to explore themes that are historical, social, and political by juxtaposing contradictions between current social issues, with cultural norms. A fan of the abstract and fragmented storyline, he tends to create sequences that are long and suspended, with the use of black-and-white as a constant. Yang's work has a nostalgic feel that incorporates the lyrical harmony of traditional handscrolls with the expressiveness of new wave cinema that is reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch, someone he admires. Yang Fudong's most popular works include: Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forrest, The Fifth Night, the 17th Biennale of Sydney, East of Que Village, An Estranged Paradise, Backyard- Hey! Sun is Rising, and No Snow on the Broken Bridge. His work has been exhibited in China through avant-garde exhibitions in the late 1990s and has been consequently shown in many countries including solo presentations in Parasol Unit, London (2011); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2010); Asia Society, New York (2009); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2005); Castello di Rivoli, Torino (2005); and the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2004). In 2013, Kunsthalle Zurich and Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive co-organized his first retrospective exhibition. Recent exhibitions include Yang Fudong at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK; Moving Mountains, OCAT Xi'an, China (both 2017) and Filmscapes, at ACMI, Melbourne (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) which traveled to the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, New Zealand (2015-2016).