Though China’s strongest signifiers at present might be endless factory floors, skies obscured by hazy pollution, and teeming hordes of newly minted consumers, video artist Yang Fudong’s installations mine a different era of cultural heritage: the heyday of Chinese cinema, as seen from 1940s Shanghai. In his current exhibition at Marian Goodman gallery, the artist, who catapulted onto the art-world stage with the meandering black-and-white film “Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest” at the 2007 Venice Biennale, embraces the buttoned-up elegance and stiff, poised beauty of the era’s movie-making, but also the underlying personal and political tension that welled up in the moment before everything changed with the Communist revolution.
“Fifth Night” (2010) is a lineup of seven screens each displaying a view into the same deserted urban plaza. Each of the screens concentrates on one of a diverse cast of characters inhabiting the same space, from two women in print dresses and a pair of vagabonds who get thrown out of a parked car to old men sitting still on a loveseat and a few roughed-up laborers in worn undershirts. The characters wander aimlessly, each the star of their own reveries, though they sometimes cross paths and make brief eye contact. The action unfolds across all the screens at once — the footage was filmed simultaneously in a complex cinematographic dance. To students of Chinese cinema, the character tropes and class stratification on display in the piece, communicated via costume and body language, is reminiscent of films like Zheng Junli’s 1949 anti-Nationalist parable “Crows and Sparrows,” a tale of an exploitative landlord manipulating the occupants of a Shanghai boarding house. Yang Fudong adopts that film's self-conscious, demonstrative acting style and echoes the richness of its black-and-white depiction of dense Chinese urban space.
A second video, the single-channel “Ye Jiang (The Nightman Cometh)” (2011), is a more stylized exploration of China’s cinematic history, though it still focuses on the meanderings of several different characters. It stars a soldier fully decked out in ancient Chinese battle armor, a woman in classical regal dress, and another pair clad in the dapper fashion of pre-revolutionary Shanghai. Scattered action takes place, but the characters again wander through their strange frozen landscape scarcely interacting. Here, another cinematic reference comes to mind: The physical isolation and psychological distress of this forbidding panorama is familiar from the freighted setting of “Spring in a Small Town,” Fei Mu’s 1948 exploration of China’s ailing traditional upper class in the aftermath of the Second Sino-Japanese war. Recently named the greatest Chinese movie ever made, the film's empty grasslands and silent, shell-shocked figures are spiritual predecessors for Yang's introverted protagonists.
"Yang Fudong: Selected Works" is open at Marian Goodman gallery through April 28
A version of this article will appear in the July/August issue of Modern Painters.