MCLC: Yang Fudong retrospective

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Yang Fudong retrospective
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (8/29/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/arts/design/a-yang-fudong-restrospective-
at-the-berkeley-art-museum.html

Cryptic Chronicler of the New China
By BLAKE GOPNIK

BERKELEY, Calif. — Imagine the central casting version of an avant-garde
filmmaker from China. The clothing’s easy: the black jeans and Camper
shoes worn on movie sets everywhere, topped by a baggy black T-shirt that
commemorates some art-film production — why not “Permanent Vacation,” the
scrappy feature that sent Jim Jarmusch on his way?

For the man inside those clothes, you could go full cliché: Give him the
rounded body and face of a poet from an ancient Chinese scroll, with the
requisite ponytail and straggly wisps of mustache and beard.

One recent morning, in a sunny office at the Berkeley Art Museum, the
artist Yang Fudong came across as this Hollywood vision of himself, all
brush-painted poet meets editing suite. Mr. Yang,
<http://www.yangfudong.com/> a 41-year-old from Shanghai, makes arcane
movies and video installations, mostly black and white and always
plotless, that have won him the full retrospective — his first — at the
museum here through Dec. 8.

He is known for using the illogic of European art film (think of
Antonioni, Resnais or the later Fellini) to talk about how China’s
traditions clash with its modern realities. His films feel like mash-ups
of “Last Year at Marienbad,” a Shanghai film noir and a Ming dynasty brush
painting, as assembled by a master of esoteric Buddhist verse.

“I was very taken with their beauty, and their complexity, and their
ability to move one and engage one,” said Marian Goodman
<http://www.mariangoodman.com/>, Mr. Yang’s New York dealer, whose roster
includes artists like Gerhard Richter and Jeff Wall.

In the late ‘90s, she got a look at the “hot” new painting out of China
and said, “My God, this is not for me.” She had no intention of “putting a
push on to get a Chinese artist,” she said, as other dealers were known to
be doing. (“I wasn’t trying to be the United Nations.”) But when she
discovered Mr. Yang’s film work, she said, she couldn’t resist.

The first piece she or anyone else would have seen was “An Estranged
Paradise,” Mr. Yang’s earliest shot at filmmaking, which had its premiere
at the 2002 Documenta, Germany’s great roundup of contemporary art.
“Paradise” uses classic montage technique to track the romantic adventures
and urban wanderings of its hypochondriac hero. Mr. Yang started shooting
it in 1997, thanks to cash from a patron willing to take a chance on him —
he was barely two years out of art school, he said, with hardly any
knowledge of moviemaking — and completed the film with financing from
Documenta.

That was followed by “Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest,”
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_B-dOdgx_A> whose five installments were
completed from 2003 to 2007 and received raves at two Venice Biennales.
Riffing on an ancient legend about seven young culturati who retreat to a
sylvan life of drinking and talk, Mr. Yang’s version follows the
peregrinations of two lithe women and five well-dressed men as they linger
among classic Chinese landscapes, farmers’ fields and modern construction
sites.

Other projects have taken in the drones of China’s office world, the
bourgeois in their parks and the poor humans and poorer dogs of the Yangs’
ancestral village. (“The people who live there are documentary,” Mr. Yang
said. “They’re just people who live there. But the dogs are more scripted,
and we paid for them.”)

While Mr. Yang’s individual subjects are relatively clear, his larger
meanings are hard to pin down. He refuses to help, offering at best a few
cryptic insights. (Inscrutable, you’d call him, if the word weren’t off
limits.)

He said he stands out from his sources in the Nouvelle Vague, because his
version conveys an Eastern tradition in which meaning “cannot be spoken
but is understood by the heart.” Or here he is on how his films borrow the
look of 1940s Shanghai: “It’s a feeling of yesterday, but it’s actually
tomorrow.” And then there’s his rejection of standard plot: “I think about
how to tell a narrative by using not people speaking so much, but how the
wind tells a narrative, or how trees tell a narrative.”

And Mr. Yang won’t play final authority on his films’ meaning. He thinks
of each viewer as “a second director,” he said. “They engage with a film
however they want to engage, and they can kind of edit it in their minds
themselves.”

One notable second director might be Philippe Pirotte, the 41-year-old
Belgian who organized the Berkeley show. Sitting in the museum’s outdoor
cafe, he spoke about how Mr. Yang’s films resist the overwhelming
consumerism of his country — maybe using the old tale of the Seven Sages
to stand for a withdrawal from consumer culture as well as for the
“radical disenchantment with the real” of his generation, as one scholar
has put it. Mr. Pirotte writes in his catalog essay that Mr. Yang and his
peers “have spent most of their formative years in a society in
transformation, which has created lasting feelings of alienation.”

Mr. Yang grew up in a Beijing suburb in the relative isolation of military
life — his father had something like a lieutenant’s rank — and said that
he never felt the impact of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. There was no art of
any kind around his home, he said, let alone anything risky. He only ended
up at the China Academy of Art, in Hangzhou, because of a natural talent
for drawing. Once there, he studied conventional oil painting, with forays
into photography.

A taste for the avant-garde only came clear in his third year, when he
began a three-month “performance” that simply involved staying perfectly
mute. Mr. Yang’s artful silence makes clear that, from the beginning, his
version of rebellious creation would involve withdrawal.

Take, for instance, the listless meanderings and musings of Mr. Yang’s
seven intellectuals, whom Mr. Pirotte says reflect the predicament of a
real cultured class in contemporary China — possibly including figures
like Mr. Yang himself — whose members have been sidelined. “They are
supposed to use their brains to make money for the country,” Mr. Pirotte
said, and those who don’t are left powerless.

Mr. Yang denies any such themes: “I’ve never thought of the connections
between my films and the state of Chinese society or politics.” But it’s
hard not to find parallels between the striking disjunctions in Mr. Yang’s
storytelling and the disjointed state of being in China today.

Daisy Yiyou Wang, a 36-year-old specialist on Chinese art at the
Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery in Washington, said she sees Mr. Yang’s
fragmented art as deeply evocative of the fractures that she’s seen in her
native China. “A lot of things he depicted in ‘Seven Intellectuals’ have a
big impact on me,” she said, to the point that when she goes home, she
feels as if she were stepping into a Yang film.

Ms. Wang also said she believed that Mr. Yang’s divagations and
dislocations come from the strong ties he has to traditional Chinese art
and language, which don’t demand the logical connections favored in the
West.

If she’s right about Mr. Yang’s work, he is courting risks. Any notion of
an essential and poetic Chinese-ness can easily come across as Orientalist
cliché, playing into the hands of a Western art world on the lookout for
the latest exotic, impenetrable product from the Mysterious East. Mr.
Yang’s appeal to tradition can also justify a nostalgia that verges on
sentiment, and a refusal to come to terms with the present.

In a scathing review in Art in America, the critic Ryan Holmberg described
“Seven Intellectuals” as “deeply narcissistic, with the romantic Yang
treating everything — from agricultural or industrial landscape and
migrant labor to narrative structure and temporal duration — as
reflections of him and his lot.”

In addition Mr. Yang’s reliance on the well-trodden poetics of
spirituality and dreams can easily be seen as simple escapism.

But it could also be that Mr. Yang’s elliptical, spiritual vision doesn’t
so much buy into an escape from reality as question the usefulness of
notions of spirit. The incoherence of his narratives and the impotence of
his heroes may flag weaknesses inherent in the otherworldly traditions
they seem rooted in. Or, more directly, the disruptions in Mr. Yang’s
vision may signal that there’s simply no way to pull tidy art out of
China’s current reality — that anything tidy would be complicit with the
nation’s focus on the bottom line.

“The ideal, utopia and paradise are like the moon in the sky,” Mr. Yang
has said. “Some people let it hang up there in the sky. Some pull it down
and hold it in their hands.”

And some find they’ve lost all sight of it.