The Coloured Sky: New Women II

source: graziafr

Regarder la réalité à travers le prisme d’un papier de bonbon coloré : ce fut le point de départ du photographe et vidéaste Yang Fudong. En pratique, cela donne des images acidulées de lolitas asiatiques, et un film projeté sur cinq immenses écrans. Là défile un paysage onirique fait de plages, de cabanons, de nymphettes en bikini, capturées en slow motion. Le décor du film, tonne de sable et pluie artificielle d’une moiteur torride, entièrement construit par ses soins, fait de Yang Fudong le nouveau Gondry chinois.
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source: acminetau

The Coloured Sky: New Women II (2014) conveys a poetic reflexiveness that permeates all of Yang Fudong’s works. In Yejiang / The Nightman Cometh (2011), a wounded soldier questions his path in life as three ghost-like figures represent his inner suffering, romanticism and regret. Spanning seven screens, The Fifth Night (2010) features a disjunctive narrative mirroring new-world China in which seven pensive youths are captured on separate cameras, wandering through a 1930s Shanghai plaza. In the circular, six-channel installation of East of Que Village (2007), wild dogsdepict the marred line between civilisation and savagery.

Yang Fudong’s works draw heavily on traditional Chinese painting and also reflect a fascination with international cinema, particularly film noir. His key influences include filmmakers Jim Jarmusch and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as Shanghai films of the 1920s and 1930s, which were strongly influenced by the West.

Born in Beijing and based in Shanghai, Yang Fudong majored in oil painting at the China Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou. He embarked on filmmaking after graduating from art school, moving to Shanghai where he still lives today. Yang Fudong’s first film An Estranged Paradise (1997 – 2002), which debuted at Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, in 2002, marked the beginning of a longstanding interest in the inner lives of young urban intellectuals. This work, like his celebrated five-part film cycle, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003 – 2007) expresses the aspirations and anxieties of his generation, born during or just after the Cultural Revolution. Unmoored from traditional culture as well as the guiding principles of Communist orthodoxy, this generation is struggling to define itself under the new socialist market economy.

Yang Fudong is represented by ShanghART Gallery (Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore) and Marian Goodman Gallery (New York, Paris, London).
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source: smh

The most recent work, The Coloured Sky: New Women II, is a departure for Yang, albeit with many familiar elements. As his first foray into digital colour there is nothing timid or half-hearted in the way he has saturated a five-channel video with bright, lurid hues. It shows three young women wearing old-fashioned bathing suits, looking like they are enjoying a holiday at the beach. Yet this beach is punctuated by a series of coloured glass panels that reflect or distort the girls’ appearances. There are also a few stuffed deer, and a live snake that may be a coy reference to the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
Imagine a surf romp drenched in the acid colours of late R.W. Fassbinder films, in which three nubile girls project their “secret dreams and anxieties”, as the catalogue puts it. Yang has tried to make his subjects seem innocent and naive, yet quietly alert to their own sexuality. “These girls have secrets that they never tell anyone,” he says, but this could be said about any of the characters in Yang’s videos. Like those other mysterious figures – the warrior in armour, the Shanghai dandy, the tribe of glamorous young people who walk around dealing with their latest existential crisis – one must read Yang’s bathing beauties as symbols or symptoms of China’s re-awakening. As a once great empire that is reclaiming its former glories by different means, China too is a strange mixture of innocence, shrewdness and insecurity, with the sexiest economy in the world.
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source: mariangoodman

(b. 1971, Beijing. Lives and works in Shanghai, China.)

Yang Fudong was born in Beijing in 1971. He is considered one of China’s most important contemporary artists. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou. Yang Fudong now lives and works in Shanghai. His work has been exhibited in China through the most important avant-garde exhibitions in the late 1990s and has been consequently shown in many countries including solo presentations in major institutions such as 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); Renaissance Society, Chicago (2004). Yang Fudong has participated in prestigious international art events including: Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2013); Venice Biennale, Italy (2003 and 2007); The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Australia (2006); Documenta XI, Germany (2002). In 2013, Kunsthalle Zurich and Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive co-organized his first retrospective exhibition.
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source: artsynet

Yang Fudong is a pioneering Chinese filmmaker best known for his “Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest” (2003-7), a series of silent, multi-part, black-and-white films that follow a cast of attractive Chinese youths through several surrealistic scenes. Drawing influence from his training as a painter and photographer, as well as the work of Jim Jarmusch, Yang’s films are sequences of slow-moving, tableau-like dreamscapes, more evocative of moods and impressions than any clear narrative. As he says: “There is no result, no answer.”
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source: leedor

Yang Fudong (China, 1971), está considerado uno de los artistas más importantes entre los que se dedican a la imagen en movimiento.

La primera exposición retrospectiva en Australia de Yang Fudong, comprende tres videoinstalaciones, así como su trabajo reciente: The Coloured Sky: New Women II (2014), trabajo de cinco canales encargado por ACMI y la Galería de Arte de Auckland Toi o Tamaki.

Las cualidades líricas y oníricas de su trabajo, las secuencias narrativas en espiral y las múltiples perspectivas reflejan la psicología de una nueva generación que lucha por encontrar su lugar en la China actual.

Estilísticamente arraigada en la pintura china (el artista es videoartista pero pintor de formación), sus instalaciones de cine multicanal también reflejan una fascinación por el cine internacional y, en particular, el cine negro.

ACMI también presentará una proyección única de épicas de Yang Siete intelectuales en un bosque de bambú (2003-2007), que es la primera vez que las cinco partes de este hito cinematográfico se han presentado de extremo a extremo en una sala de cine.

Yang Fudong está representado por ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, y Marian Goodman Gallery, Nueva York.