Yang Fudong - The Coloured Sky : New women II

Since the early 1990s, Yang Fudong has been examining the complexities of contemporary Chinese society from a symbolic, detached perspective through his art form. Formally trained as a painter, Fudong has developed an extensive body of work comprised of videos, films, installations and photographs; consistently creating a visual language enveloped in a dream-like mystery.

Favouring multi-screen video projections, Fudong creates an experience that immerses the viewer. His characters, deliberately silent and disembodied, move according to choreographed gestures, always managing to transport the viewer into an aesthetically perfect environment.

Often drawing stylistically on different periods in Chinese and Western cinema – as well as taking inspiration from Shanghai in the 1930s, and the landscape tradition rooted in Chinese art history – Fudong creates open-ended, existential narratives that interweave quotidian ritual with dream-like states. With a consciously romantic framework that is simultaneously contemporary and out-of-date, Fudong examines China through the eyes of young urban intellectuals as they grapple with their place in the modern world. He effortlessly references China’s cultural traditions, whilst making close observations of what makes these narratives relevant to contemporary society. The resulting timeless stories plunge viewers into an otherworldly, nostalgic atmosphere in which a generation that exists between modernity and tradition explores and questions the world.