Yang Fudong - The Coloured Sky: New Women II

Produced and conceived under the artistic direction of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, this exhibition is part of the “Hors-les-murs” program, showcasing previously unseen holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Culturels Louis Vuitton Tokyo, München, Beijing and Venezia. It is thus carrying out the Fondation’s intent to mount international projects and make them accessible to a broader public.

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 With a consciously romantic framework that is simultaneously contemporary and out-of-date, Fudong examines China through the eyes of young urban intellectuals as they grapple with their place in the modern world.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.

The Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo invites the public to discover this now major figure in Chinese contemporary art and cinema, through the presentation of a poetic work. Fudong usually creates works on 35mm black and white film; this five-channel video installation marks an aesthetic departure from his signature, through the overwhelming use of vivid colour; the first colour film of the artist’s oeuvre.

Portraying an artificial brightly coloured world, the film depicts five young women, naïve and seductive, wearing vintage swimwear on a deliberately synthetic beachfront setting. Filmed in slow-motion against sounds of laughter, sighs, ocean rumbles and cricket song, they play a game of seduction. Five screens depict images of the sun, the sea, the beach, games, food and references to Western art interspersed with the appearances of a horse and a stag. One real, the other stuffed, the animals refer to a Chinese political story dating back to the 3rd century B.C. referring to the proverb "point to a deer and call it a horse" ; a moral play on what is true and what is false.

The Coloured Sky: New Women II epitomizes Fudong’s artistic signature of stylistically referencing different periods in both Chinese and Western cinema and culture.