In his third 12 months of faculty, the artist Yang Fudong determined to cease talking. For what grew to become Otherwhere: Not Talking for Three Months (1993), he communicated largely by writing on his hand or signage. Generally he even traced his finger on a chilly window and breathed to disclose the phrases outlined by condensation.
Close to the tip of his interval of silence, he needed his first phrases to be one thing profound. He took a bus to the Tiantong Temple on the outskirts of the southern Chinese language metropolis Ningbo and stayed in its guesthouse in a single day. Within the morning, a monk requested who he was searching for. Frightened he is perhaps mistaken for a thief, his first phrases have been, “The place’s the bathroom?”
“I suppose it was philosophical, in a way,” Yang, now 54, stated with a smile. We have been sitting inside his high-ceilinged studio, throughout the complicated connected to the Shanghai Museum of Glass and the place he’s labored for the previous 18 years. From the very earliest years of his artistic work, Yang used silence as expression. Silence has since continued to play a central position in his movies, which hardly ever function dialogue.
Props from earlier movies, together with two mannequin horses and a large fluted vase, surrounded us. His calligraphy follow coated a desk. {A photograph} from Honey, his 2003 movie impressed by his curiosity in films about feminine spies, held on a wall, exhibiting a girl in fur behind a pink leather-based couch.
Set up view of “Yang Fudong: Aromatic River,” 2025, at UCCA Middle for Modern Artwork, Beijing.
Yang Hao/Courtesy UCCA Middle for Modern Artwork
“Many issues can’t be deliberate,” he stated. That instinctive, unpremeditated strategy extends from his early works into his newest works. Close to the doorway stood Personal Notes from a Land of Bliss (2025), a 15-panel set up that features movies, work, and pictures. It will likely be proven in an exhibition that options largely new works on the UCCA Middle for Modern Artwork in Beijing, opening November 22.
From a distance, the acrylic and charcoal work nearly look summary, however drawing nearer, figures and flora emerge, painted in thinner sinuous strains. Yang employed a technique in Chinese language portray known as “interpretive imitation” to borrow illustrations from Music Dynasty painter Ma Yuan’s Elegant Gathering on the Western Backyard. He selected acrylic as a result of it dries faster than oil paint, which he stated induces a unique mind-set.
Yang Fudong, Aromatic River (nonetheless), 2016–25.
Courtesy Yang Fudong Studio
The work, like lots of his movies are performed in black and white, which he has regularly stated creates temporal distance for viewers. “Generally belongings you see in colour would possibly truly be black and white,” he stated. “When black and white are at their purest, they really include all colours.”
UCCA curator Chelsea Qianxi Liu defined that Yang has persistently tried to create totally different types of cinema. For Daybreak Breaking (2018), he filmed in an artwork museum; in Infinite Peaks (2020), he explored the connection between portray and movie. With Personal Notes from a Land of Bliss (2025), Yang is utilizing “a cinematic strategy to re-examine portray,” Liu stated. Traditionally, viewers of lengthy scroll work may solely absorb a portion at a time, unfolding a piece earlier than revealing the following. “In Yang’s view,” she stated, “it’s similar to viewing a film.”
Yang Fudong, Aromatic River (nonetheless), 2016–25.
Courtesy Yang Fudong Studio
Yang’s work is well-known throughout Asia, with solo exhibitions held previously on the Lengthy Museum West Bund, the Yuz Museum, and the Daegu Artwork Museum in South Korea. His movie Sparrow on the Sea (2024) was M+’s facade fee final 12 months. Whereas he’s additionally well-known internationally, along with his breakthrough in Europe taking place at Documenta XI in 2002, Yang has a sure attraction inside China, Liu added. “His work is immediately recognizable as his. He’s all the time had a singular presence in up to date Chinese language artwork.”
The exhibition additionally features a 15-channel black-and-white video set up, proven throughout 9 rooms. Titled Aromatic River (2016–25), the piece is meant as a three-dimensional illustration of Yang’s reminiscences. The identify is a translation of Xianghe, a county city on the plains exterior Beijing, the place he grew up.
Yang had deliberate to movie in Xianghe after he made An Estranged Paradise (1997–2002), a black-and-white movie which makes use of non-linear narrative to depict a drifting mental’s city alienation. He’d already begun filming ladies in his hometown in 2000, across the time his grandmother died.
Initially, he deliberate Aromatic River as a documentary, to be recorded regularly over the course of eight to 10 years. In 2002, his mom handed away, and he put the challenge apart. By the point he returned, greater than a decade later, Xianghe had eating places and buildings over ten flooring excessive. “I felt if I didn’t movie at that time, it could change much more,” he stated.
That winter, in 2016, Yang filmed over 47 days. The actors he employed weren’t given scripts, solely a common define. He described the filming course of utilizing a line from Cao Xueqin’s 18th-century novel Dream of the Crimson Chamber: “Fact turns into fiction, when fiction’s true.” What he filmed hadn’t truly occurred to Yang—the ensuing fragmentary scenes of every day life equivalent to a pig carved and bagged, a baby engrossed in a spinning prime, tables laid for a celebration have been altered variations of precise reminiscences and impressions he’d had. The result’s a Xianghe that doesn’t belong solely to the previous.
“Linear time is a really fashionable understanding,” Liu stated. “Lots of Yang Fudong’s works appear to contradict this modernity, maybe trying again whereas concurrently embracing the longer term.”
Set up view of “Yang Fudong: Aromatic River,” 2025, at UCCA Middle for Modern Artwork, Beijing.
Yang Hao/Courtesy UCCA Middle for Modern Artwork
His movies are nearly plotless, rendering them laborious to piece collectively. As a substitute, they’re usually extra intent on finding an emotion than telling a story. For Yang, dialogue lies in motion. “When a tree strikes, even somewhat, it has emotion,” he stated. “Even when we’re filming an empty nook of a home, so long as the suitable feeling is captured, I really feel it’s respiratory.”
Although many of those video works have been filmed in recent times, they’re solely the inaugural chapter of Yang’s ongoing Library Movie Undertaking, through which he considers themes of nostalgia and hometown as a part of the origins of individuals’s non secular lives. His goal is to create an open movie, a door that somebody can push open, determine the place they need to head upon entry.
Additionally within the exhibition is Breastfeeding (2025), a furnishings and video set up composed of televisions and cupboards that Yang has collected over time—items of furnishings as soon as widespread throughout northern China, in Beijing and provinces like Shandong, Hebei, and Shanxi. Some have been used for storing garments, others for kitchen utensils. Grouped collectively, they stand like a small group of ancestors. “They’re like actors in a play,” Yang stated. Most of the cupboards as soon as had clear glass panels, which Yang has changed with mirrored surfaces. Strolling round them, the viewer seems and disappears, as do the cupboards themselves, making a subtly shifting area. Its relationship with Aromatic River, he stated, “is just like the one between a tree and its shadow.”
The exhibition contains work from his college days within the Nineteen Nineties—although internationally identified for his video works like Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003–7), Yang’s follow started in portray.
Yang Fudong, Joyful New 12 months, 2002–25.
Courtesy Yang Fudong Studio
He nonetheless remembers his early dejection about heading south to review at Hangzhou’s China Academy of Artwork whereas his classmates went to Beijing’s Central Academy of Superb Arts. However trying again, had he stayed in Beijing, he suspects he may need remained a classical painter. There’s a throughline within the exhibition that intertwines his childhood, his progress as an artist, and his personal notion of progress. “He’s blended totally different states of time collectively,” Liu stated.
As Yang and I wrapped up our dialog, deliverymen arrived with framed New 12 months greeting playing cards he’d despatched out to pals over the previous twenty years, which function within the exhibition as Joyful New 12 months (2002–25). We regularly understand time as progressing from one level to the following. However from Yang’s perspective, even when issues are previously, they nonetheless exist within the current. “The long run is already there, you simply haven’t reached it but,” he stated. “It’s there, ready for you.”
