February 2, 2010

Yang Fudong – First Spring

or, A New Direction in China’s Visual Communications

Once again, Designboom seems to have tapped into my subconscious, enriching my recent firsthand exposure to images created by Chinese artists.

Still from First Spring, 2009

Yang Fudong is today’s topic. I recently came across his work as a “new direction in Prada’s visual communications”: his latest work is a short film for the luxury brand (full video at the end of the post), which was picked up by Hypebeast, among other blogs. I watched it and didn’t give it a second thought.

Dawn Mist, Separation Faith, 2009

It wasn’t until I chanced upon his name in Designboom later that day that I realized that I had seen his work before, at UCCA’s “Breaking Forecast” exhibition (which runs through the end of February). Unfortunately, I somehow managed to miss the film ‘Dawn Mist, Separation Faith,’ a new full-length film that was screening at the UCCA.

Ms. Huang at M Last Night #2, 2006

In any case, the show included a couple of photos from his 2006 series ‘Ms. Huang at M Last Night,’ which suggest a mute narrative that is probably less intriguing than the stylistic content/composition implied by the noirish glamour of the stills.

Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, Part I, 2003

‘Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest‘ is a five-part video piece that apparently found an audience at the 2007 Venice Biennale. I don’t really know enough about film or photography to legitimately critique his work, so I’ll just say that it looks pretty good to me.

Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, Part V, 2007

Which brings us to Yang Fudong’s latest film, ‘First Spring,’ a period piece set in Shanghai during what the West knows as the Interbellum Period.

Inspired by the Chinese adage that, “the whole year’s work depends on a good start in spring,” this bold and beautiful film represents an exciting new direction for Prada’s visual communications at the start of this decade.

-Prada.com

Although I’ve only had nominal exposure to his work, I was impressed with his mastery of composition, as each shot is expertly framed to maintain a certain tautness, a broadly sexual tension that keeps the story from unraveling.

The mood is predominantly jaded—most notably when magic is made mundane—shifting from resigned to restless to complacent, and back again, with only a tacit suggestion of devious outright illicit behavior. Similarly, the characters seem to fall somewhere in the narrow space between pensive and aloof: their blank stares aren’t necessarily cold or empty but are simply opaque, inscrutable.

Rituals—not quite perfunctory, not quite clandestine—impart both a sense of historical setting and a sense of displacement.

Thematically, the short is marked by a vague yet undeniable sense of yearning or even sublimated desire, but Yang Fudong forgoes the resolution and leaves the viewer wondering whether there was any conflict in the first place.

For an entirely different experience of the clip:
1.) Go to Prada.com. The video for the F/W 2010 Menswear will start playing automatically (I hate autoplay too, but it works for this).
2.) Click on ‘First Spring’ by Yang Fudong on the menu at the left. It will open a video player overlay and ‘First Spring’ will start playing automatically.
3.) Mute the overlaid video player. Watch the short film with the music from the runway show. Crazy shit.