Open    Access



A Kind of Multiverse? Traces of a Forgotten Modernity Inside Yang Fudong’s Black and White Work



Author(s)

Mariagrazia Costantino

Full-Text PDF XML     15 Views

DOI:10.17265/2328-2177/2025.05.001

University of Catania, Italy

After graduating from the China Academy of Arts (Department of Oil Painting) in Hangzhou in 1995, Yang Fudong (1971) moved to Shanghai to work as a graphic designer. Inspired by his daily job in Pudong, he started producing photographic series that closely resembled the advertising campaigns he worked on. Glossy images of stylish young people or dishevelled white collars in highly saturated colours, defined “intellectuals” in cryptic accompanying captions. Conversely, his body of work in black and white, almost entirely shot on 35mm film, portrays a suspended reality out of the historical time: a ghostly dimension akin to a drowsy vigil, a uchronia, an “estranged paradise”—to borrow the title of his earliest film set in Hangzhou. But it is Shanghai’s elusiveness and material relationship with the past that has contributed the most to form Yang’s trademark imagery and aesthetic. What he conjures up in his still and moving images, is a dimension with a distinctive oneiric quality, an “in-between” universe where all the circumstances are justified and have an inner logic, just like in dreams, or just like in the China of his childhood. The research of Yang Fudong is somewhat unique in the universe of contemporary Chinese art and sets him apart from a plethora of artists that have used the video in a much more “didactic” and quotational way. I will illustrate some specific aspects of his black and white body of work, trying to show how a certain self-orientalist trait can be interpreted as strategy to regain narrative agency and bring to the surface a series of removed instances: the main of which being, in my opinion, the fate of Shanghai’s (perhaps of Mainland China in its ungraspable entirety?) modernity.

multiverse, China, Shanghai, multimedia art, film, photography, modernity, orientalism, Cultural Revolution