Yang Fudong:

City Light

MCA Denver presented Yang Fudong’s video City Light, which follows a young man and his doppelganger on a day in the city. A fantastic detective story with restrained comic appeal takes place when the protagonists enter into a film noir with all the requisites. The video switches from black & white to color while the score changes from a Chinese melody to a Bossa Nova. The plot is detached from the liveliness of the cityscape, creating scenes that are serenely beautiful yet humorous.

Yang’s films can be characterized by an atmosphere of ambivalence that is descriptive of an overall attitude towards life in twenty-first century China, especially among young Chinese intellectuals. Since 1989—the year of the Tiananmen Square massacres—young people have been less and less involved in politics. In many of his films, Yang captures this generation’s blasé stance towards the politically evolving China. 

Yang Fudong was born in 1971 in Beijing and currently lives and works in Shanghai. Fudong studied painting at the Academy of Fine Art, Hangzhou. His work has been exhibited widely internationally, including solo presentations in major institutions such as Fosun Foundation, Shanghai; the Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai; Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia; Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo; Daegu Art Museum, Korea; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand; ACMI, Australia; Parasol Unit, London; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; Asia Society, New York; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Castello di Rivoli, Italy; and Renaissance Society, Chicago.