Timeless Classic Beauty in Yang Fudong's Films

Yang Fudong's work represents a turning point in contemporary artistic production in China. His first film, An Estranged Paradise, which premiered at Documenta in Kassel in 2002, showcased a new narrative and visual sensibility, imbued with a contemporary aesthetic formed by multiple registers. His monumental cycle Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest which was completed over the next five years, poetically rendered the spirit of her generation, the kids born in the mid-1980s. Subsequent projects have broadened her cinematic vision in both directions of space and time: his films are installations that contain traces of their own making. For his most comprehensive institutional exhibition to date and its premiere in Beijing, Yang Fudong presents the first installment of his Library Film Project, a research process that aims to create a film that can contain a complex reality, both real and constructed. Inspired by his childhood in the rural Eastern suburbs of Beijing, this chapter weaves together elements of the past and present, public and personal.