Review: Yang Fudong: One Half of August

Three video works by one of the most important contemporary artists to have emerged from China: ‘Fifth Night’ (2010); ‘One half of August’, (2011); and ‘Yejiang (The night man cometh)’ (2011). The first is a video-installation comprising seven synchronized projections of a night scene in Shanghai’s old town. Fudong’s pioneer technique of ‘multiple view film’ (that is, the same scene shot from multiple angles) dramatically intensifies the viewing experience, magnifying the most minute of details, and expanding our wakefulness to the plane of action. Through a crisply vibrating environment (scored by the clang of blacksmiths’ hammers, the rattle of rickshaws, and the clapper of horses’ hooves), the characters gently drift, their relative inaction drawing out the sensory clamour of the moment.

The second work, ‘One half of August’, is an eight-screen installation in which Fudong revisits a number of his other video works, and distorts them via projection onto various architectural details and ornate furniture. Rather than being presented in a negative-esque line (a la ‘Fifth Night’), the work now covers all four walls of the room, which, in the near-pitch blackness of the gallery space, has a disorientating effect in complement to the contorting images. The final film, ‘Yejiang (The night man cometh)’, while comparatively straightforward in form, is, in terms of content, by far the strangest of the three, as we are transported to a snow-covered a-historical dreamscape in which four characters (two in medieval dress, two in contemporary) interact with a range of fauna. All in lush HD, at a cinema near you.

[Review by Thomas Keane]