BOMB 118/Winter 2012
Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, part V, 2007, 35 mm, black-and-white film transferred to DVD. Total running time: 91 minutes. Images courtesy of the artist; Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai and Beijing; and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.
I curated Yang Fudong’s work for the first time in 2004 when I was an associate curator of an exhibition in Japan. I invited Yang Fudong to preview his film Backyard—Hey! Sun is Rising. Since then, he has asked me to write about his work—for his solo shows at GL Strand Gallery in Denmark (2008) and at the Hara Museum in Japan (2009). In 2010, Zhang Yaxuan and I put together screenings of Yang Fudong’s films and related seminars at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, and the Beijing Film Academy.
In this interview I sought to push the envelope by examining his mise-en-scène techniques in The Fifth Night, part I. In addition, I wanted to set the anchor in the question “does spiritual life exist at all?” because it is what concerns Yang Fudong the most.
When I watched The Fifth Night in the exhibition Useful Life 2010 at the ShanghART Gallery, I was very moved by it. Seven screens formed seven scrolls and they each seemed to start at a different point in time. The stories of seven young people, with their footsteps and dreams, were told in a calm yet complex fashion. It was Yang Fudong’s unique calmness. It was still his own escapism, the dreamlike quality of his other works. There were still mixed time periods and characters, and mixed sets—artificial and real locations. And it was still beautiful and elegant. The stories were told from seven different perspectives and jumped from one to another. What happened a second ago became the past. It felt familiar in that sense. The Fifth Night is not only about Yang Fudong’s aesthetic preferences, but also about his new approaches to time in narrative. Through this interview I discovered his intentions for The Fifth Night, part II, as well as the artist’s ideas behind the making of both works.
Li Zhenhua Can you briefly talk about the relationship between the film installation The Fifth Night (2010) and the video installation The Fifth Night, part II (2010)? Part one was exhibited at the ShanghART Gallery and part two at the Eighth Shanghai Biennial. You mentioned that part two was a by-product of part one. I’m curious about how the two pieces came about through different forms.
Yang Fudong I should start by talking about the film Dawn Mist, Separation Faith (2009). During the shooting of this film, I wondered if, and how, I could make another art piece out of the same production. I realized that a lot of takes were simply discarded in the editing room, like in Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (2003–2007) and some other shorts I did. I would shoot the same shot five, ten, twenty, or more times. At the end of the day, I would pick the best take and edit it into the actual piece. Why did it have to be that particular take? Where did all the bad takes go? Shouldn’t they exist even if they were not perfect? In other words, should I reveal my working process by showing multiple takes as well as the mistakes I made? I pondered over different possibilities. So I chose to make Dawn Mist, Separation Faith only out of takes that were “no good.” It was shot in the summer of 2008. It is a film that consists of only nine shots, or, say, a film installation with nine projections. So even before making The Fifth Night, I considered trying out different lenses and perspectives that I had never used before. But none of the ideas were very concrete until I was asked to participate in the show Useful Life 2010. It was around the Chinese New Year in 2010 that I decided to make The Fifth Night.
LZ The Fifth Night is very different from Dawn Mist, Separation Faith.
YF Yes. Seven parallel screens form a line, and they connect with one another, imitating traditional Chinese long-roll painting.
LZ It feels like seven scrolls too.
YF I was trying to avoid it being like seven separate scrolls. The first version of The Fifth Night at ShanghART was more like a live film on multiple screens. It made use of camera movements and mixed lenses with a variety of depths of field, including wide-angle, standard 35 mm, and long lenses. It created what I call a “little midnight theater” feel by slight and gradual shifts in the framing, and slow dolly movements. My first instinct then was to shoot from different angles simultaneously so that, when projected, it would look like a live feed.
(Interview)