Mainland dreams on tape: video fests at three venues in New York—MOMA and two private galleries—recently revealed the technical range and narrative quirkiness of China's restless post-Tiananmen generation

Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Barbara Pollack

Video is the medium of the moment in China, where younger artists have embraced the rapid production capabilities of digital cameras and Final Cut Pro to keep pace with the cultural upheavals occurring in their country during the past decade. Though this phenomenon--which also includes works shot on film and then transferred to video--is leas than 10 years old, it has already been widely heralded, receiving attention at international biennials and, more recently, at several venues in New York.

In February, Barbara London, associate curator in the Museum of Modern Art's film and media department, brought a score of recent video works to the Gramercy Theatre. This program included an evening devoted to the first film by Hugo Boss Prize nominee Yang Fudong, another highlighting the work of Wang Jianwei, and the five-day "China Now" survey of shorter videos and films by a diverse group of newcomers. Concurrently, TRANS>area presented a selection of four films by Yang Fudong, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, that had originally been shown at the Moore Space in Miami in December 2003. Chambers Fine Art also featured a video by Yang, as well as works by three other Chinese artists, in a show titled "Feverish Unconscious: The Digital Culture in Contemporary China."

In the program notes accompanying the series at MOMA, London refers to these young artists as the Sixth Generation, a term originating in the Chinese movie industry, whose First Generation created the renowned Shanghai cinema that reigned from 1910 to 1932. In more recent times, "Fifth Generation" has been applied to filmmakers who emerged in the mid-1980s, such as Zhang Yimou, director of Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and Chen Kaige, director of Farewell, My Concubine (1993), films that received international acclaim but were forbidden in China. Today's younger artists are clearly Sixth Generation in that they grew up after the Cultural Revolution, most of them attending art school and beginning their careers subsequent to the student uprising at Tiananmen Square in 1989. While a few might quality as authors of feature films, others are exploring a variety of art related genres, including animation, narrative shorts, documentaries and video installation. Indeed, quite a few are working in all of these various film languages simultaneously, switching from one to another from project to project.

With at least one work at all three venues, Yang Fudong appears to be the designated star of this highly disparate group, though he began making films only in 1997. His solo evening at the Gramerey was devoted to the inaugural An Estranged Paradise, shot in 35mm with a running time of 76 minutes. Told from the point of view of a young man who is plagued by ennui as his wedding day approaches, the work offers a glimpse of changes taking place in once-small towns throughout China, Housing developments and traffic jams are shown as replacing traditional shops and gentle flows of bicycles, adding to the hero's sense of alienation as he goes from doctor to doctor to find out if there is a medical basis for his condition. Due to the story's obvious parallels to Sartre's Nausea, coupled with the black-and-white film's use of ponderous voice-overs (translated through subtitles), Western viewers could not miss the obvious ties to French New Wave films of the early 1960s. The reference might seem surprising, given the age (33) and relative isolation of the Shanghai-based director, but Yang and his peers came of age with a vivid awareness of Western styles. Of late, they have gained access to newly reissued foreign DVDs and videos through the Internet, to say nothing of China's flourishing black market in pirated copies.

However, Yang has received international acclaim not for this first effort but for his latest work, Seres Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, Part 1, which was completed for the Venice Biennale 2003 and became the highlight of the installation at TRANS>area. This work, the first installment of a five-part, full-length feature, was also shot in 35mm black-and-white, but in this case the film's atmosphere of nostalgia is shared by the characters themselves. The story is based on a 3rd-century account of seven intellectuals who rebelled against society by escaping into the woods. Yang updates this tale with a troupe of his colleagues, clothed in designer outfits and plagued by urban angst, on a day-trip to Mount Huangshan (Yellow Mountain), a popular tourist site. Here, the foggy landscape is overwhelmingly beautiful and the black-and-white footage recalls the look of Chinese scroll painting. The stylish characters are filmed against this backdrop in a manner reminiscent of still photographs, with voice-overs providing the only dialogue. They question ancient rituals performed at the site--such us making a wish for prosperity by clamping two padlocks together and hurling them over the cliff--even us they reenact them. They doubt the likelihood of love and marriage, though they clearly have the freedom to date, have affairs and skinny-dip. Here, Yang perfectly encapsulates the emotional toll on a generation that was born during the Cultural Revolution, but now faces the concrete reality of earning a living and making personal choices in a newly market-driven economic system.