Yang Fudong

Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Naples
Phillips de Pury, New York, November 17, 2006, lot 332
Private American Collection

Tokyo, Pola Museum Annex, Avicon: Asia Videoart Conference; 13-23 December, 2003
Beijing, Ullen Contemproary Art Centre, UCCA Art Theatre, Floating Images, 28 May, 2010
Guangzhou, Times Museum, Out of the Box, 26 March to 4 May, 2011
Zurich, Kunsthalle Zurich, Yang Fudong: Estanged Paradise Work 1993-2013, 6 April to 26 May, 2013
Berlin, Zhong Gallery, Contemporary Art in China: 1990-2012, 12 April to 12 July 2013
Shanghai, ShanghART H-Space, Clutch, 6 September to 24 November 2013
Chicago, University of Chicago, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Yang Fudong: East of Que Village, 28 February to 30 March 2014

This work is generally in good condition. There is wear and a sticker mark on the mini casette case.
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The Beginning of Yang Fudong’s Video Art

Yang Fudong, the foremost video artist of China, has earned the recognition of the international art world with his five-part series Seven Intellectuals of the Bamboo Grove. His works have been exhibited in major museums and other venues around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Venice Biennale, and Documenta of Kassel, Germany, and have been collected by such premier art institutions as MoMA, the Pompidou Centre, and the Tate Modern. Their academic value is beyond doubt. In Yang Fudong’s highly stylized video images, we can easily detect the influence of old Shanghai films and the European New Wave. His breathtakingly beautiful imageries combine traditional Chinese culture with contemporary Chinese social realities. Giving voice to young Chinese intellectuals, they enact their disillusionment and redemption in China’s rapid development. In the present sales, we offer Yang Fudong’s After All I Didn’t Force You (Lot 858), his very first work of video art and the point of origination for his subsequent career. It is invaluable in understanding Yang Fudong’s art, and has been tremendously influential in Chinese video and installation as well.

Born in 1971 in Beijing, Yang Fudong graduated from the China Academy of Art in 1995, majoring in oil painting and later turning to photography and new media. Three years later, he completed his fi rst work of video art, After All I Didn’t Force You, a single-channel video in black-and-white. Approximately three minutes in length, the video is divided into two parts. In the first, Yang Fudong uses rapid jump-cuts to gather 14 different characters into a single offi ce meeting and merge their individual faces. As the camera fixates on their combined “single” face, we read the sentence, “After all I didn’t force you.” Both are no doubt a metaphor for the repression of individuality in China’s rapid urbanization and development, a theme made even more explicit by the final static image of a birdcage. The second part of the video presents men and women strolling in the streets to a soothing musical soundtrack, their freedom and individuality apparently uncompromised. The mood, full of romance and ambiguity, is to be rehearsed and varied in many of Yang Fudong’s subsequent works, such as Estranged Paradise and Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Grove.

Although Yang Fudong presented his claim to fame, Estranged Paradise, in 2002, he had begun conceptualizing it as early as 1997, and thematically Estranged Paradise was in the same vein as After All I Didn’t Force You. According to the artist himself, Estranged Paradise was inspired by the young people who graduated together with him and expressed the helplessness and indecision they felt in life and in artistic creation. His earlier photographic series Don’t Worry It Will be Better and The First Intellectual (Lot 983) likewise explored the anxieties of young people defeated and oppressed by society, whose only consolation was to believe that everything would be better. Like the aforementioned works, After All I Didn’t Force You expressed Yang Fudong’s experience of and criticism towards social reality after his graduation. The urban ethos, feelings of indirection of young people, relationship between men and women, disharmony between individuals and their environment so palpable in this work would all remain central in Yang Fudong’s art for years to come, even as he expanded to multi-screen and multi-channel audiovisual installations. Yang Fudong’s fi rst completed work of video art, After All I Didn’t Force You almost encompasses all his most salient themes, and its artistic and historical value cannot be underestimated.