Yang Fudong’s multi-screen allegories about China

MULTIPLE screens featuring black-and-white footage are the norm for works by Chinese artist Yang Fudong.

Still from The Coloured Sky: New Women II (2014). From the exhibition Yang Fudong: Filmscapes at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne.

YANG Fudong’s Wikipedia page carries a series of editorial alerts about its quality and in particular a warning that “the neutrality of this article is disputed”. This is hardly surprising when we encounter in the second line of the entry the assurance that “he is considered one of the brightest young stars in China and the greatest film writer to come out of China ever”.

It’s even odder to find that a list of his most popular films includes the 17th Biennale of Sydney. This was the first occasion for Australians to see his work, for the 2010 Biennale included what has remained among his best-known videos, East of Que Village (2007), which now returns as part of a survey exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne.

East of Que Village is also the earliest work in the exhibition, and the most uncompromisingly grim in its view of the desolation that is the underside of China’s unique synthesis of socialist politics and capitalist economics.

We are surrounded by six screens, with black-and-white footage of what could be a ghost town somewhere in the desert regions of China but is apparently not far from Beijing. There is a large structure that looks like a brickworks, and a few aged inhabitants still clinging to their lives in the drab and dusty village.

But dogs are the real subject of the film: packs of mongrels roaming this desperate landscape, starving, chewing at dessicated bones, ­including a bovine skull and what looks like the carcass of a sheep. All of them are mangy and famished, and some are crippled. In the end they are reduced to killing and eating each other.

It is a long way from this bleak allegory to the work newly commissioned for the exhibition, The Coloured Sky: New Women II (2014). This is shown on five screens and is the only work in colour: a saturated, exaggerated chroma to match its subject, which is young women posing and primping for the camera.

For all their youth, the girls already seem to be rehearsing the roles of vamp and seductress. The accompanying label refers to the history of concubinage in China, a phenomenon abolished in socialist theory but flourishing in capitalist practice. To make the message clearer, the girls play with huge phallic snakes and contemplate vulval seashell mouths.

If East of Que Village was all about dark reality, this is about illusion and fantasy; but the work doesn’t seem to rise above a rather flaccid indulgence in opulent effect. Glamour of a kind is evoked, but without any real edge of eroticism: the subject is approached through a camp aesthetic that sees women as decorative but not desirable.

More substantial is The Fifth Night (2010), a black-and-white work on seven screens, set in Shanghai in the years between the wars, the days of the foreign concessions when the city was an exotic meeting place of East and West and a centre of political intrigue: the milieu, for readers of Herge’s Tintin, so vividly evoked in Le Lotus bleu (The Blue Lotus), serialised in 1934 and 1935 and first published as a book in 1936.

The year 1936, as it happens, is seen conspicuously inscribed on the facade of a building near the beginning of the film, for it was shot at a studio known as the Shanghai Film Shooting Base, which is a film lot replicating the look of the old city. The different screens show various events taking place in the same square: a couple of young men dressed in Western clothes are thrown out of a car with their suitcases; workers go about their business, among other things repairing an old bus; a rickshaw passes, then a horsedrawn carriage; a blacksmith is seen working in the open, and various other characters walk around in a bemused state.

If there appear to be overlaps between the otherwise disparate events and characters shown on the different screens, it is because of the way the film was shot. Seven cameras were used, with different viewpoints, but they were all shooting the same scene. The various actors are all present simultaneously in the same space, and the whole film apparently was shot in a single take. The duration of the work is 10min 37sec, which is the length of a roll of film.

The premise is interesting, but the weakness is in the scripting of the action, for there is no dialogue. The only element that has any narrative tension — implying some sense of what may have happened before or may happen next — is the episode of the young men being thrown out of the car. Nothing else in the film manages even to raise such questions, or therefore to stimulate the viewer’s interest or to suggest connections between its various characters.

The rickshaw and the carriage pass by without motivation, as though included mainly because they were there on set and available. A few men sit on a chaise longue in the middle of the square for no reason; there is another man in a barber’s chair. Such random details could have been effective if used sparingly to add a touch of doubt or absurdity but fall flat when they predominate.

Apart from the young men thrown out of the car, the nearest thing to a protagonist is a young worker in a singlet, looking around him with a dazed expression as though he had passed through a time warp and found himself suddenly in an unfamiliar time and place. Another young man also wanders aimlessly, carrying an armful of firewood.

The sense of aimlessness, and the suspicion that the director has no more idea than his actors what is meant to be going on, is most apparent in the figure of the young woman, who strolls around the set not only without motivation but self-consciously, as though modelling her period dresses on a catwalk.

In the end, the multiple screens provide an illusion of complexity and animation, and to a casual observer they offer a first impression of suggestive imagery and a dreamlike milieu suspended between nostalgia and angst.

But the illusion dissipates with more sustained attention, and the weakness or absence of underlying narrative structure becomes all too clear. The work hardly lives up to the claim that its author is “the greatest film writer to come out of China ever”.

The most impressive work from this point of view is The Nightman Cometh (2011), where the use of a single channel and thus more conventional film format has obliged Yang to pursue greater structural coherence, although one can still detect the habits of someone used to operating with multiple screens and it is not hard to imagine how this work too could have been adapted for such a format.

The subject of the film is the meeting of China’s present and past, although the past is here represented by a romanticised, filmic version of medieval or early modern China, while the present is ambiguously suggested by figures who are closer in feeling to the interwar period evoked in The Fifth Night, made the previous year.

The opening looks like a period film set about 500 years ago; the camera pans across a scene of carnage following a battle: weapons, bodies, bits of broken chariots half-buried in snow. A warrior lies on his back, wounded. We see a deer in the snow, in a landscape that is visibly a studio set, with pointedly artificial lighting.

A young woman in the dress of centuries past appears — the whole film takes place in this single location — and feeds the deer out of her hand. Then she leaves and another young woman enters wearing what looks like the fashion of the 1930s: we can see how these different figures could easily have been entering and departing on separate screens, but here they come and go one after the other.

The warrior now turns up with spear and helmet and a horse, which rather incongruously seems to have a modern saddle. Then, just as the historical girl was succeeded by a modern one, the warrior’s place is taken by a willowy, epicene young man in white, almost a Pierrot figure, who walks on hesitantly and a bit squeam­ishly, pulling his handkerchief from his breast pocket as though taken aback by the smells of the battle scene. The artificial rocks that he walks past are deliberately made to echo the conventional forms of rocks in ink paintings of landscapes, and later we see that the trunk of the tree on the right is similarly artificial.

The warrior returns: a figure as dark and hulking as the young man is white and almost disembodied. He lights a fire and eventually rides off on his horse, after a few more scenes that cut to and fro between the male and female representatives of each historical period. Each turns up separately until one scene when the young man and the modern woman coincide: he sees her, but not vice versa, reinforcing our general impression that he is the protagonist of the film, if one can use that term for a character who does virtually nothing.

After the warrior’s departure, the epicene young man returns and touches the end of a spear planted in the ground; alarmed at the blood on his fingers, he wipes them with the pocket handkerchief, seeming overawed by the past reality he has glimpsed.

Then all four come into the frame at once, but in pairs; the modern woman takes the handkerchief, sees the blood and weeps inconsolably; the historical girl looks on, then turns away. The film cuts to a shot of a bird of prey: it seems as though the grandeur and violence of the past, which leaves the young man disoriented, overwhelms the young woman with a sense of tragedy.

This feels like the end, but in fact there are a few more brief episodes before the warrior rides off, a dark silhouette, turning back to look at us in a way that is clearly intended to be a self-conscious, almost corny allusion to convention, before disappearing into darkness.

This is still a long way from the harsh realities of contemporary China evoked in East of Que Village: the modernity experienced by the dispossessed and those who have not benefited from the economic revolution.

It conveys rather the experience of the wealthy young consumers who live in a world of commodities, fashion and media; the figures from the 30s who act as their proxies suggest the alienation of their lives in an unreal world of manufactured images, while the past takes a form at once cliched — like a clip from an old movie — and incomprehensibly remote.

Yang Fudong: Filmscapes

Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne. Until March 15.