Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-garde Art and Independent Cinema

Chapter 8. The Video Works of Yang Fudong: An Ultimate Escape from a Global Nightmare

165 C H A P T E R 8 The Video Works of Yang Fudong An Ultimate Escape from a Global Nightmare On a rainy day in mid-October 2004, I flew from New York to London to visit a new exhibition of contemporary art held at Tate Modern. The show was titled Time Zone: Recent Film and Video and featured ten artists from various countries such as Albania, Belgium, Germany, China, Indonesia, Israel, the Netherlands, and the former Yugoslavia. It was a Friday afternoon at Tate, and a few museum visitors roamed around the third-floor gallery where the film and video works were screening in the partitioned dark rooms. As I entered one of these rooms, I found myself watching Liu Lan (Liu Lan, 2003), a fourteen-minute film made by Yang Fudong, a Chinese artist living and working in Shanghai. For a while there was only one middle-aged couple sitting beside me, but soon a small crowd gathered and they sat through the entire film with great amusement. Yang’s film was shot in black and white, so it looked very “singular” among the colored “moving images” on display. In addition, Liu Lan was perhaps the only film that narrated a warm human love story against a rustic setting, while much of the other exhibits of Time Zone seemed to render a cold and unpeopled urban landscape as a central motif, especially Anri Sala’s Blindfold (2002) and Jeroen de Rijke’s and Willem de Rooij’s Untitled (2001). In this chapter, I will discuss Yang Fudong’s two video works, Liu Lan and Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest Part I (Zhulin qixian 1, 2003), both of which intimate what I see as an ultimate escape from a global nightmarish reality. Liu Lan: An Aborted Chinese Modernity? In general, Yang Fudong’s video works remind us of a welcoming human love that is tragically missing from everyday realities around the globe. As we watch daily news on TV and are shocked by video pictures of increasing violence and cruelty 166 In Quest of Meaning in a Spiritual Void such as the decapitation of civilians or slaughter of women and children, we may agree with Michael Ignatieff, an American scholar at Harvard University, who has called “the terrorist as auteur”1 a disturbing “filmic” phenomenon that has dominated the Western media in recent years. In this context of televised atrocities from all over the world, Yang’s films seem to imply an escape from the “global nightmare” described by Noam Chomsky and by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyu Davis in their writings on today’s international conflicts.2 However, the iconography of Yang’s Liu Lan is rather a cinematic trope of time-honored themes and motifs in modern Chinese cinema, which tends to deny any political implication. Liu Lan tells the tale of a young girl named Liu Lan, who comes from a fishing village and is in love with a young man of a quite different social class. Throughout the film, this young man’s identity cannot be determined as can Liu Lan’s, whose activities include fishing and embroidering. The young man appears to be a “businessman,” dressed in a white suit and carrying a mysterious suitcase when arriving at Liu Lan’s ferry moored alongside the lakeshore. But the content of the suitcase is never revealed to the audience, even though the man and the girl both open it once or twice. In the film there is another fisherwoman whose weather-worn, wrinkled face indicates her great age. This old woman could be Liu Lan’s grandmother, or she might merely symbolize the youthful Liu Lan in her old age. I will further explore the mystery of the suitcase and the symbolism of the old fisherwoman in a moment. Figure 19. Liu Lan. Dir. Yang Fudong. 2003, courtesy of Shanghart Gallery and Yang Fudong. The Video Works of Yang Fudong 167 Firstofall,themise-en-scèneofthesmallfishingcommunityinLiuLanevokes two early Chinese films. One is the well-known Song of the Fishermen (Yu guang qu, 1934), a canonical work by Cai Chusheng (1906–1965) in modern Chinese cinema. The other is The Fisherwoman (Yujia nü, 1943), a popular movie directed by Bu Wancang (1903–1974), who was a veteran director in the Shanghai film industry. In both films, there are two motifs that also play an essential role in Yang Fudong’s Liu Lan...