Yang Fudong

Yejiang/The Nightman Cometh, 2011

Yang Fudong’s complex photographic/filmic narrative strategy, his enigmatic pictorial language, the exquisite care he takes with every detail of the lighting, the music and the direction of the actors – and his abundant references to cinematic history and to politics – have placed him at the forefront of a new ‘literary’ art form in China. The film Yejiang / The Nightman Cometh, 2011, is one of the few single-channel projections created by Yang Fudong in recent years. The setting looks like a stage set and shows a snow-covered landscape scene in a suggested theatre of war. An injured warrior in ancient Chinese armor is followed by three equally ghostly figures, clearly from mutually contradictory times and historical backgrounds. There is no narrative thread, no beginning and no end. Having appeared out of nothingness, the warrior departs the scene in the same way, riding away into the snow, unguided and aimless. Yang Fudong (the artist himself has described his film as ‘neo-realistic’) combines the lyrical wealth of references and the enigmatic and “merely suggested“ qualities found in classic Chinese painting with the slow and open‑to‑interpretation narrative style of French Nouvelle Vague films.