Yang Fudong, Fifth Night, 2010. HD video Installation, 7 screens. Black and White, sound, 10’ 37’’. Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris / New York; Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai. ©Yang Fudong

After the resounding success of his first solo exhibition at Paraol unit foundation for contemporary art in 2006, the foundation will dedicate a second major solo show to the renowned Chinese artist and film maker Yang Fudong in September 2011. Yang Fudong is regarded as one of the most important artists to emerge in contemporary China. In this exhibition he presents three works: Fifth Night, 2010; One half of August, 2011; and Yejiang (The night man cometh), 2011.

Yang Fudong, Yejiang (The night man cometh), 2011.

Fifth Night is a video-installation composed of seven synchronized projections. The shots are supposed to feature the streets of Shanghai’s old town at night. In the middle of the scene with carriages, rickshaws and vintage cars, a stage has been built and a tramway is being frantically repaired. Unrelated characters appear, hesitating men and women attend to their own activities without interaction. The artist uses seven 35 mm cameras which film the same scene from different angles, demonstrating a variation of scale and depths of field. Yang Fudong refers to this new technique as “multiple view film”, which emphasises the character’s subtle expressions and simplest actions. What the viewer could perceive as separate instances, are actually simultaneously tied together into one scene, expanding and multiplying the spectator’s usual vision and perception. As with most of Yang Fudong’s works, here again the work is open-ended.

In the first floor gallery is the world premiere of two other works. One half of August is an eight-screen, black-and-white, HD video installation in which Yang Fudong aims to create distortion and a change of reality in some of his selected video works by projecting them onto various structures and objects.

Yejiang (The night man cometh), a 35-mm film transferred to HD video, is a single-screen work that trails a palace guard on his nightly rounds. In a snow-covered landscape, the guard is confronted by a fierce battlefield in which he too must fight for survival.

Born in 1971 in Beijing, Yang Fudong lives and works in Shanghai.

Recent exhibitions include Marion Goodman Gallery, Paris, France, (2011) and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, Australia, (2011). Other one-person exhibitions include National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece, (2010); Hara Museum, Tokyo, Japan, (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, USA, (2009); MuHKA, Antwerp, Belgium, (2009); Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China (2009). Important group exhibitions include: 52nd International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, (2007); The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK, (2007); Time Zones: Recent Film and Video Art, Tate Modern, London, UK (2004); Chinese Pavilion and Utopia Station, 50th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, (2003).