This installation brings together paintings, photographs, and video screens, comprising fifteen panels in total. Each surface is overlaid with glass of different tones and luminosities, reflecting varied hues of light. The work draws inspiration from Southern Song painter Ma Yuan’s handscroll Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden, which depicts literati’s travels and assemblies. Through expanses of negative space, separate areas of focus, and restrained brushwork, Ma Yuan’s composition evokes the “tranquil pleasures of the human realm,” traditionally regarded as the symbolic expression of a Chinese scholar’s inner world. Yang Fudong adapts and reinterprets this motif in a highly personal, stylized visual language. The literati’s “journey” here resonates with the labyrinthine village on the opposite side of the exhibition hall—a simulacrum of Xianghe that one may endlessly traverse yet never fully leave. Fragmented into discontinuous images, the work recalls the sequential unfolding of a handscroll, as well as cinema’s spliced yet continuous frames. Its overall configuration also alludes to spirit screens, walls that commonly shield the entranceways of courtyard homes in rural northern China, marking the threshold between public and private space.

County Magistrate, County Magistrate depicts a collective migration unfolding in an indeterminate time and place. Men, women, and children from a village move through mountains as the sky gradually grows dark, walking resolutely into the distance until they arrive at a new settlement. The abandoned courtyards they leave behind still bear traces of daily life: a steaming kettle, unfinished bowls of food, an old television flickering with static, and worn-out pieces of furniture. The camera then slowly pans to an outdoor movie screen showing After Armistice, a black-and-white film released in 1962. In the film, a man draws a business card from his pocket and introduces himself as Xianghe’s newly appointed county magistrate. At this moment, the story slips into another layer of fictional time and space.

Shot from 2016, when work began on Fragrant River, until 2025, when the project was completed, these photographs interweave scenes from the making of the film with moments from daily life, forming an extended visual record.

A single-channel video shot on 16 mm color film, At the Summer Palace follows a mysterious man and a young boy as they wander through the Summer Palace, clad in clothing recalling styles from the 1980s and 1990s. The work unfolds like a hazy moment between dreaming and wakefulness, recalling the stillness of a languid afternoon. The era-specific details present in the setting seem to anachronistically clash with their pair’s clothing and behavior. Through this dislocation of time and space, Yang Fudong evokes the complex emotions of childhood, specifically the mixture of curiosity and unease a child feels upon encountering the strange and unknown.

Backyard - Hey! Sun is Rising is a silent black-and-white film shot in 2001, accompanied by the rhythmic intensity of martial arts music. Several men dressed in old military uniforms move through city streets with the affected gait of Peking opera performers, brandishing swords; at other times, they retreat indoors, where they either get lost in reverie or engage in mock combat with wooden blades. Through this early work, Yang Fudong explores how film may serve as a medium for expressing emotions and dreams. In his words, “All the fragments are like a discontinuous dreamscape, yet sometimes they seem real. We all know everything merely happens in the moment of dawn.”

Father’s Fireworks is a short film the artist edited out of footage of daily life that he had previously shot. It captures the artist’s father setting off fireworks in celebration of the New Year.

This documentary by Zhang Jinghua captures behind-the-scenes moments and glimpses of everyday life during the filming of Yang Fudong’s Fragrant River.

This installation is primarily composed of old furniture and televisions, in styles that were common in the area around Xianghe during the 1980s and 1990s. The televisions play footage of everyday life that the artist recorded in his hometown in the early 2000s. The furniture’s surfaces are overlaid with mirrors and glass panels of varying luminosity, reflecting the shifting light and images of the surrounding environment. Together they create a space in flux—garden-like and illuminated by flickering light—where time seems to lose its coordinates.

In 1993, while still a third-year student at the China Academy of Art, Yang Fudong undertook a three-month experimental performance in which he refused to speak, communicating only through body language or writing. For him, this deliberate withdrawal from the everyday proved formative: many of his artistic convictions, insights, and modes of thought can be traced back to it. Reflecting on the experience years later, he remarked, “Three months of doing this was not easy. Once it was over, something akin to faith took hold. Do you truly believe in what you’re creating, or do you relax when no one is watching? There’s an aesthetic question here, of what is true and what is false... If you persist, the texture becomes entirely different.”

The versions of this work presented in this exhibition consist of photographic documentation of Yang ’s performance. The black-and-white prints were produced in 1993, while the color version documents a 1999 reenactment of the piece.

Yang Fudong studied oil painting at the China Academy of Art from 1991 to 1995. For this exhibition, he has selected several sketches he made in preparation for his graduation project, providing insight into the origins of his artistic practice. These paintings find the artist examining how urban residents negotiate issues of pollution, protection, and safety.

This group of works consists of sketches Yang Fudong made during his years studying oil painting at the China Academy of Art, as well as shortly after graduation. Encompassing figure drawings, portraits, and landscapes, they reveal the academic training he received before turning to film, offering a point of reference for observing the evolution of his artistic vocabulary.

An Estranged Paradise is Yang Fudong’s first feature film, shot on 35 mm black-and-white film. The story follows Zhuzi, a young man living in Hangzhou who suffers from a persistent physical discomfort—symptoms that in fact arise from his dissatisfaction with and anxieties about life in contemporary society. Unfolding through stylized imagery reminiscent of a faded landscape calendar, the film portrays the daily life, emotions, and inner world of an urban intellectual. Shot in 1997, the film was not be completed until 2002, when contemporary art quinquennial Documenta provided post-production funding. It would debut at Documenta 11 that same year.

Yang was based in Hangzhou for much of this period, having returned to the city and begun his artistic practice in earnest after a brief post-graduation sojourn in Beijing. The film can be seen as a prose poem dedicated to Hangzhou, his second hometown, where he studied for four years. This exhibition also showcases a selection of the film’s soundtrack in the form of sheet music. The score marked Yang’s first time working with Jin Wang, then a young musician. The two have continued to collaborate in the years since. Through these musical excerpts, Yang seeks to evoke the essence of an artist’s growth.

In 1997, soon after Yang Fudong finished principal photography for his first feature film, An Estranged Paradise, he began to envision a project inspired by his hometown—Xianghe County in Hebei province. In January 2016, he led a team to Xianghe’s county seat and villages for a 47-day shoot. Post-production would not be completed until the autumn of 2025. He named the film—in gestation for more than a quarter century, and requiring nine years of effort to complete—Fragrant River.

In this 15-channel black-and-white video installation, Yang Fudong adopts a detached authorial perspective, weaving together fragmentary memories of real-life events into a fictional narrative. The film centers around a young mother, who symbolically bridges generations within a large family. It begins with her joyfully preparing for the Spring Festival and concludes on an ambiguous note, leaving the story unfinished while foreshadowing several different possibilities for the future. Throughout, the narrative intertwines scenes of young people’s romances and weddings, the death and funeral of an elderly woman, and various everyday scenes of rural life in northern China—raising and slaughtering pigs, making rice dumplings, visiting temple fairs, and more. People mark the passage of time through their daily toil, as the village acquiesces to the dispersal of its inhabitants and other changes. Birth and aging, illness and death, departure and return—all seem to be but part of a peaceful cycle of time. At once realistic and uncannily unfamiliar, scenes feel like memories broken apart and then reconnected. Surreal images occasionally drift by, as if seeping in from dreams, hinting at an additional dimension to the story. In this exhibition, the 15 screens are unevenly distributed within a labyrinth of 9 multi-layered, interconnected spaces. Inside, different temporalities and narrative threads appear to occur simultaneously. Through these means, the artist builds a sense of being “out of place, out of time.”

Here, Yang reaffirms his commitment to fragmented, non-linear storytelling, blending the lyrical essence of “the cinema of implication” with incisive character studies to imbue everyday themes such as memory, growth, family, and nostalgia with a touch of the eternal. Xianghe the place thus becomes a poetic metaphor for the durée of time.

These New Year’s greeting cards were created by Yang Fudong between 2002 and 2025.