On the afternoon of March 14, 2026, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art will welcome film and media scholars Erika Balsom and Chunyan Fu for keynote presentations and conversations. Approaching from the perspectives of film history, the history of moving image art, and aesthetic methodology, they will examine the moving image installation practice of Chinese contemporary artist Yang Fudong.

Currently on view at UCCA, the exhibition “Fragrant River” sees Yang Fudong revisit the landscapes of his upbringing ad memory through six newly commissioned video works. In the eponymous installation Fragrant River (2025), the artist constructs a journey of memory and return across nine nested, interconnected chambers, orchestrated through fifteen screens. Works such as Young Man, Young Man (2025), At the Summer Palace (2024–2025), and County Magistrate, County Magistrate (2024–2025) together form a layered visual narrative of place and recollection. Through a highly aestheticized cinematic language, Yang brings together the poetics of Eastern philosophy, the idioms of modern cinema, and the visual logic of contemporary culture, generating an aesthetic tension that hovers between dream and reality.

The exhibition also reflects on Yang’s point of departure as an artist. His trajectory unfolded alongside the profound social transformations in China around the turn of the millennium and in relation to the landmark exhibitions that shaped Chinese contemporary art at that historical juncture. Building on this context, the present conversation turns to a parallel historical line: situating Yang’s practice within the art-historical development of moving image installation since the 1990s and proposing a rereading of film history premised on an “exit from the movie theatre.”

In Yang’s video installations, multi-room sequencing, thresholds of darkness and reflection, and the relay between projection, photography, and painterly composition together produce an embodied mode of spectatorship. Images linger, disperse, and return, generating resonance and memory through suspension and delay. In this sense, the exhibition site itself becomes a medium—an environment in which resonance, suspension, and memory are composed as lived experience.

Drawing on the international rise of multi-screen installation since the 1990s, as well as French film theorist Raymond Bellour’s notion of “an other cinema,” Erika Balsom will consider how moving images are dismantled, extended, and re-sited within exhibition space. Forms once understood as “cinema” are redistributed, transformed, and reorganized, giving rise to new structures of spectatorship and new temporal experiences.  Approaching from the perspective of literati aesthetics, Chunyan Fuwill examine the “exhibition ecology” constructed through Yang’s moving image practice—a total, integrated environment in which architecture, circulation, light, and the viewer’s pace shape the emergence of images. Drawing on aesthetic concepts such as xu shi (虚实, the interplay between virtual and real), liu bai (留白, blankness as an active interval), and yi jing (意境, the ideorealm), she will analyze how Yang reconfigures tradition as a method of spacing, attunement, and temporal drift rather than a repertory of motifs. The conversation will further delve into cinema’s new ontological condition after its departure from the theatrical apparatus, and how Yang Fudong translates these historical circumstances into perceptual, artistic form. The event will be moderated by UCCA Public Programs Curator Wu Yiyao.