yang fudong; seven intellectuals in a bamboo forest

yang fudong; seven intellectuals in a bamboo forest

artasiapacific nov/dec 2009 p 139

(35mm film based upon an ancient Daoist tale known as Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove reset as seven young scholars retreat in the 1970s or 80s -can an intellectual reconcile nature and powerful ideals - japanese film - qingtan , a daoist form of 'pure conversation'.

asia society:
In 2003, Yang Fudong produced the first part of his now seminal, five-part film, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest. One part of the film was created each year (in sequential order), and the entire work was finished in 2007. The work has no clear narrative, although each part takes place in a different setting. Some parts take place in a rural environment, while others are set in cities. The film poses questions about the dissonance between men and women, individuals and society, the past and present, and reality and an ideal world.

Each part was originally shot in 35mm film, which was then transferred to DVD. Yang prefers to shoot in film, as opposed to digital video, as he believes that film retains a strong sense of the artist’s touch, which digital videos often lack. The five parts differ in length, ranging from approximately thirty to seventy minutes; the total running time amounts to about four hours.

Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest was first screened at the 2007 Venice Biennale and received high praise. The Asia Society exhibition is the first presentation of the complete five-part work in a U.S. museum, and the work is a promised gift to Asia Society’s Contemporary Art Collection.

shangart:
The film Seven Intellectuals In Bamboo Forest is based on the history of seven talent intellecuals in the Chinese ancient Wei and Jin Dynasty. Ruan Ji, Ji Kang, Shan Tao, Liu Ling, Ruan Yan, Xiang Xiu and Wang Rong were famous poets and artists at that time. Open and unruly, they used to gather and drink in the bamboo forest, singing songs and playing traditional Chinese musical instruments, in hope to escape from the earthly life. They pursued individuality, freedom and liberty. Their remarkable talent and passion made them a notable group in Chinese history.

NYT: From an Ancient Bamboo Grove to Modern China
By KEN JOHNSON
Published: May 28, 2009
The celebrated filmmaker Yang Fudong, who was born in 1971 and lives in Shanghai, is having a New York moment. His best-known work, a beautiful but tryingly long, slow and portentous series of movies called “Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest” (2003-7), is on view in its five-hour entirety for the first time in a United States museum (at the Asia Society).

Meanwhile, Marian Goodman Gallery is presenting Mr. Yang’s “East of Que Village” (2007), a kind of gritty, anthropological study shown as six simultaneously running videos. Seen together, these exhibitions afford a supremely stylish and at times frustratingly narrow glimpse into the collective soul of modern China.

The two projects are similar in some ways. Both are in black and white and proceed with no regard for linear narrative. In terms of subject matter, however, they are worlds apart.

In its snail’s pace, emotional muteness and velvety grain, “Seven Intellectuals,” which was featured at the 2007 Venice Biennale, calls to mind early films by Jim Jarmusch, whom Mr. Yang has credited as an inspiration. Mr. Yang is often a striking image maker, but he has none of Mr. Jarmusch’s zany humor and storytelling imagination. He has also been influenced by the French New Wave.

But his movies, which tend to be wordless, are more pictorial than cinematic. Trained as a painter and photographer, he creates sequences of images that are like perfectly composed Modernist photographs. Often the imagery plays on classical Chinese paintings as well.

Inspired by a story about some third-century Taoists who retreat from the corruption of urban life and government service to a bamboo grove for conversation, singing and drinking, “Seven Intellectuals” tracks the dreamlike meanderings of a group of morose, well-dressed, fashion-model-pretty young people (five men and two women). We first encounter them reclining in the nude on a rocky outcrop on Yellow Mountain in Anhui Province. Then we follow them to a claustrophobic city apartment, where romantic and sexual complications ensue, and then to a beach where they process dried fish and wander over oceanside rocks carrying suitcases.

The last and longest segment has them in a big city, where Mr. Yang’s disjunctive imagery becomes increasingly surrealistic. Though usually dressed to resemble mid-20th-century French philosophers, Mr. Yang’s seven intellectuals look more like graduate students than serious thinkers, and they seem to be without solid foundations of selfhood.

In Part 3, as if to atone for their rootless self-absorption, they take up mountainside rice farming. Barefoot and in peasant clothes, they churn flooded paddies with a rudimentary, ox-drawn plow; build dikes of mud with hoes and pitchforks; and plant seedlings. Like Marie Antoinette and her fellow mock-shepherds, and like American hippies who escaped to rustic communes in the 1960s, these intellectuals indulge in the fantasy of a more wholesome lifestyle and greater intimacy with nature. Of course, it doesn’t last; that kind of life is too hard. Eventually they descend from their high-minded privations to the moral confusion of city life.

Going from the earlier project to the documentary video “East of Que Village,” it looks as if Mr. Yang were doing Social Realist penance for his prior infatuation with privileged youth. Running concurrently on six high-definition flat screens in a dark room, each 20-minute video shows shifting views of a remote village in a region surrounding Beijing. In the desolate landscape outside the village, scrawny dogs forage for food and get into snarling fights. In town we see people doing routine activities. At one point they enjoy an outdoor performance of screechy folk music and a communal parade.

The video suite is not overtly message-driven. Mr. Yang’s minimalist style works as a gaze of all-over, noncommittal attentiveness. By showing six channels simultaneously, he creates an enveloping experience, which is enhanced by the sounds of barking and growling, blaring music and other ambient noises.

In their reticence, Mr. Yang’s films border on pure and nearly static formalism. (He makes “Last Year at Marienbad” seem like an action film.) Nevertheless, they are richly allusive. You can read “East of Que Village” as an allegory of life on the fine line between civilization and savagery. The title, by the way, refers to the direction of the only road leading to the outside world.

Viewed against a backdrop of recent Chinese history — the decline of Maoism, the rise of capitalism, the accelerated importation of Western art and culture — both films exude a mournful ennui that is the opposite of go-go modernity. Welcome to China. Here are the educated classes who aspire to the intellectual and material rewards of modern, global culture, but risk losing their traditional sources of identity and spiritual energy. And there are worlds where life is unforgiving, and death is always near at hand. The future seems bleak.

artforum:
A thousand words: Yang Fudong talks about The Seven Intellectuals
Sept, 2003

In one of my earlier works, the photographic triptych The First Intellectual, I touched on a concept that still preoccupies me: One wants to accomplish big things, but in the end it doesn't happen. Every educated Chinese person is very ambitious, and obviously there are obstacles--obstacles coming either from "out there," meaning society or history, or from "inside," from within oneself. In this work you could see that "the first intellectual" has been wounded. He has blood running down his face and wants to respond, but he doesn't know at whom he should throw his brick; he doesn't know if the problem stems from himself or society. Ideals and the way they distinguish people, but also the way that they can unite people and encourage them to form bands, partnerships, brotherhoods--this was something I wanted to investigate in more depth, taking my time to do so. When I eventually completed An Estranged Paradise, I started defining this new, vast project, which will untold as five different films. Because I feel that this topic is extremely important to an understanding of China, both past and present, I wanted to articulate several temporalities together: one that is really ancient, the stories of "The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove"; another set during the '50s and '60s, when there was a profound questioning of the status and role of intellectuals (and so the films will have a clear '50s, '60s kind of New Cinema flavor); and, ultimately, one dealing with the concerns and ideals of today. more .....