The Mobile Mirror of Memory
“This state we’re in […], a moment when we have to negotiate our past while inventing our present.” Yang Fudong

Yang Fudong is creating one of the most compelling and important bodies of media installation art today. The range of his work, from large-scale multi-screen projections No Snow on the Broken Bridge, 2006, to single-screen pieces, which include Lock Again (lu ke zai) and Honey (mi), display a mastery of the moving image and a sophisticated understanding of cinematic language. In the 1990s, installation artists employing the moving image turned to the classical cinema as a source of inspiration and as a reference for exploring the cinematic basis of the moving image. Yang's brilliant negotiation of social memory and cinematic history, which he articulates against the background of contemporary political change in China, places his work on the cutting edge of a new aesthetics of the moving image. Douglas Gordon and Pierre Huyghe are among the artists identified with the appropriation of the work of canonical film directors. Gordon's installation 24 Hour Psycho, 1993, screened Hitchcock's Psycho, 1960 on video at two frames per second, transforming it into a 24-hour silent film. [...]

John G. Hanhardt


Catalogue excerpt
fast forward 2. The Power of Motion
Media Art Sammlung Goetz
Editors: Ingvild Goetz and Stephan Urbaschek
Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz, 2010

Yang Fudong, Honey (mi), 2003
Single-channel video installation, color, sound
Edition 8/10
9' 29"