‘First Spring’

Whatever should happen — the beautiful, the fantastic, the dreamlike …

A few young men are in Prada menswear…
As if in Shanghai of the 1930s or 40s,
As if in cafés, ballrooms and backrooms in the dark of night, in all the merry places …
Whatever should happen would happen ….

In the streets, in the crowds, you meet Chinese of different classes, from different
times; like people in utterly different worlds, but meeting in Shanghai dozens of years
ago ….

Whatever should happen would always happen …
In the sky over this city,
They still see they’re walking under the parasols …

Dangerous beauty …, promising beauty …
Whatever should happen …
Everything in the spring depends on …
A good start in the spring …

—Yang Fudong

Video still excerpt from Prada Men Summer 2010 movie by Yang Fudong.

Watch the full video on Prada.com

Hans Ulrich Obrist on ‘First Spring’

THE PAST THE PRESENT THE FUTURE

Yang Fudong is one of the most internationally acclaimed Chinese artists working today and a major representative of contemporary Chinese video art. His work explores and expands the potential of the filmic conventions of linear narrative.

What impresses the viewer upon first seeing Yang’s works is the sensuousness and beauty of the images, qualities that draw us in while leaving us unprepared for the narrative ambiguity at the heart of the films. Uncertainty is pervasive – there are uncertain characters, confused identities and unexpected props, all of which conspire to create a world of personal experience that resembles but never completely coincides with the real world. Combined with the formal experimentation that Yang visits upon the material, this uncertainty creates an overall sense of drifting, somewhere between immersion and distraction, inviting clear parallels with the simultaneous stimulation and oblivion of the modern city experience.

In modern cities, man’s inner sensitivity is fogged by a cumbersome jumble of information and tangled human relationships. Yang’s use of delicate grey tones at first seems to alleviate this confusion, to help us come to terms with our train of thoughts, but it also establishes a distance; that of faded memories or dreams. Indeed, the use of black and white in Yang’s videos – for instance in the film Moshen Tiantang (An Estranged Paradise) of 1997–2002 – suggests a nostalgia for the films of 1920s and 1930s Shanghai, when the city was a booming center for film production. Suggesting his own feelings of alienation in relation to the experience of the city, Yang, who lives in Shanghai, has stated that ‘I always have this feeling of not living in my own city, of being a long way from my family in a city that isn’t really mine’.