Fifth Night (2010), Yang Fudong, HD video installation
A lady, groomed and elegantly dressed, is walking in the middle of a city square reminiscent of an old Shanghai. Her face is inscrutable, vacillating between vacancy and quiet anticipation. Her movements are poised, unhesitant. She ascends a platform and brushes her hand along the railing of a spiral staircase leading to nowhere. Behind her, a man passes; in another screen, he is the focal point. He appears shell-shocked, his face sweaty and blemished, oblivious to the other figures around him who each seem to inhabit a different metaphysical plane. Completing the scene are ricksaws, vintage cars, a crew of mechanics fixing a tramcar – all the humdrum unfolding against a soundtrack of nostalgic music punctuated by the ominous sound of hammering that haunts the space.
Such images, as seen in Fifth Night, a seven-channel video installation shown as part of Yang Fudong’s solo exhibition, One half of August, at Parasol unit, are in many ways characteristic of the Shanghai-based artist’s oeuvre. But beyond these overt resemblances, one can here discern a subtle but nonetheless significant shift in the artist’s approach towards his medium. Particularly when compared with his seminal work, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, which directly references the historical figures of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, the socio-political specificities in Yang’s recent works are comparatively muted, with the emphasis seemingly placed instead upon the ocular. From the outset, Yang’s retreat into what appears to be a phenomenology of cinema seems like an implicit affirmation of the overriding, and possibly misguided, critical tendency towards reading his works in universalising terms – either in terms of a poetics of ambiguity or a vague existentialism – but such a reading obscures the fact that Yang has not abandoned cultural tropes entirely. As it seems, Yang’s interest lies less in visuality per se than in the act of rendering visible, referring specifically to the operations that make visibility possible on a global scale. Such operations, however, cannot be reduced to those of an Orientalism that has already been outmoded by a decentered postcolonial world. Instead, the Chineseness as seen in Yang’s films is more accurately a synecdoche of that which can be preliminarily called foreignness, and as such, the viewing subject that his films confront must necessarily refer not only to the West, but consumers of that nebulous category of cinema called “World Cinema”.
Since attaining global visibility, Chinese cinema has found itself perpetually embroiled in the politics of spectatorship, often accused of pandering to the Western gaze. This self-fetishisation can be best understood in terms of what Laura Mulvey, in her feminist critique of cinema, calls “to-be-looked-at-ness” – that which offers the viewer a voyeuristic pleasure made possible by the combination of spectacle and narrative. In this light, Yang’s films, with its bold aestheticisation of narrative tropes such as the nubile Chinese damsel and the ancient warlord, may appear less an elucidation than a symptom of this problematic. But yet, any sense of “scopophilia” described by Mulvey[1] is not entirely delivered, or is at least never brought to consummation, for the initial romantic promises of narrative are often, through the prolonged act of spectatorship, diffused in a cloud of ambiguity. In Fifth Night, for instance, the sense of foreboding conjured by the intense theatricality of the choreographed spectacle never culminates in a desired climax. The characters remain, in true Beckettian fashion, to be perpetually waiting, the Orientalist fantasy never allowed to complete itself – pure spectacle without narrative. The film nurtures spectatorship only to disappoint it with an existential impasse – existentialism used here as a means by which scopophilia is disrupted, rather than an end in itself.
But yet, one can never quite situate Yang’s work and practice as whole within the broader postmodern and postcolonial project of deconstruction typified by works like Tracey Moffatt’s landmark Nice Coloured Girls (1987) and Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989), in which the manipulation of the cinematic structure itself is central to her dissection of Aboriginality. Instead of fragmentation, what one encounters here is a film that despite its absence of narrative, is structurally coherent, for the logic of the montage remains entirely intact; a sustained, unitary gaze persists. Thus, it may be more accurate to say that Yang’s work is less deconstructive than descriptive. His gesture here is not so much a dismantling of an Orientalist gaze than the depiction of an emergent, post-Orientalist gaze that has become the dominant spectatorial mode following the collapse of the Oriental-Occident binary brought about by the reality of globalisation. The nature of this gaze is a peculiar one: without recourse to the sedimented background of meanings that constituted the Orientalist fantasy, it remains distant and panoptical, attentively surveying the foreign in an effort to make it intelligible, or to use a Heideggerian term, to make it “disclose” itself to the outsider-viewer. It is the gaze of the audience of “World Cinema”, embodied here in the film’s camerawork (and by virtue of our passivity, equated to the gaze that we, the audience, take on), which in its adoption of a vast range of angles and depths of field, its careful, measured movements and the austerity of its monochromatic colours, similarly manifests a panoptical nature. Significantly, Yang also foregrounds the inevitably frustrated nature of this gaze, by first encouraging it on with its enticements of “worldliness”[2], conjured by the seeming facticity of the meandering figures who appear just-there, who despite doing nothing of consequence, appear firmly settled in a self-contained, putatively undisclosed constellation of significations, before upsetting it through the viewer’s eventual realisation that everything is a mere semblance.
Ye Jiang (The night man cometh) (2011), Yang Fudong, HD video installation
What Yang seems to have achieved here is the capturing of the transitional moment of Chinese, and by extension, global cinema today as it departs from the myths perpetuated by Orientalism towards an uncertain future, a movement that can be explained through Roland Barthes’ theories on myth as semiology. In Mythologies, Barthes speaks of “myth” as a “second-order semiological system” that is built upon the first – that of language. What is the final term (sign) in language becomes the first term (signifier) in myth. He elaborates that in this transformation, the linguistic sign “empties itself”, its history evaporated as it prepares itself to “receive its signified” in its new function as the mythical signifier. This transitional stage from one semiological chain to the next is seen in Yang’s Ye Jiang (The night man cometh), a single-channel video set in a snowy landscape with a bizarre ensemble consisting of a vanquished warlord, a pensive-looking maiden, a white-suited man, another maiden in white, a hawk and a family of deers. As signs, these are images already laden with meaning, “a whole system of values: a history, a geography, a morality, a zoology, a Literature”[3] – values that have, however, been eroded by their recontextualisation, replaced instead by an anticipatory void. But this void is never filled, for the mythical signified never arrives to fill it: the film reads like a prologue that never ends. In place of myth, all we have is a mere mythic mise-en-scène – a stage devoid of narrative. It is a mere surface, a topos of myth.
Pushing this retreat to the surface to an extreme is the last and titular piece of the exhibition, an eight-channel video installation in which Yang projects scenes from his earlier films onto various architecture and furniture and films them. The work marks a strange turn in our experience of the exhibition, for suddenly we are wrenched out of the diegetic universe of cinema, confronting the mise-en-scène we have been dwelling as a mise-en-abyme. But while the entire idea of making a film of a film may sound trite in this day and age, this instrumentalisation of the artist’s own work for such a purpose renders it a profoundly self-reflexive act. In fact, there is something self-negating in Yang’s act of reducing his entire oeuvre to literal surfaces, which results in the collapse of figure and ground and by extension, that of cinema as a signifying system. While in Fifth Night and Ye Jiang, there is still an effort to reel the audience in with the promise of a world, a myth, the surfaces here cannot even accommodate the illusion of penetration. All we are left with is a pure materiality, the skin of film: figures brushing across the contours of a classical statue, warping as they pass over the edge of a shelf…
What is one to make of this nihilistic gesture – this complete upending of a gaze that has nonetheless already lost its ontological bearings? Does it, somewhat obliquely, point towards a gaze that is soon to be no longer tenable as a mode of grasping the foreign? If so, what else can we turn to? How else can we look? To this, the works of Yang proffers no answer. In their universe, there is only the gaze, and gazing alone, however pointless, must suffice.
Yang Fudong: One half of August was held at Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art from 13 October to 6 November 2011.
Notes
[1] Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Art in Theory, 1900 to 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (London: Blackwell Publishing. 2009), 984-86.
[2] Martin Heidegger, Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 59, 70.
[3] Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage Classics, 2009), 141.
