Yang Fudong –
New Women

Editor
Philipp Bollmann

Author
Michael Ostheimer

Design
Neue Gestaltung

Publisher
Distanz Verlag

Format
30 x 21 cm

Features
Hardcover, linen with dust jacket

ISBN
978-3-95476-271-2

Publication
January 2019

Kaufen

This publication is dedicated to Yang Fudong’s series New Woman and was produced to accompany the exhibition of the same name, curated by Philipp Bollmann in 2018 at the Osramhöfe in Berlin.

In continuous black and white, the artist brings together five unclothed women wearing only makeup and jewelry in a studio interior among sparse props. Silent and in the form of long, predominantly static shots, the images show little movement. The women move gracefully between classical columns and vases, lean against chests of drawers and mantelpieces, lie elegantly on ottomans and lavishly furnished beds, sit effectively on wooden chairs and decorative elements, and tenderly touch flowering branches, books, or occasionally the edge of a water basin. The spatial ambiance fluctuates between an ancient excavation site, an elegant salon, and an ethereal brothel.

Yang Fudong’s New Women is an homage to the beginnings of Chinese cinema. In the films of the 1930s, an image of transgression was staged as undoubtedly international, but also as a place of contradictions where art, culture, and political freedom mingled with corruption, brutality, and decadence. An intertwining whose creative energy, sexual charge, and political breeding ground were decisive for the departure from the stagnation of the imperial era and the turn toward an independent modernity.

Exposed to the structurally ambivalent spirit of a transitional period, Yang Fudong’s “new women” move as if in an intermediate realm, between the search for meaning in the testimonies of the past and self-determined action. With this tentative appropriation, they could also be on the way to a genuinely Chinese modernity—regardless of the concrete form a Chinese society that commits itself to a non-Western modernity may eventually take.