Event 8 am, 9 April
ShanghART is delighted to announce that a live virtual event with artist Yang Fudong and curator Ute Meta Bauer will be held on 9 April, discussing "Performance in the Work of Yang Fudong—from Otherwhere to Dawn Breaking". This event belongs to the series of dialogues of Yang Fudong's solo exhibition "From The Nightman Cometh to Dawn Breaking" in Portland, Oregon. Starting from Yang's performance in 1993, this talk provides insights into the artist's important representative works in the past and the core creation of his "Museum Film Project" and "Library Film Project" that he focused on in recent years.
Speakers： Yang Fudong Ute Meta Bauer
Host： Sandra Percival
Date Time: 2022.04.09（周六）8.00 am (CST)
Vimeo:https://vimeo.com/696655435/01095086c7
(This dialogue will be held in English and Chinese with simultaneous translation. The event will be recorded and circulated on ShanghART social platform.)
This talk presents the evolution of performance in Yang’s work, beginning with his vow of silence while a student at The Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China (1991–1995), which a decade before Yang’s arrival, had become a centre of experimentation. While a student, he watched the video of Joseph Beuys’ 1974 performance I Like America and America Likes Me, a performance during which Beuys was brought in an ambulance to an art gallery to avoid stepping on US soil, and where he was confined with a coyote. In Hangzhou, texts such as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus were circulated, which drew a limit to the expression of thoughts summed up as: “What can be said at all can be said clearly, and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” In 1993, Yang’s first action was Otherwhere, a silent performance when for three months he took a vow of silence. He stopped speaking and only wrote messages to communicate, even on his body if there was nothing else to hand. After moving to Shanghai, Yang began contemplating a five-part work in late 2001, creating one part of the cycle a year, deliberately slowing his pace. At the 52nd Venice Art Biennale (2007), Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest was shown in its entirety spread out over five successive rooms in the Arsenale.
Yang would realise more than one project of a long duration. In 2009, he proposed shooting a film in a museum as a live performance and for the second edition of Performa in New York, he was commissioned to "create an open film set inside a New York Museum." It was understood to take place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but it remained unrealised. More than a decade later, in 2018, Yang realised the opening chapter of Dawn Breaking – A Museum Film Project as a live durational performance at the Long Museum in Shanghai. Two spectacular sets were built as shooting locations inside the museum — The Morning Ceremony of the Song Dynasty and The Tower of Life. Over 36 days, a continuous performance unfolded while museum audiences witnessed the live filming. The visitors could also view the raw footage of each day's film shoot on the following day, posted sequentially in 36 dailies in the form of a video diary. Later that year, Yang realised Indeed, the Only Way, live performance and installation staged and filmed at The Power Station of Art, his contribution to the 12th Shanghai Biennale. The video Indeed, the Only Way is currently installed in Zena Zezza's exhibition YANG FUDONG—from Yejiang/The Nightman Cometh to Dawn Breaking in Portland, Oregon, United States.
About this exhibition
Curated by the founder of Zena Zezza Sandra Percival, this exhibition presents Yang's work for the first time in the Pacific Northwest, featuring an installation of "Moving Mountains" and three short films, including "Liu Lan," "First Spring," and "Robber South." Film screenings throughout the season feature "Dawn Breaking – A Museum Film Project" documentary film, "Estranged Paradise," and the five chapters of "Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest." The exhibition is taken place in the 1857 Hallock and McMillan, which is Portland's oldest building located in the heart of Old Town Chinatown.
Speaker
Ute Meta Bauer was born in Germany and studied visual communication, stage design and art theory at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. Bauer is an editor, professor, curator and, since 2013, she is the Founding Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, a national research centre of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Bauer has held leadership positions in cultural and academic institutions including Artistic Director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (1990-1994); Professor of Theory, Practice and Communication of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Art Vienna (1996-2006); and Founding Director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo (2002-2005). At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Bauer served as Director of the Visual Art Program (2005-2009) and Founding Director of ACT, the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (2009-2012). Currently, she is curating the Singapore Pavilion at the 59th Venice Art Biennale featuring Shubigi Rao: Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book and is a curator of the 17th Istanbul biennale alongside David Teh and Amar Kanwar. Bauer was a co-curator of Documenta11 (2002) on the team of artistic director Okwui Enwezor where Yang Fudong first gained international acclaim for his film Estranged Paradise. At NTU CCA Singapore she curated Yang’s exhibition Incidental Scripts together with Khim Ong (2014/2015).
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