Photography is film. In My Heart Was Touched Last Year, Yang Fudong turns his attention to photography as a medium to observe the elegant profile of a woman's face and to capture the tears that slide down her cheek. Portraiture is a crucial element in Yang Fudong's work, the female protagonist moves in an ambiguous rhythm between photography and film, thus creating a zone of indistinction between movement and stasis, presence and absence. Her tears could be the tears of joy, or of a heart's undaunted struggle under comely appearance. In this sense, Yang's work can be seen as a constant extraction (or mixture) of time and background, which offers to the audience an convoluted puzzle enciphered by the touching portrayal of a one's this gaze.

Taxt by Li Zhenhua

First published in K11 'Truth Beauty Freedom and Money' catalog, P136