Artist Yang Fudong Summons the Future in One of His Biggest Exhibitions in China

In his third year of college, the artist Yang Fudong decided to stop speaking. For what became Otherwhere: Not Speaking for Three Months (1993), he communicated largely by writing on his hand or signage. Sometimes he even traced his finger on a cold window and breathed to reveal the words outlined by condensation.

Near the end of his period of silence, he wanted his first words to be something profound. He took a bus to the Tiantong Temple on the outskirts of the southern Chinese city Ningbo and stayed in its guesthouse overnight. In the morning, a monk asked who he was looking for. Worried he might be mistaken for a thief, his first words were, “Where’s the toilet?”

“I suppose it was philosophical, in a sense,” Yang, now 54, said with a smile. We were sitting inside his high-ceilinged studio, within the complex attached to the Shanghai Museum of Glass and where he’s worked for the past 18 years. From the very earliest years of his creative work, Yang used silence as expression. Silence has since continued to play a central role in his films, which rarely feature dialogue.

Props from earlier films, including two model horses and a massive fluted vase, surrounded us. His calligraphy practice covered a table. A photograph from Honey, his 2003 film inspired by his interest in movies about female spies, hung on a wall, showing a woman in fur behind a pink leather sofa.

“Many things can’t be planned,” he said. That instinctive, unpremeditated approach extends from his early works into his latest works. Near the entrance stood Private Notes from a Land of Bliss (2025), a 15-panel installation that includes videos, paintings, and photographs. It will be shown in an exhibition that features mostly new works at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, opening November 22.

From a distance, the acrylic and charcoal paintings almost look abstract, but drawing closer, figures and flora emerge, painted in thinner sinuous lines. Yang employed a method in Chinese painting called “interpretive imitation” to borrow illustrations from Song Dynasty painter Ma Yuan’s Elegant Gathering at the Western Garden.  He chose acrylic because it dries quicker than oil paint, which he said induces a different state of mind.

The paintings, like many of his films are done in black and white, which he has frequently said creates temporal distance for viewers. “Sometimes things you see in color might actually be black and white,” he said. “When black and white are at their purest, they actually contain all colors.”

UCCA curator Chelsea Qianxi Liu explained that Yang has consistently tried to create different forms of cinema. For Dawn Breaking (2018), he filmed in an art museum; in Endless Peaks (2020), he explored the relationship between painting and film. With Private Notes from a Land of Bliss (2025), Yang is using “a cinematic approach to re-examine painting,” Liu said. Historically, viewers of long scroll paintings could only take in a portion at a time, unfolding a section before revealing the next. “In Yang’s view,” she said, “it’s very similar to viewing a movie.”

Yang’s work is well-known across Asia, with solo exhibitions held in the past at the Long Museum West Bund, the Yuz Museum, and the Daegu Art Museum in South Korea. His film Sparrow on the Sea (2024) was M+’s facade commission last year. While he’s also famous internationally, with his breakthrough in Europe happening at Documenta XI in 2002, Yang has a certain appeal within China, Liu added. “His work is instantly recognizable as his. He’s always had a singular presence in contemporary Chinese art.”

The exhibition also includes a 15-channel black-and-white video installation, shown across nine rooms. Titled Fragrant River (2016–25), the piece is intended as a three-dimensional representation of Yang’s memories. The name is a translation of Xianghe, a county town on the plains outside Beijing, where he grew up.

Yang had planned to film in Xianghe after he made An Estranged Paradise (1997–2002), a black-and-white film which uses non-linear narrative to depict a drifting intellectual’s urban alienation. He’d already begun filming women in his hometown in 2000, around the time his grandmother died.

Originally, he planned Fragrant River as a documentary, to be recorded gradually over the course of eight to ten years. In 2002, his mother passed away, and he put the project aside. By the time he returned, more than a decade later, Xianghe had restaurants and buildings over ten floors high. “I felt if I didn’t film at that point, it would change even more,” he said.

That winter, in 2016, Yang filmed over 47 days. The actors he hired weren’t given scripts, only a general outline. He described the filming process using a line from Cao Xueqin’s 18th-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber: “Truth becomes fiction, when fiction’s true.” What he filmed hadn’t actually happened to Yang—the resulting fragmentary scenes of daily life such as a pig carved and bagged, a child engrossed in a spinning top, tables laid for a celebration were altered versions of actual memories and impressions he’d had. The result is a Xianghe that doesn’t belong solely to the past.

“Linear time is a very modern understanding,” Liu said. “Many of Yang Fudong’s works seem to contradict this modernity, perhaps looking back while simultaneously embracing the future.”

His films are almost plotless, rendering them hard to piece together. Instead, they are often more intent on locating an emotion than telling a narrative. For Yang, dialogue lies in movement. “When a tree moves, even a little, it has emotion,” he said. “Even if we are filming an empty corner of a house, as long as the right feeling is captured, I feel it’s breathing.”

Though many of these video works were filmed in recent years, they are only the inaugural chapter of Yang’s ongoing Library Film Project, in which he considers themes of nostalgia and hometown as part of the origins of people’s spiritual lives. His aim is to create an open film, a door that someone can push open, decide where they want to head upon entry.

Also in the exhibition is Breastfeeding (2025), a furniture and video installation composed of televisions and cabinets that Yang has collected over the years—pieces of furniture once common across northern China, in Beijing and provinces like Shandong, Hebei, and Shanxi. Some were used for storing clothes, others for kitchen utensils. Grouped together, they stand like a small group of ancestors. “They’re like actors in a play,” Yang said. Many of the cabinets once had clear glass panels, which Yang has replaced with mirrored surfaces. Walking around them, the viewer appears and disappears, as do the cabinets themselves, creating a subtly shifting space. Its relationship with Fragrant River, he said, “is like the one between a tree and its shadow.”

The exhibition includes paintings from his university days in the 1990s—though internationally known for his video works like Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003–7), Yang’s practice began in painting.

He still remembers his early dejection about heading south to study at Hangzhou’s China Academy of Art while his classmates went to Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. But looking back, had he stayed in Beijing, he suspects he might have remained a classical painter. There’s a throughline in the exhibition that intertwines his childhood, his growth as an artist, and his own perception of growth. “He’s blended different states of time together,” Liu said.

As Yang and I wrapped up our conversation, deliverymen arrived with framed New Year greeting cards he’d sent out to friends over the past two decades, which feature in the exhibition as Happy New Year (2002–25). We often perceive time as progressing from one point to the next. But from Yang’s perspective, even when things are in the past, they still exist in the present. “The future is already there, you just haven’t reached it yet,” he said. “It’s there, waiting for you.”