Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce a solo presentation of Yang Fudong’s six channel installation, East of Que Village 2007, which will be on view May 6th through June 20 2009.
This will be the first New York presentation of the work, first commissioned by Tate Liverpool for The Real Thing: New Art from China and presented there in 2007, and shown at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, 2008, and MUKHA, Antwerp where it is currently on view thru June 2009.
The exhibition of East of Que Village also coincides with Yang Fudong’s solo exhibition of the epic five part film, The Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest I-V, 2003-2007, currently on view at The Asia Society through September 13th, which was seen in entirety in 2007 at the 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy.
One of China’s best known young artists, in East of Que Village (2007, 6 screens, b&w, 20’, 50”), Yang Fudong diverges from the erudition and urbanity of Seven Intellectuals, delivering a highly personal film that focuses on the sense of isolation and loss increasingly present in China’s contemporary society as communities are scattered, traditional rural villages dissolved, and the fight for survival takes precedence. The imagery is of a desolate and hostile landscape, the host to a group of wild dogs fighting a merciless life-and-death struggle for survival, with only a sporadic presence of human life and social values.
“It is one of those strongly felt experiences that Yang Fudong was able to draw upon in his new work. ‘East of Que Village’, which draws upon those bitter, cold feelings that he associates with Beijing, and with Northern China in general, and which have come to embody for him a sense of isolation and loss. … In East of Que Village [Yang Fudong] finds a poignantly emotive means of communicating these concerns, and in orienting the vision through the eyes of ‘man’s best friend’, plays directly to sensibilities and sensitivities that again, know no national borders – certainly not in western nations. … ‘East of Que Village’ centres on a moment, or a series of moments, in the life of an untamed and untethered pack of dogs, surviving at the most basic level of existence, in an arid, desolate, and unforgiving expanse of northern landscape, flat and wide like the desert, the grasslands of Mongolia, or the loess plains of Shaanxi. The chosen location is, in fact, an isolated village in rural Hebei, which, in the depths of winter, is as equally forbidding as any of those mentioned” . (Karen Smith, The Real Thing (cat.) Tate Liverpool )
Yang Fudong writes, “In rural areas of Hebei, the weather is cold and dry in winter, people live quietly and simply in the plains, but are also bustling about their own lives. Almost all the households keep dogs as watchdogs; the dogs are learning to survive, but dependent on their owner at the same time… Que Village is one of the small villages of only one-hundred households. Lots of dogs live in the village as well, and are subject to disease, death, abandonment, or trafficking. But in the eyes of their masters, dogs are dogs, and in the end, they do not see the only road leading to the outside world in the east of Que Village.” – Yang Fudong
