DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.16

Yang Fudong: In Search of the Lost Ying/Yang Balance

Christine Vial Kayser (A.)

The photographs, videos, and installations of the famous Chinese artist Yang Fudong (杨福东, b. 1971) combine a mastery of light and grain that bears a strong Western influence with a sense of melancholia for the Chinese past. These images have been interpreted as a reaction to the consumerism, individualism, and materialism that have overtaken Chinese culture since the 1990s, when Yang started his career. Critics suggest that the artist is looking for an alternative model based on inner harmony and withdrawal from the world, inspired by the poetic spirit of the literati. Despite the importance and special status of women in his art, his work has been approached as ungendered. This chapter argues that Yang’s acknowledged taste for Chinese literati tradition takes onboard an allegiance to the modern Confucian doctrine of the 1990s, in which each gender has a specific social role. I posit that his representation of beautiful women attempts to address the crisis of masculinity in contemporary China, which emerged at a time when the economic power of women was growing, and an affirmative feminist movement was on the rise. I also acknowledge that the prevalence of white and its association with water, snow, and silence in some of the series is a possible indication that the feminine is a way to retrieve a Yin/Yang balance, a Daoist concept, also present in New Confucianism. I attempt to trace the intellectual and spiritual genealogy of this apparent contradiction throughout this essay.

stránky: 379-411