Yang Fudong

Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Naples
Acquired from the above by the present owner

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist

China, Shanghai, Eastlink Gallery, Uncooperative Approach (Fuck Off), 2000 (different edition)
France, Paris, Espace Cardin, Paris-Pékin, 5 - 28 October, 2002, p. 225 (different edition)
Italy, Naples, Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Yang Fudong, February - March, 2004
China, Shanghai, ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai History in Making from 1979 Till 2009, 9 September - 10 October, 2009 (different edition)
China, Beijing, Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, The Civil Power, 12 June - 12 October, 2015 (different edition)

Paris-Pékin: Exposition, Beaux Arts Collection, Turin, Italy, 2002, p. 44
China Art Now, Editions Flammarion, Paris, France, 2004, p. 205
Zhu Qi ed., Chinese Avant-Garde Photography since 1990, Hunan Fine Art Publishing House, Changsha, China, 2004, p. 261
Out of the Red - The New Emerging Generation of Chinese Photographers, Damiani Editore, Italy, 2004, p. 162
Art and Exhibition: Wu Hong on Contemporary Chinese Art, Lingnan Fine Art Publishing House, Guangzhou, China, 2005, p. 95
Lü Peng, A History of Art In Twentieth Century China, Edizioni Charta, Milan, Italy, 2010, p. 1115
Lü Peng, The Story of "Art in China" - from Late Qing to Present, Peking University Press, Beijing, China, 2010, unpaginated
Quote Out of Context-The Works of Yang Fudong, China Academy of Fine Art Publishing House, Hangzhou, China, 2013, p.149

This work is generally in good condition with minor creases and printing irregularities on the upper center portion of the work. Upon close inspection, minor pinpoint foxing can be observed near the central length of the right edge. Please note that this work was not examined out of its frame.
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Intellectual in New China
Yang Fudong

Yang Fudong is China’s most famous and influential photographer and video artist. Although he was born in Beijing, his career in art has centered on Shanghai, and almost all of his artworks bear close ties to that city. In his early years, he explored the marginalisation of people in modern cities. Later, he created a series of works in dialog with Shanghai’s past and present. In his internationally acclaimed film Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, he shifted his focus to Chinese traditional culture and modern history. But prior to these important works, Yang Fudong’s most popular work of art was The First Intellectual (Lot 1068), which was featured in the seminal “Fuck Off” exhibition in Shanghai in 2000. This artwork is the most important milestone from the early years of the artist’s career.

The China Academy of Art, located in Hangzhou, is the cradle of Chinese photography and video art. Alongside Zhang Peili, who graduated from the Academy in the early 1980s, Yang Fudong is the institution’s most prominent representative. After graduation, Yang briefly returned to Beijing, where he filmed an early important video artwork, An Estranged Paradise. Soon afterward, he relocated to Shanghai to take a job at a gaming company. The First Intellectual was created during this period. City life became the artist’s most pressing subject because of the many challenges and dilemmas it posed for a young intellectual with a passion for making art.

In 1999 and 2000, Yang adopted the style of New Documentary Photography, the perspective of the urban youth, and the setting of Shanghai. The First Intellectual is Yang’s most important work from that period, and it was included in the “Fuck Off” exhibition, which was a peripheral show concurrent with the 2000 Shanghai Biennial. That year, the Biennial was broadened to include foreign artists: an attempt to establish Shanghai’s image as an international art capital. The First Intellectual is a triptych of photographs. The topmost of the three is the one that people are most familiar with. The background is Lujiazui, a financial district of Shanghai. The youth in the foreground wears a rumpled white-collared shirt. There is blood on his face, and he holds a brick in his hand. He stands in the middle of an empty street and glares all around him. The artist dubbed this urban survivor The First Intellectual. At the turn of the century, this artwork captured without mocking the yawning gap between the images projected by the government with the perspectives of a new generation.

The artist described the work in his own words: “an educated young person, perhaps viewed as an intellectual or a cultured person, is smashed with a brick on the street. There’s nothing he can do about it. He cannot vent, and he cannot find a target. It’s a state of powerlessness”. Rapid urban development and the consequent sense of alienation were the artist’s primary sources of inspiration. “Is this development in harmony with the hearts of young people? It depends on the person. How does one survive and adapt in a society facing high-speed development?”¹　

In the years since, The First Intellectual has become the most important and representative work of Yang Fudong’s early period. It is a symbol of Shanghai in the new century, and it also represents a major breakthrough in Chinese photography. At the time, contemporary Chinese realist photography was focused on people on the fringes of society, and there was a dearth of fresh material. Yang Fudong’s emergence brought photography into the contemporary moment by taking the metropolis as its subject and focusing on the present. It marked a new wave in photography. Gu Zheng, a photographer himself, praised The First Intellectual for portraying “the helpless eruption of a Chinese youth was been disillusioned under the dual pressures of urbanisation and globalisation, in the context of consumerism. Yang Fudong has chosen urban youth, one of the most powerless groups in present-day China, to express this eruption.”²

The subject presented by The First Intellectual has reappeared frequently in the artist’s subsequent artwork, demonstrating the seminality of the work. In particular, Yang Fudong’s most famous work, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, inherited the exploration of urban life by young people initiated by The First Intellectual. The film shows the journey of seven youths who leave nature and arrive in the suburbs before eventually having no choice but to return to the city. It reveals the predicament of the youths as they seek their own path in a highly symbolic rural setting. More broadly, the film reflects the confusion that has accompanied China’s process of modernisation.

Although Yang Fudong graduated from the Oil Painting department, he has primarily worked in the mediums of photography and video art. In 2004, he was given the Hugo Boss Prize by New York’s Guggenheim Museum. His works have been featured by major art events including the Kassel documenta and multiple Venice Biennales, and his works have been collected by leading global museums including the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and the Fukuoka Art Museum.

¹ “Tupian ji dianying: Yang Fudong fangtan zhiyi”, Quote out of Context: Selected Works of Yang Fudong, China Academy of Art, 2013, p. 125

² Gu Zheng, “Laizi oufa de qifa ... guanyu Yang Fudong de sheying yi yingxiang zhuangzhi”, Quote out of Context: Selected Works of Yang Fudong, China Academy of Art, 2013, p. 10