ShanghART is so pleased to present Yang Fudong’s solo exhibition NEW WOMEN in ShanghART H-Space.

New Women, a five-channel video installation, is Yang Fudong’s most recent video work. New Women was commissioned by TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) where it was presented for the first time in 2013 to high acclaim.  New Women will also be shown in Art Unlimited/Art Basel this summer.

New Women is inspired by the decadent atmosphere of Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, a period that has been captured in some of the best-loved Chinese films today and remains influential among Chinese artists in general. 1930s movies were mostly storytelling, focusing on the dark side of the society and the fate of small potatoes. The same goes for contemporary movies, but they produce now different types of industrial image products, and all for the purpose to consume our feelings. Generally, artists are not exactly the same; they are more of text authors and philosophers, and they don’t deliberately create entertainment products. The work New Women examines and suggests how women – and, ultimately, the ideas about women – have embodied China’s search for modernity over the past hundred years. It is a tribute to nascent Chinese cinema, also a depiction of the ideal woman image in each person’s heart which implies an idealistic state. 

In the end of 2013, Yang Fudong’s New Women was nominated as "Best Artwork of the Year Award" of LU XUN Award 2013.

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and ShanghART Gallery