Yang Fu-Dong

Experiencing life feels like inhaling fresh air. It’s not like you take a book, read a chapter, and you’ve gained this or that. For me, I might go read a book on a haystack in the countryside, and then I get in the zone, experience that daydream. This daydream is actually another way of taking something “out of context,” and the book is merely a catalyst. I think it allows, for a brief instant, one to rise to an ever-so-slightly higher state.

With regard to filmmaking, I think there’s no way to find out about a Chinese style—I don’t know what a Chinese style is; this is something very difficult to define. I can only say that I grew up in a Chinese environment, and I use my own perspective and experiences, including some things that I learned from school; in fact, all of it comes from this context. These things are inescapable, whether they are called traditional or modern. There’s really no way to explain. You just keep going, and that includes your life at this moment. I think you can only keep on working and follow your heart. If there’s such a thing as a Chinese style, then it’s keeping it simpler, respecting yourself, and doing what you want to do in the context where you grew up. If you can do that—respect your own context—then that’s quite good.

I think there might be another kind of film, one that’s more open. I haven’t found an accurate name for this kind of film, so for now let’s say “abstract film.” The abstract film is not like Western abstract art, where some random brush strokes and formless objects become an abstract painting. I think it should be an unusual film that taps into the minds of the audience. I dislike, more and more, standard feature films or standard documentaries. When I watch them, a lot of them make me feel like I’m enduring them, or even wasting my time. I feel that once the films are over, it’s like a library with a lot of books, while you may not have time to read each one, even if you do read every book, you don’t necessarily become a learned person. So I hope that those who participate in filmmaking have an independent creative consciousness and their own standards, and that they know what kind of movies they should make. This, perhaps, is especially important. As to the difference between abstract films and conventional films, it’s a little like the experimental film that everybody has been talking about for many years. Abstract films should be like experimental films, but with even more tension. They can be watched 20 years earlier or 20 years later, and still possesses that moving power, not like a pop song that drops out of the chart once it’s old.

To me, actually, a film is sometimes something that deceives people. It can turn rumors into realities. Regardless of the great ideals, entertainment value, or all kinds of other elements there might be, a film controls or influences people’s thinking, which is why films are popular. The feeling is, if you want to go make a film, then you must respect the film, and this respect comes from self-respect. But sometimes it could be quite hypocritical. It’s something you can ponder, but never fully figure out.

The text is adapted from an interview conducted by Zhang Ya-Xuan with Yang Fu-Dong, previously published in Contemporary Art and Investment, September 2007.

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Text by Pedro N. Marques; Translated from Portuguese by Elisa Evangelista

Diogo Evangelista’s paintings erupt out of a bewildering convergence of familiar images, although not necessarily recognizable or identifiable in the context of the visual culture. Those images form non-linear narrative cores, which generate a tortuous and disguised matrix. Each of his paintings has a reading of its own and shows a unique perspective which corresponds to the artist’s decisions. At each pictorial movement, he is the one who decides what to show and what to conceal, who leads the flow of attention, and he creates—as if it was choreography—focusing lapses of time oscillating between the evidence of certain details and distractions. Because his raw materials include research as well as the appropriation of all sorts of images, Diogo Evangelista often uses images extracted from newspapers or professional photography magazines, from the Internet, or even from street propaganda. In other words, he resorts on the History of Painting and its motives and genres such as the portrait, the landscape, or the still life as well as on the contemporary subculture. He emphasizes the interchange in disparity instead of consensus. These images are connected with a shared visual culture, and emerge from a collective memory under constant change, permanently subject to the vertigo of forgetfulness and to the eminence of remembering. They are a communal property reappearing under the strangeness of recognition, like a too close and too familiar déjà-vu. Perhaps this is the cause of a certain tranquillity and introspection that they emanate, in spite of the painted reference.
   
The element that somehow unites these images lies in the inner power that turned them into paintings, as well as in the subjective vision of the artist, who moves in a tradition not distant from the “ready-made,” but above all, in a aesthetic view of the world. Diogo Evangelista utilizes the colour, the light, and the scale which are conceived from all of the precious work and dedication of photographers, models, designers, and producers that make each image. Curiously, the original composition also remains, and this fact might lead us to consider the artist’s process either as one of cynicism or one of extreme sincerity, or to interpret it as a posture of sincere devotion for images in general. It seems as if most of the reactions to Diogo Evangelista’s works emanate from the abidance of the original image, from the sincerity inherent to its presence, from its aesthetic seduction as well as from a certain innocence they eradiate.
   
This simultaneity of cynicism and sincerity is not—and could never be—an aleatory event. If we took an almost anthropological approach of the image, we would see that these are paintings that search for the mechanisms that allow a given painting to become powerful and effective, that ask why and when a certain image might be considered completed. When the artist recognizes the previous dedication embedded in the images chosen to become painted, he also acknowledges the fact that an image is always shared between who creates it and who usurps it. It’s not exactly the case of a new image or a new author, but the fact that the image is the same, whose origin is a collective entity.
   
It’s not simply painting… if one thinks of painting as the act of placing paints on a surface. The encounter of images that underlies the artist’s process is a double event: the starting point is the image selection, followed by their exposure once they become paintings. If both gestures are related to a selection—both conscious and intuitive—the expository setup of the paintings broadens the association process: the mixing of images becomes a more complex collection of symbols, interpretations, and expectations that go beyond a narrative imposition. In spite of being autonomous, each painting is immersed in connection and narration.

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