Curated by Beatrix Ruf and Philippe Pirotte

Inspired by Chinese films of the 1920s and ’30s, the work of Shanghai-based Yang Fudong receives its first major museum survey in the West this spring with a show jointly organized by the Kunsthalle Zürich and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The exhibition promises a rich selection of the artist’s films, cinematic installations, and photography from 1993 to the present, offering European (and, soon, American) audiences a chance to further their understanding of his practice—including its relationship to erstwhile key classical Chinese concerns such as the tensions among intellectual pursuits, rural retreats, and urban worldliness, particularly as deployed in traditional landscape painting. A catalogue with essays by Pirotte, Ho Rui An, and Colin Chinnery will accompany the exhibition.

— T. J. Demos