Yang Fudong. The Fifth Night (Rehearsal), 2010; seven-channel 35mm film transferred to HD; black and white, sound; 52:09 min. Music: Jin Wang

One can guess from this arrangement that Yang’s work investigates the structural nature of film and the process of building a narrative while simultaneously commenting on modern Chinese society and post–Cultural Revolution anxieties. However, the joy of Yang’s work is visceral as well as intellectual; I felt a rush of pure pleasure at being greeted by this cinematic immersion, with its rich, nostalgic black and white, and its lovely atmospheric drifting. The film, video, photography, and print works in this mid-career retrospective are layered with political and cultural significance, and they are utterly captivating.

Yang was born at the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1971, so in his formative years, when foreign cinema began to make its way into China, he would often see a movie poster but not the actual movie, or he would watch a film that was not subtitled in Chinese, so he would have to invent the dialogue and motivations for the on-screen actions. There’s a literary term—poetic misprision—that describes the process by which works that predate the artist’s own have a direct bearing on production but are not a clear, direct influence; these works are fundamentally misinterpreted by the artist, processed by an intense subjectivity that never allows for a “pure” reading of any work of art. Poetic misprision operates on two levels in this exhibition: first, in Yang’s own process of apprehending the films that he could never completely penetrate, leading to his artistic oeuvre and, second, for the viewer unaware of the nuances of Chinese history and culture, who essentially—productively—mistranslates Yang’s work by seeing it from an unyielding Western perspective.

Yang Fudong. The Evergreen Nature of Romantic Stories, 1999; chromogenic print; 34.65 x 47.24 in; courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, NY/Paris, and ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai

Take, for example, the thirteen-minute absurdist Backyard—Hey! Sun Is Rising (2001), a film characterized in the exhibition catalogue as “an anti-heroic parody of Chinese propaganda imagery mixed with references to traditional Chinese wisdom, in a visual stylization that vaguely recalls Chinese cinema of the 1930s and 1940s.” Four men perform tasks that don’t resolve into a coherent story: they crawl along the sidewalk, inexpertly practice swordsmanship, rest indolently on furniture, etc. The men, sets, and costumes are clearly Chinese (and the purposeful ambiguity of the actions has been related to discontent in Chinese society). Nevertheless, when the men walk across a street in single file, I am immediately reminded of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover. My Western perspective seems inescapable, though it seems less problematic knowing that my misapprehension of the work mimics Yang’s own poetic misprision.

Yang Fudong. Forest Diary, 2000; chromogenic print, 66.93 x 90.55 in; Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

The photographs in the exhibition also explore ideas of cinema and narrative, as stirring to the viewer’s imagination as the movie posters were to Yang. The series Ms. Huang at M Last Night (2006) appear to be film stills, though they are not. They allude to shadowy film noir intrigues with no overarching scenario driving the series toward a final determination. Nearby, the series Don’t Worry, It Will Be Better (2000) depicts well-groomed young professionals in enigmatic scenes. But these are not the purposeful enigmas of a crime drama. Rather, the characters occupy themselves with trivial activities or simply gaze wistfully into the distance toward a future that may never arrive. Upstairs, the three saturated chromogenic prints from The Evergreen Nature of Romantic Stories (1999) find young urban couples staring introspectively at penzai (Chinese bonsai). Though these works seem less cinematic than the others, they are hung in a column, so that they make three “frames” of images, as in a strip of film.

Yang Fudong. Don’t Worry, It Will Be Better, 2000; four chromogenic prints, 35.43 x 49.21 in. each (framed); courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, NY/Paris, and ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai

Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise is a sprawling exhibition, and I returned for a second viewing. As I attended to the lovely, atmospheric single-channel video City Light (2000)—in which a man and his doppelganger travel around the city performing a set of actions loosely related to detective-fiction tropes—I relished the proposition that Yang had set up: as the actions of the characters never add up to a coherent, plot-driven account, the video reads less like a “movie” and more like watching strangers go about their lives; the viewer is free to invent a story while acknowledging that it is not the story. The fundamental ambiguity of Yang’s work creates a space for the viewer regardless of her cultural perspective, a cinema that opens possibilities instead of projecting determinate narratives.

Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise is on view at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive through December 8, 2013.

Bruce Nauman, Going Around the Corner Piece, 1970, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian

In the self-explanatory show entitled Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010, the history and evolution of the video art genre are recounted through 50 video works and installations, drawn from the collections of both the Singapore Art Museum and Centre Pompidou. Having developed in tandem with the apparatus of television and the analogue and then digital video cameras, video art’s reconfiguration of the politics of image-making and its ability to place the spectator as an indispensable agent in a work’s existence are significant tenets on which the exhibition is established. The infinitely widening scope and scale for the production and interpretation of (moving) images, the mode of their dissemination, and the documentation of performances (technical or otherwise), pose several key but general questions around which the works are grouped.

The pertinence of such questions however, falters in the collaborative effort that has shown up more differences than similarities. Reconciling the inventory of the Singapore Art Museum with the Centre Pompidou’s reveals the tentative forays into the processes of historicisation that are only beginning to develop in Southeast Asia and the inevitable rift in the standpoints of Western art and Southeast Asian art history. The Pompidou’s international collection stretches back 4 decades to the genesis of video art; the Singapore Art Museum’s inventory spans approximately a decade that really began with the Asian Financial Crisis (1997-8) and is focused on works produced in the surrounding geographical region. The wider ramifications of this collaboration go beyond an overwhelming inventory imbalance and the expanded visual vocabulary that video technology provides; indeed the emerging ideological differences become apparent when speculative comparison – the attempt at a comparative video-art history, should it even exist – inevitably sets in.

Pipilotti Rist, A la belle étoile (Under the Sky), 2007, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian.

The seeming futile effort of historicising video art in this instance, is thus mitigated by several thematic (and loosely chronological) focuses that ground the show: television critique, the representations of self, the documentation of performance, installation in space, landscape as metaphor, video-as fiction and the deconstruction of narratives.

If early efforts by video pioneers such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman and David Hall took the definition of an art object beyond its conventional parameters as a static entity produced for visual consumption, perhaps the greatest strength of video art triumphed in this show is the unprecedented potential of experiential interactivity between artist, installation and spectator. Peter Campus’ Interface (1972) invites the viewer to superimpose their reflection onto their projected image after which they simultaneously face 2 images of themselves – one of the video image and their reflection on the glass screen. The inherent sense of ego coupled with a measure of curiosity is a potent brew, particularly when facets of the multi-layered self are revealed in art. Like the literary Doppelgänger (the ghostly and sinister double), artists’ early efforts recognised the potential of video art in exploring the loss of existential reference in which the traditionally held view of the consecrated sense of self is destabilised. In Bruce Nauman’s Going around the Corner Piece (1972), the surveillance set-up is symmetrical and simple: perched in the corners in a white square-room are closed-circuit cameras and small TV monitors that capture visitor movements going around the corner of the enclosed space. The spectator’s image disappears from view as he/she rounds a corner; speeding up in an attempt to play catch-up with one’s image results in a unsuccessful tail-chasing endeavour – which is probably the glorious core and yet most vexing part of this work.

Peter Campus, Interface, 1972.

Departing from the investigative preoccupation with the apparatus and the monolithic hold that television had, video art had, by the 1980s, begun deconstructive strategies of memory and narratives, debunking on its way, stereotypes of sexuality, ethnicity and gender perpetuated by the very same mode. Nam June Paik’s semi-documentary Guadalcanal Requiem (1979) explores the subjectivity of memory through the deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of narratives, in a film that coalesces history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles in the Solomon Islands. Surrealistic images of archival footage, interviews, Charlotte Moorman’s fragmented cello performances come together like a scratchy Hitchcock–Buñuel/Dali crossover. The haunting collage is often fraught with poignant tension and a sense of the macabre: interviewees with singular (or paltry) memories picking up where some have left off; Moorman playing a cello with a long palm leaf against a thunderous horizon, and at another time, performs concealed in a body bag.

Guadalcanal Requiem, Nam June Paik, 1979, © Nam June Paik Estate video still Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EIA) New York

A deconstructive approach to the moving image seemed to be video art’s trajectory from the 1990s into the early 21^st century, incorporating new developments of photo processing, digital editing and image layering in contemporary visual culture. Swiss conceptual artist Pipilotti Rist’s A la belle étoile (2007) moves between micro- and macrocosms on horizontal and vertical surfaces. As suggested by curator Christine Van Assche, such works operate on removing depth of field, redefining in the process, the spectator’s own rapport with space.

Despite the influence of the commercial mainstream, video art has nevertheless, retained its earlier forms: the performance documentary, mixed-media texts, or even the visual portrait. Such forms seem conceivably better suited to the preoccupation with art’s social purpose and its context of production that remain dominant traits in Asian-produced videos; perhaps most similar to the historical Western notions where art was produced within corresponding socio-political backgrounds. Just as Gustav Courbet’s post-romanticism was a rejection of academic and bourgeois juste milieu, much of Southeast Asian works are filled with the rhetoric of social change in which media artists show no desire to be unbound from their local cultural matrices. By continuing to invoke ties to tradition, incredibly varied configurations (or even fragments) of history that appear in Asian works at best, seem to read as disjointed narratives to the viewer unschooled in the intricacies of China’s tumultuous last few decades.

Yang Fudong, Backyard - Hey! Sun is rising, 2001.

Yang Fudong’s Backyard – Hey! Sun is Rising (2001) follows the Keatonesque slapstick antics of four young men enacting military rituals and traipsing around with swords, questioning the meaning of rituals in the wake of social changes. A richer meaning however, could be gleaned from Yang’s work if considered in the light of the communism’s wane, as well as in the historical traditions of Zen, martial arts and the aesthetic disciplines of poetry, painting and calligraphy – all of which are mirrored in aesthetic form and content in his videos. Like Yang’s disoriented characters who seem to seek penance in an environment marked by repression, The Propeller Group’s Uh… (2007) confronts Vietnam’s youth culture’s adaptations to the changing socio-cultural and political landscape through the symbolic use of graffiti, and the disorder and spontaneity it represents – the antithesis of Vietnam’s ordered socialist state.

Uh..., The Propeller Group, 2007, Singapore Art Museum Collection

Manet's Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai farmers, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Two Planets series, 2008, Singapore Art Museum collection

While Western artists like Pierre Huyghe and Issac Julien integrated mixed media installations with the spectacular and immersive experience of cinema, Asian filmmakers also tended to persist with the use of narrative (and at times, the meta-narrative) as a didactic strategy. In Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s The Two Planets Series (2008), Thai farmers – groups of people blithely oblivious to the cultural or economic baggage associated with canonical works of Western art history – talk about several cornerstones of modern European painting. Their discussions of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1863), van Gogh’s The Siesta (1889-90) and Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) are artlessly literal, context-less and extremely humourous, with the constant comical tendency to drift towards off-topic situations. Straddling the diverse worlds of rural farming and art history, Rasdjarmrearnsook raises questions of socio-cultural context, the parameters of interpretation and appreciation, but stops short of suggesting that our efforts in basting together a coherent narrative and interpretation of art are vain but significant detractors from the lost pleasure of looking.

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Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010 is presented by the Singapore Art Museum and the Centre Pompidou, and runs through 18 September 2011.

What has always been striking about the space at Parasol unit is its impressive shapeshifting nature – the rooms constructed for one exhibition are completely dissolved in the next. Here, for I Know Something About Love, two floors have been transformed to create a one-way procession that takes you through tales of love and lust – a trail one can easily lose themselves in.

Literally.

The ground floor of the exhibition space has been overtaken by an ivy covered labyrinth –  a wrong turn finds you in a dead end, forced to turn back around and try again. However if you choose the right path, you may turn the corner and happen upon an intimate scene of love that looks strangely familiar.

Yinka Shonibare, MBE, The Confession, 2007. Two mannequins, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, shoes, coir matting, artificial silk flowers. 158 x 178 x 170 cm. Image © Yinka Shonibare, MBE, courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photograph: Patrick Gries for Musée du quai Branly, Paris

Jardin d’amour, originally created in 2007 for the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, is an elaborate maze by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE, that contains three hidden sculptural tableaux. A sense of uncanniness is played out in our recognition of the scenes, taken from the eighteenth century Fragonard series, ‘Progress of Love,’ and here given the Shonibare treatment – headless figures with skin colour of indeterminate origin are clad in the colonial Dutch wax fabrics. In this Garden of Love identity is uncertain and authenticity questioned…

Love is never what it seems.

Yang Fudong, Flutter, Flutter... Jasmine, Jasmine, 2002. Video still, Three-channel video installation. Music by Miya Dudu. © Yang Fudong, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai.

Emerging from the maze and heading up the stairs, a sense of self is still hazy as Yang Fudong’s three channel video piece Flutter, Flutter… Jasmine, Jasmine explores the challenges of identity facing a generation of Chinese youth, filtered through perceptions of love. Here, a young couple, unsure of who they are, turn to each other to find themselves, struggling between what they think they should feel for each other and what they actually feel. When describing the first time they made love, the woman tells us, laughingly, that her partner seemed like a monster…

Love is complicated.

Shirin Neshat, Fervor, 2000. Video still, Two-channel black and white video/audio installation. © Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.

Further complicated by the traditions and values of Islamic society Shirin Neshat’s Fervor, finds love in a place where it is forbidden to be. A poetic, mirrored, two-screen video depicts a man and a woman who in a brief moment passing on the street have an instantaneous connection. As the film footage splits apart and comes back together, so do the characters. Their emotions culminate when they are shown to be physically divided by a thick curtain that separates the men and women, yet they are still intensely aware of the presence of one another; their connection electrifying…

Love is everywhere, where it is forbidden be.

Christodoulos Panayiotou, Slow dance marathon, 2005. Video still, Video (documentation of a performance). © Christodoulos Panayiotou, courtesy the artist and Rodeo, Istanbul.

Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou work, Slow dance marathon, continues to find love in unexpected places. Instead of having a barrier erected these individuals are asked to break down all sense of personal space. A document of a performative social experiment, Panayiotou asked volunteers, unknown to one another, to slow dance in a 24 hour public marathon. The warm embraces and tender caresses of strangers who perform gestures of love construct a tableau influenced by the expectations of the audience and the popular culture songs to which they dance.

Love can be what we force it to be.

Moving through the verses of love poem constructed here we find longing, lust and desire. Yes, we are told something about love, but even someone as daft as myself in the ways of love know this is not everything about love. The high from sugary sweet optimism cannot last for long.