Installation view of "Yang Fudong: Fragrant River," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Yang Hao, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
Yang Fudong's work has always hovered between video and installation, film and contemporary art, personal memory and collective history. In his recent large-scale solo exhibition "Fragrant River" presented by the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, he undergoes a concise yet profound turning point in his creation, while reflecting on his past journey, but also pointing to new possibilities. Although the exhibition is entitled "Fragrant River" which is the literal translation of Yang Fudong's hometown—Xianghe County in Hebei Province, it does not just focus on local chronicles or personal nostalgia. Through the interplay of new and old creations by the artist, combined with the careful arrangement of the exhibition, "Fragrant River" seeks to construct a composite space that integrates memory, emotion, history, and archives—as if it was a library or maze built from images. This experiment to archive the exhibition itself also serves as a critique and reflection on linear history and rapid consumer culture, inviting each visitor to recalibrate the distance between themselves and their spiritual homeland amid moments of loss and discovery.
Installation view of "Yang Fudong: Fragrant River," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Yang Hao, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art."Xianghe": Salvaging Nostalgia in "Slow Films"
At the center of the exhibition is the 15-channel black-and-white video installation Fragrant River (2016–2025), a work that reflects more than twenty-five years of conceptualization and artistic practice. The idea first emerged in 1997, shortly after Yang completed his debut feature An Estranged Paradise. In 2016, the artist and his team filmed for 47 days in Xianghe's county seat and surrounding villages, with postproduction continuing until the autumn of 2025. The long creative process itself is a form of adherence to "slow time" sharply contrasting with the fast-paced, ephemeral image production of the present.
Installation view of "Yang Fudong: Fragrant River," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Yang Hao, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
Fragrant River is at once a spiritual return to the terrain of personal growth and homesickness, and a sustained meditation on time itself. Fifteen screens are dispersed across nine interlocking, nested chambers, forming a labyrinth of memory. As viewers navigate these spaces, their movement becomes a means through which time unfolds, positioning them as participants within the work's narrative structure. The exhibition also includes a documentary on the making of this work, offering insight into how the artist transforms personal recollections into moving-image narratives that resonate with shared human emotion.
“Fragrant River” Series, Black-and-White Photograph, 2025
Archival inkjet print on fine art paper, Courtesy Yang Fudong Studio.
Fragrant River (still), 2016-2025
15-channel digital video installation ,black and white, sound
Image courtesy Yang Fudong Studio.
The work unfolds around the daily life of a young mother preparing for Spring Festival celebrations. Fragmented scenes of birth, aging, and death appear alongside depictions of manual labor and communal life, presenting a northern Chinese rural landscape that is at once deeply real and strangely unfamiliar as it shifts through light and shadow. Time is measured through repetitive work, while moments of the surreal open onto another temporal dimension, brief apertures resembling ruptures in a dream. Fragrant River serves as a point of entry into the artist's expansive inquiry into the inner life of the individual. The works assembled within this framework comprise an intensely personal catalogue of images, while remaining open, waiting to be read by each viewer.
Fragrant River (still), 2016-2025
15-channel digital video installation ,black and white, sound
Image courtesy Yang Fudong Studio.
Fragrant River (production still), 2016-2025
15-channel digital video installation, black and white, sound
Image courtesy Yang Fudong Studio.
"Library Film Project": Exhibitions as Archive and Genealogy
The exhibition goes beyond displaying individual works, with its overall structure clearly pointing to Yang Fudong's long-term "Library Film Project". As Yang Fudong mentioned in an interview, "What you need to do is to spend time creating works in different forms and contents, and once they are completed, place them on a bookshelf like books, waiting for people to browse." This concept envisions the artist's long-standing creative practice as an ever-accumulating, categorized, and open archive, and this exhibition represents an important stage of "cataloging" and "hitting shelves" within that project.
Installation view of "Yang Fudong: Fragrant River," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Yang Hao, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
Alongside the titular work, the exhibition debuts five further new works, which alongside a selection of earlier pieces, which collectively reflect the artist's ongoing inquiry into the relationship between image, memory, and life.
Young Man, Young Man (2025), a five-channel video installation shot on 16mm color film, reconstructs, in a dispersed and nonlinear manner, fragments of Yang's youth growing up in a military residential compound in Beijing during the 1980s. The boys in the film run, practice martial arts, wait for buses, swim, and walk through cornfields, as if inhabiting a long summer that will never end. Here, Yang reflects on how moving images hold memory: moments of innocence, longing, and solitude become suspended within the material trace of celluloid.
Young Man, Young Man (still), 2025
5-channel 16 mm film video installation, color, sound
Image courtesy Yang Fudong Studio.
Also shot on 16mm color film, the single-channel work At the Summer Palace (2024–2025) follows a man and a young boy as they wander through the grounds of the Summer Palace. Time quietly slips out-of-joint, like a half-waking dream on a languid afternoon. In the single-channel County Magistrate, County Magistrate (2024–2025), an unspecified collective migration unfolds. Villagers move along mountain paths at dusk, while empty homes retain the warmth of recent habitation—history and the present moment converge into an imagined local chronicle of home.
At the Summer Palace (still), 2024 - 2025
Single-channel 16mm film, color, sound
Image courtesy Yang Fudong Studio. 
County Magistrate, County Magistrate (still), 2024-2025
Single- channel digital video, color, sound
Image courtesy Yang Fudong Studio, supported by UCCA Center for Contemporary Art
In Backyard -Hey! Sun is Rising (2001), men dressed in old military uniforms wander through the early hours of a city, as if sleepwalking, reflecting Yang's early explorations of how moving images can give form to mood and dream.
The installation Breastfeeding (2025) centers on pieces of old furniture and television sets commonly found in the Xianghe area during the 1980s and 1990s, extending private memory into an embodied, spatial form. Covered with mirrors and glass in varying degrees of opacity, the furniture creates an environment that resembles an expanded domestic interior—subtle, shifting, and unmoored from chronological time—inviting viewers into a space where memory and image fold into one another. Vintage cathode-ray televisions placed on the pieces of furniture play video footage recorded by Yang on his visits home to Xianghe from Shanghai in the early 2000s, the unstaged imagery forming a sort of precursor to Fragrant River.
Installation view of "Yang Fudong: Fragrant River," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Yang Hao, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
The exhibition also features a 15-panel installation comprising painting, media, and photography. Private Notes from a Land of Bliss (2025) is inspired by Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden, a handscroll by Southern Song painter Ma Yuan. Employing a highly personal visual language, Yang evokes the classical motif of the literati excursion, echoing the labyrinthine setting of Fragrant River situated at the other end of the gallery. The sequential logic of the fragmented images corresponds to the traditional mode of viewing a handscroll segment by segment, yet it also recalls the structure of film: discrete yet continuous shots. The work constitutes another chapter in Yang's ongoing exploration of what he terms "painterly cinema."
Installation view of "Yang Fudong: Fragrant River," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Yang Hao, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
Employing slow, extended takes, fragmented plotlines, and a lyrical yet restrained image quality, Yang's creations hold an esthetic tension that hovers between dream and reality. The artist describes his method as "the cinema of implication,"constructing emotional circuits through rhythm, breath, and sustained gaze, inviting viewers to experience a meditative flow of thought as they watch. In his work, time is decomposed and dilated into a perceptible spiritual dimension, while film itself becomes a living organism—its grain, flickering light, and mechanical sound manifesting time in tangible form.
Why are we willing to get lost in "slow moving images"?
In such an era defined by short videos, mobile communication, and fast content production, "Fragrant River" and its exhibition format demonstrate a deliberate esthetic resistance. The twenty-five-year creative cycle, over 400 minutes of total runtime, and the exhibition experience that requires physical engagement seem to ask the audience to invest a significant amount of attention and time which seem so scarce now. This "slow creation" and "slow viewing" essentially reject the trends of time commodification and fragmentation, intending to restore the dignity, depth, and tangibility of time, and to further reassess the value of art as an activity of contemplation.
Installation view of "Yang Fudong: Fragrant River," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Yang Hao, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
The exhibition transforms moving images from mere objects of observation into "installations" that construct memory. Whether it is the fragmented daily life in the countryside depicted in Fragrant River or the frozen moments of youth in Young Man, Young Man, these works do not aim to fully reproduce the past but instead activate a "process" of memory through material media (film, screens, old furniture) and specific forms (long takes, black-and-white tones, multiple frequencies juxtaposed). The audience's experience of getting lost and finding their way in the maze mimics the unreliable, non-linear, and reconstructive nature of memory itself.
Installation view of "Yang Fudong: Fragrant River," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Yang Hao, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
By systematically reviewing his own creations, perhaps the entire solo exhibition of "Fragrant River" can be regarded as a massive "meta-work" by Yang Fudong. It transcends the limitations of a single medium, integrating film, installation, painting, documentation, and architectural space, while transforming curating and displaying themselves into a creative language.
Installation view of "Yang Fudong: Fragrant River," UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Yang Hao, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
With a restrained yet persistent esthetic, Yang Fudong constructs a setting for contemplation, reflection, and introspection. Here, non-linear and open-ended narratives create a silent and ongoing dialogue between his individual memory and the collective history. In this era dominated by efficiency, "Fragrant River" defends another possibility that allows for slowness and getting lost, giving viewers the chance to reconsider the connections between themselves and the past, home, and existence through a slow, intentional journey, thereby touching the essence of their own lives.
Text (CN) by Zhang Chong, (EN) edited by CAFA ART INFO
About the Exhibition
Yang Fudong: Fragrant River
Exhibition Period: 2025.11.22 – 2026.5.5
Location: UCCA Beijing, Great Hall
Image Courtesy of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
