YANG 2003.083

In City light (Chengshi zhiguang), Yang Fudong explores the feelings associated with living in a big city – the sense of belonging to a place yet remaining anonymous to those around us. Lacking a linear narrative, this dreamlike work relies on offbeat humour. Yang depicts characters undertaking the daily rituals of city life, but with a twist: dancing in an office or on the median strip of a busy highway, running up and down alleyway stairs, and holding umbrellas when it is clearly not raining. Through this comic disjunction, the work gestures towards the recognition of a second self, emerging from the private reverie of someone who wishes to be elsewhere. Of the work, Yang has said that it ‘expresses the feelings of a person who feels sometimes like two people’.