Yang Fudong (Chinese, b.1971) is a video and film artist based in Shanghai. In 1995, he graduated from the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, where he studied painting and photography. One of his earliest works out of school was a photographic triptych titled The First Intellectual, which depicts an injured man in a business suit holding a brick. Yang then became a self-taught filmmaker.

Curators took notice of his work and began to exhibit Yang’s films at galleries and group shows, such as documenta and the Venice Biennale. His most well-known film, Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, was first shown at The Moore Space in Miami, and at the Venice Biennale in 2003. The 35 mm film is loosely based on Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, the 3rd-century story about a group of scholars and poets who reject urban life and public service and retreat into a bamboo forest for leisure. The three-part story depicts seven young, modern, professionally dressed individuals walking in a daze in the forest; these individuals soon become barefoot and poorly dressed peasants. In the final part of the series, they return to the city and resume a modern lifestyle.

Many of Yang’s films do not focus on a linear narrative, but rely on the silent interaction of characters and the effect of scene composition, much like the works of David Lynch and Matthew Barney. His films and video installations have been exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthaus Graz, the Tate Modern, and the Shanghai Zengdai Museum. Yang is represented by ShanghART in Shanghai and Marian Goodman Gallery in New York and Paris.