Mrs Fang (Director’s cut)

Fang Xiuying was a farm worker born in Huzhou, Fujian in 1948. For the last eight years of her life she suffered from Alzheimer’s. By 2015 the symptoms were quite advanced. She received an ineffective treatment in a convalescent home and few months later she returned home to die.

Beauty Lives in Freedom

Gao Ertai, 83, lives with his wife Pu Xiaoyu in Las Vegas. Based on his personal experience of over 50 years under a totalitarian system, Gao Ertai’s works on aesthetics and alienation provide a piercing analysis of how an individual is coercively alienated and turned into atool of a political regime. Driven by an ordinary man’s urge to be free, an oppressed body uses himself as an alienated tool to demonstrate that beauty is the symbol of freedom.

Traces

While preparing his film The Ditch, Wang Bing travelled to the Gobi Desert, to the exact same places where thousands of people lived and died in the ‘re-education- through-labour’ camps set up by the communist regime in the late 1950’s. He shot scenes of desert and abandoned bones, which provide evidence of the events of those times buried until now.

Wang Bing

Born in 1967, in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China Lives and works in China and France.

In 1992, Wang Bing graduated in photography from the Luxum Arts University in Shenyang. For his photography work, he watched at length workers of the Tie Xi facility. In 1995, he studied at the Beijing Film Academy, then worked for some time on television before starting a career as an independent film director in 1998. West of the Tracks is Wang Bing’s first documentary, filmed in 2002, for which he received numerous awards and grants.

In 2009, Galerie Chantal Crousel presented his first solo exhibition in Paris, with the projection of the two documentary films: Fengming and Man with No Name. Since then, Wang Bing has produced many documentaries such as Three Sisters (2012), TA’ANG (2016), Coal Money (2016), as well as Mrs Fang (2017) and 15 Hours (2017), both exhibited during Documenta14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017.

In 2017, he was awarded the Golden Leopard, highest award of the Concorso Internazionale of the Locarno Festival for the film Mrs Fang. That same year, he was also the recipient of the EYE Art & Film Prize in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), honouring his entire filmography. His work has been subject to numerous retrospectives, notably at the Centre Pompidou in 2014, and at the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española, Madrid, in 2018. Wang Bing will have a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich in winter 2018–2019.

Wang Bing is currently visiting artist-professor at Fresnoy - contemporary arts national studio (France), for the university year 2018–2019.