In Collaboration with Art Basel, M+ to Show Yang Fudong’s Film Super-Sized

News 8 Supersized Works to See During Art Basel in Hong Kong Sam Gaskin

Asia’s first global museum of visual culture in Hong Kong, M+, has announced its third collaboration with Art Basel and UBS—a new film commission, Sparrow on the Sea (2024), by Chinese contemporary artist, Yang Fudong.

The work—described by Yang as an ‘architectural film’—will be shown on the museum’s Victoria Harbour-facing facade nightly, from 22 March to 9 June 2024 on a screen 65 metres tall and 110 metres wide. Sparrow on the Sea (2024) will take the place of Sarah Morris’ ETC (2023), which is on view until 17 March.

‘Crafting my moving image work for the city...is a tremendous privilege,’ Yang says. ‘Hong Kong, with its beauty and diversity, holds a special place in my heart as the birthplace of great movies and music from my childhood.’

Shot in Hong Kong, the film intertwines landscape and architecture with a richly atmospheric soundscape to create a dream-like narrative that is influenced, Yang says, by classical Hong Kong cinema from the 1970s to 1990s. Deliberately designed to evoke nostalgic familiarity, it blends moments of the city’s past and present to reflect on its ‘unpredictable’ future.

‘Every epoch has its own characteristics, and time contains both memory and existence,’ Yang told Ocula Magazine in 2015. ‘Sometimes, life doesn’t need to replicate the life and memory of the past, but should instead search for and discover the taste for beauty and fun reminiscent of the past epoch, and try to turn them into works with qualities that are unique to this period of time.’

Born in Beijing in 1971, Yang studied oil painting at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, before pursuing a career in filmmaking and photography in the 1990s. His work has since been shown at major institutions worldwide, including Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013); Tate Modern, London (2004); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003). —[O]

Sparrow on the Sea will premiere with sound at the M+ Cinema on Saturday 23 March 2024, followed by a discussion with the artist, co-hosted by M+ and Art Basel.

Main image: Yang Fudong, Sparrow on the Sea (2024) (still). Co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel, presented by UBS, 2024. © Yang Fudong. Photo: courtesy the artist.