The photo The Coloured Sky: New Women II, No. 4, 2014, is part of a photographic artwork series which was developed in parallel with the video installation of the same name. This large-format color photograph depicts a night-time scene with rain, dominated by blue-black tones. A woman dressed in a blue 1940s-style swimsuit stands in the foreground of the picture in a river-like puddle, stretching both her arms away from herself. Wooden lattices and palm trees can be seen in the middle ground of the picture. In the background, there is the silhouette of a hilly sandscape. Behind the range of sand dunes, the fantastic yellow-orange-tinged glow of a sunset or sunrise is perceptible as the only warm light source in the scene. In the final scene of the eponymous film the mood shifts completely from cheerful, playfully childlike beauty to uncertainty and abandonment.
In a compelling further development of previous approaches, Fudong’s newer artworks also question the role of women, investigating constructions of femininity and idealized images of women in film, advertising and popular culture. The glowing, apparently unnaturally heightened colors of these artworks represent a new development; Fudong is using color, rather than black-and-white, for the first time. Rather than making use of color in order to consolidate realism, he uses an iridescent colorfulness to obviously reveal artificiality.
Yang Fudong
The Coloured Sky: New Women II, No. 4, 2014
