Yang Yongliang: Fall into Oblivion

On April 3rd, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts did a screening of Yang Yongliang's art film, "Fall Into Oblivion", with a skype call to the artist in China afterward for a Q&A.

The Film was around an hour long and focused on a person in full kendo regalia. The main character would leap between modern Japan and a lush island, often freaking out and trying in vain to remove his kendo mask. While the film had no dialogue, there were music and sound effects accompanying it, and the music was similar in my opinion to ocean wave tracks and white noise. Several visual symbols accompanied the main character as he walked through the world, namely a white cat, crows, trains, and the character's panic attacks.

My understanding of the film was that this character was out of place in the modern age: his traditional kendo uniform which he could not remove no matter how hard he tried stuck out in the contemporary crowds of downtown Japan, and he panicked as he was not able to conform. In the interview with Yang Yongliang afterward, he spoke about the setting as a dreamscape and mentioned how crows formed the guiding presence between the two worlds the main character was transitioning between.

Yang is very interested in the relationship between rural and urban spaces, as shown in his photography that I looked at through informational pamphlets. Applying this interest to film meant approaching it in a different way: instead of clever photoshop where the rural mountainsides are made of skyscrapers, as in his photos, Yang instead focused on leaping from place to place and transitioning as if by waking up from a dream.

My favorite part of the film was the end, when, after a gorgeously choreographed kendo fight with a different uniformed kendo man, the main character takes a second kendo mask off the wall (presumably his fallen opponent's) that seems bubbling with something inside it, goes to the top of an urban building, and releases hundreds of crows from the mask. I think, as crows represented the guiding force between the two worlds, that he was giving up leaping from world to world and would stay in the modern setting.