Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003–2007) is artist Yang Fudong’s magnum opus: a five-hour, five-part film that premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2007. This enigmatic work is based on a famous Chinese fable about a group of youthful literati who withdraw from their corrupt third-century society to establish a loose-knit community in a forest. This story, which has been told through poetry, music, and ink painting for thousands of years, describes an ancient utopia shaped by philosophical conversation, poetry, singing, and drinking.

In Yang’s filmic update, the ‘intellectuals’ are a group of young and disillusioned city-dwellers navigating China’s emerging capitalist economy. Too young to remember Mao’s collectivist dystopia, the protagonists here are focused not on nation-building, but on self-definition. Part I (twenty-nine minutes’ duration) begins on the Yellow Mountain, an idealised vision of nature depicted in countless Chinese shanshui ink paintings. The group then embarks on a long journey towards self-knowledge, their existential meanderings taking in a cloistered urban apartment (Part II, forty-six minutes’ duration), a country farm (Part III, fifty-three minutes’ duration), a fishing village (Part IV, seventy minutes’ duration), and Shanghai’s luxurious leisure spaces (Part V, ninety-one minutes’ duration).

Shot on black-and-white 35mm film and transferred to digital video, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest is renowned for its arresting imagery, minimal dialogue, distilled palette, evocative gestures, and gently unfurling narrative. The film’s images leave their trace the same way as what a brush might leave on a Chinese scroll.

Yang Fudong was born in Beijing in 1971. He trained as a painter at the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou from 1991 to 1995, and then at the Beijing Film Academy in 1996. He now lives and works in Shanghai.

A master of suggestion, Yang’s influences include Chinese ink painting, French New Wave cinema, and 1930s Shanghai film noir. He is best known for his sublime black-and-white moving image installations that explore the hopes and aspirations of his peers, a generation that has grown up in the midst of unprecedented societal change in China. Yang updates traditional stories to explore the ways in which the turmoil of China’s recent past, and the uncertainty of the future, might be understood.

Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest is a breakthrough work in the history of contemporary moving-image art that helped usher in a new international style of immersive, cinematic, multi-channel gallery installations. Yang is not interested in traditional storytelling, but instead encourages his viewers to act as ‘second directors’ who actively make their own narratives and meanings from his minimalist films.

Furthermore, the work is inspired by the language and philosophy of ink art, and is a prime example of ink’s evolution and contemporary relevance. At M+ we take an expansive attitude that defines ink art not merely through its medium, but as an aesthetic that has spurred a wide range of applications. To quote from the artist himself: ‘In ancient Chinese painting, there has always been an emphasis on liubai—what’s left undrawn on the paper. For me, no matter whether I am making a video or a film, the same idea applies . . . The undrawn part in a work is there for the audience to engage with, using their imagination for viewing and interpretation.’^[1]