Online Exclusive, Reviews

Yang Fudong

Nothing Happens, and Everything Does

Words PLUS MAGAZINE

Yang Fudong’s Sparrow on the Sea, presented at Marian Goodman’s Los Angeles gallery, feels like stepping onto the deck of a ship unmoored from time. The gallery sways with the rhythm of the film that gives the exhibition its name—a single-channel black and white work first shown on the façade of M+ in Hong Kong, and now presented in a newly immersive form for this West Coast debut. But here, unlike its earlier presentation without sound, the film breathes with ambient noise and a haunting score that fills the room like salt air. There’s a man, or maybe three of them, walking through unnamed streets with a leaking suitcase. A sparrow flutters. Somewhere, an octopus unfurls its slick limbs onto the sand. This is a world where narratives unravel like thread in water, and where memory is less a function of the mind than a mood thick in the atmosphere.

Yang Fudong has long been a master of half-told stories. From his early masterpiece An Estranged Paradise (1997–2002) to the seven-channel The Fifth Night (2010), his films are less about what happens and more about what it feels like to remember something that may never have happened. Sparrow on the Sea (2024) carries that same dreamy disorientation, but it’s starker here—more mature, even. The three actors who each take on the role of the protagonist don’t so much portray different ages as they do different versions of the same uncertainty. Their shared expressions, lost, pensive, eyes drifting just beyond the camera—echo our own confusion as viewers.

It’s not the scenes that linger, but the textures: the slap of waves, the wet shine of pavement, the mechanical lurch of a tram. One moment, a man lies prone in an anonymous hotel room; the next, he stands at the edge of a vast ocean. These aren’t metaphors you decode, but sensations to absorb, like a scene unfolding through fog. The octopus appears late in the film, surfacing like a totem from a submerged subconscious. Could it be connected to the suitcase—a memory, a burden, a guardian? The film doesn’t offer an answer, and the ambiguity feels strangely liberating: a reminder that meaning isn’t always what moves us.

Adjacent to Sparrow on the Sea, two new bodies of work, Sparrow and Island, echo the film’s mood in still form. The photographic prints read like dream fragments: washed-out, paused mid-breath. Some look like film stills; others are suspended halfway between image and thought. They don’t offer stability or resolution. Instead, they feel like meditations—small, quiet altars to a past that’s already slipping away.

What’s striking about Yang’s work, and what this show reminds us of, is how he uses the language of cinema to loosen its familiar form. He withholds plot, climax, and resolution, offering instead mood, repetition, and ambiguity, tools closer to poetry than narrative. If Western cinema teaches us to anticipate character arcs and tidy endings, Yang cuts through that expectation, allowing the threads to remain loose. In doing so, he offers something more generous: a mirror for the kinds of inner wanderings that rarely get seen.

Sparrow on the Sea doesn’t offer easy answers. It leaves us with sensation rather than certainty, and the space to drift. And in our current moment—restless, fractured, dislocated—that feels like a radical kind of honesty.

Yang Fudong’s “Sparrow on the Sea” is on view at Marian Goodman Gallery, 1120 Seward Street, Los Angeles, from May 21 to July 26, 2025.