Yang Fudong: Sparrow on the Sea

M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, is delighted to announce a brand-new film Sparrow on the Sea (2024) by celebrated Chinese artist and filmmaker Yang Fudong, co-commissioned with Art Basel and presented by UBS. The sixty-minute film will be shown on the M+ Facade every night from Friday, March 22 to Sunday, June 9, 2024. This is the third year M+ has collaborated with Art Basel and UBS to activate the facade.

Sparrow on the Sea is described by the artist as a site-specific “architectural film”. Shot in Hong Kong, the black-and-white film weaves together scenes from seaside villages and nocturnal city streets. By referencing visual motifs and textures from classic Hong Kong cinema of the 1970s to the 1990s, Yang aims to evoke a sense of nostalgic familiarity. He invites the audience to fully immerse themselves in the ambient soundscapes of the city, which serve as a soundtrack to his moving images. The work is intended to function as a short poem, blending moments from Hong Kong’s past and present to offer a glimpse into an unpredictable future. 

Sparrow on the Sea will also premiere with sound at M+ Cinema on Saturday, March 23, followed by an in-person conversation with the artist. More information is available here.

Free screenings of the work will be presented in the M+ Cinema on Monday, March 25, Friday, March 29, and Saturday,  March 30, at 3pm and 4:15pm (no pre-registration required).

For the latest information on the programme, please visit here.

About Yang Fudong 
Yang Fudong (b. 1971, Beijing) lives and works in Shanghai. He graduated from the Department of Oil Painting, China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and is among the most important Chinese artists working today. He started his artistic career by creating video works in the late 1990s before working in a wide range of mediums including photographs, paintings, films, and installations. His works explore the structures and forms of identities in myths, personal memories, and life experiences, while providing a unique visual interpretation of the subject from multiple cultural perspectives that transcend time and space. 

About M+ 
M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, it is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. M+ is a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century. 

About Art Basel  
Founded in 1970 by gallerists from Basel, Art Basel today stages the world’s premier art shows for Modern and contemporary art, sited in Basel, Miami Beach, Hong Kong, and Paris. Defined by its host city and region, each show is unique, which is reflected in its participating galleries, artworks presented, and the content of parallel programming produced in collaboration with local institutions for each edition. Art Basel’s engagement has expanded beyond art fairs through new digital platforms and initiatives such as the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report. Art Basel’s Global Media Partner is The Financial Times. For further information, please visit artbasel.com.