OUTSIDE: Two exhibitions at the IMA present different opportunities for thinking about landscape and silence.

With eight screens, Chinese artist Yang Fudong's No Snow on the Broken Bridge is not the first multiscreen composition to be screened at the IMA, but it’s installation in the cavernous Gallery Three is striking. With eight simultaneous sequences, the narrative is certainly more ambiguous than the artist's series Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, which shows in the IMA Screening Room, but the works are cut from the same cloth – twenty-somethings in suits and cheongsangs dispassionately negotiate a landscape at a deliberate and languid pace.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="550" caption="Yang Fudong: No Snow on the Broken Bridge, 2006"][/caption]

In a text prepared for No Snow on the Broken Bridge [ref]Produced by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation: http://www.sherman-scaf.org.au/publications#/publications/yang_fudong_no_snow_on_the_broken_bridge1/[/ref], Claire Roberts posits that the key to Yang Fudong’s success is an appropriative relationship with his countries’ history, noting “the way in which he has been able (when he has wanted) to make connections with the visual and aesthetic cultures of China’s past and yet remain very much of the present.” The casting of the films, particularly No Snow on the Broken Bridge, seems to align with this statement. While reality tv programs like the US Colonial House and the Australian programs Outback House and The Colony set out on a predestined pattern to mock participants lack of skills when placed in a provincial environment, the cast of No Snow appear effortlessly cool in 1920's costuming, both Western and Chinese. This coolness can be attributed to the Yang's young, dispassionate cast, slowly and purposelessly investigating the riverscape, in this instance the West Lake of Hangzhou[ref]The 'Broken Bridge' in Hangzhou isn't broken. The Bridge takes it's name from the Duan family – another Chinese character with the same pronounciation means 'Broken'.[/ref].

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="550" caption="Yang Fudong: No Snow on the Broken Bridge, 2006"][/caption]

Seasons have often been useful metaphors for age: spring is most commonly associated with new life. It seems to this writer that Yang reverses this association, the last days of winter paralleled with the last years of the cast's youth. The time to explore is running out, the 1920's garb seemingly indicating a China before Mao, but that strife of the Chairman's policies is on the horizon. Your twenties are a fun, confusing, complicated time, but they don't last forever – a different type of anxiety and strain is in the post.

In contrast, the twenty-five photographs that make up Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki’s body of work The Park show a markedly different approach to exploring landscapes, but there is much of the same spirit of ennui. If read left to right around the first room, the photographs repeat the same scene – different couples, clothed but obviously engaged in physical attention to each other, play out different versions of the same tableau. There are no apparent reasons to suspect the sex here is not mutually consensual, but there is no room for romance.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="490" caption="Kohei Yoshiyuki: Untitled, From the series The Park, 1971"][/caption]

It’s not until the eighth photograph in Gallery One that things get sketchy – instead of a sexual pairing we see two men peering through scrub at something out of frame: the viewer is now forced to reconsider the ‘innocence’ of the first images. These images are not of spontaneous expression – these trysts have been planned. Consider the newspaper spread on the ground by one couple. Consider the tennis racquet that lays next to another couple, considered by this writer to be a useful prop to explain one’s presence in the park[ref]Presumably in this case Yoyogi park, the Yoyogi National Stadium opened for public use after the 64 Olympics.[/ref].

In gallery two matters are complicated furthur – we see both hetrosexual and homosexual pairings, groupings, and many more voyeurs.While the show gets some of it’s frission from the overtly sexual content (the red and black sign at the front of the Judith Wright Centre promises “Photographs of people watching people having sex”) more angles emerge. Compositionally the closest touchstone for this writer is the work of Charles Peterson, whose images are regarded as the foremost photographic documents of the Grunge music era. The suface level similarities are obvious – full-frame and uncropped, the work of both photographers captures strangers in candidly strange shapes. Both photographers also capture people at the bleeding edge of the social contract, where there are unwritten rules of etiquette in the moshpit and in the park, where a certain level of invasion is acceptable, even encouraged.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Charles Peterson: Kurt Cobain, Vancouver, 1991"][/caption]

While the images are captivating (the formal arrangement of bodies is one that you don't see everyday, and has a messy, provocative appeal), the heavy lifting in the show has to be done by the viewer. Questions of consent and participation in the social contract have to be addressed by the viewer for any serious engagement in the work. At the 7/11 near the bookstore I’ve been working at there is a flatscreen tv rolling through countless and slightly grainy screen captures – bodies made instantly more guilty-looking by the forced perspective of the survaillance camera in the corner of the ceiling. These people (and not, presumably, those with black rectangles covering their faces) are known shoplifters – the television framed with the suggestion that any helpful information be given to Crimestoppers. There is a presumed consent to being filmed in the 7/11 – YOU WILL BE VIDEOTAPED, but Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs were taken with an infrared flash on infrared film – the only clue that your image may be captured might have been a muffled click in the darkness, or the winding of film.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="504" caption="Kohei Yoshiyuki: Untitled, From the series The Park, 1971"][/caption]

And, of course, as an audience your own primary function is looking also. In fact, if you stand in a certain part of gallery two, you can peer through the glass window and watch the volunteers greeting visitors and monitoring the space, a multi view security monitor on the front desk (printed on the glass door: “Galleries are under constant video surveillance”). To wit: you can watch people watching people looking at photographs of people watching people have sex.

Both Kohei Yohiyuki and Yang Fudong can be said to have created complicated spaces for pause. There is a silence to the works at IMA galleries, but it is an awkward one.