Nirvana

Yang Heng is a young film maker who caused a stir with his first feature Betelnut; he won the Grand Prix of Pusan with it. The film was made on a very low budget, but is very precise in drawing an authentic mood .
Wang Bing -see Crude Oil and Fengming, A Chinese Memoir in this programme – suggested that Yang Heng could be a new name for this section. The suggestion was eagerly followed, and Yang Heng again made his debut, but now as an installation maker.
He allowed himself to be inspired for this work by the Buddhist vision of life. Within Buddhism, Nirvana stands for a blessed mental state that transcends both life and death. It’s the highest state of being. Chinese Buddhists describe Nirvana as the Other Bank.
In the installation, compounded images are used to reflect something of the Buddhist vision of life and death. Dying is another way of being born in this sense. In life, we basically only wait for death in order to be reborn again. This is the view of Nirvana that the maker wanted to record. A wide variation of images with newly born babies, old people with weather-beaten faces, boring and melancholy crowds, modern, disharmonious sounds, grotesque and cheerful urban scenes, and sounds of women singing, men reading lectures, etc. Nothing less than life itself. (GjZ)