Return from the Mountains
Yu Depeng is a filmmaker and video installation artist who blends influences from East and West. He belongs to a generation of Chinese émigré artists living and working in Spain. Since 2006, he has developed his practice in the fields of moving image and photography, exploring visual grammar. His work has been exhibited in renowned institutions such as the National Museum of Anthropology in Madrid (Spain), the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon (Portugal), Ars Santa Mònica in Barcelona, and Matadero Madrid.
In his photographic series Nostalgia (2019–2022) and Fog (2021), Yu Depeng explores the reconstruction of identity through memory, reverie, and the sense of emptiness in the landscape. These photographs lie at the intersection of art and documentary, combining images captured with both a digital camera and a 1959 Leica analog camera. Influenced by his background in filmmaking, the artist creates an atmosphere that echoes the visual language of directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly his acclaimed film Nostalgia.
The presence of fog also evokes the spirit of traditional Chinese landscape painting (shanshui), a discipline Yu Depeng studied from an early age. In his photographs, mist appears not only as an atmospheric element but as a poetic symbol: at times almost “invisible” to the viewer’s eye, it evokes universal sensations associated with both personal and cultural experience—solitude, cold, loss, and mysticism.
Yu Depeng’s landscape photography also serves as the foundation for his moving image project Round Sky, Square Earth (2024). The title refers to the ancient cosmological concept that has inspired representations of nature in Chinese art for centuries. Through this immersive work, Yu Depeng transforms the exhibition space into a living landscape painting. Filmed in the natural surroundings of northern Madrid, the project searches, from Spain, for traces of the artist’s homeland and the aesthetic pillars of traditional Chinese culture. In doing so, it generates an unexpected dialogue between China and Spain.
This exhibition represents the artist’s symbolic return to his roots after developing his artistic career in Spain, reinforcing the cultural bond between the two countries.
Text by Susana Sanz Giménez