Dialogue with Ye Jintian: Only when the mind wanders can one be truly captivating.

Everyday News Reporter｜Xie Tao    Everyday News Editor｜Tang Yuan

“We are destined to meet such an era.” — Shakespeare, Othello

In 1988, at the end of the film Landscape in the Mist directed by Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, the brother-and-sister duo, Ourra and Alexander, spend the whole journey searching for their father. They finally cross the border, step into the thick fog, and see the great tree shrouded in the mist.

This is a story about lost innocence—and even more, about homesickness. Wandering and drifting, with thick fog everywhere.

Image source: a still from Landscape in the Mist

The thick fog that has spread everywhere was originally the most common sight in Chengdu’s plain during winter. And the ongoing drizzle and overcast weather in recent days has only made the fog grow more intense.

The crowds visiting the exhibition are packed into Chengdu Art Museum with wet, trailing backs; they arrive with the enthusiasm of sudden rain, and leave as abruptly as it begins. In an all-black outfit, Ye Jintian shows up on time at the agreed interview location—silent and composed.

A ball of quiet always hovers at his side, impossible to dispel. The rain keeps falling outside the window. So our conversation unfolds within that kind of quiet—words without boundaries, like black horses: sometimes they plunge into the fog, sometimes they run toward open spaces, and sometimes they step into a patch of bright green grass and pace there.

Whether it’s the conversations on the front line from a few years ago, or the casual talk in the same room this time, Ye Jintian always seems to exude a kind of “homesickness” that places him outside the present moment and time-space.

As the renowned historian and anthropologist Alan McFarland puts it, Ye Jintian is “someone who has come from the Renaissance.”

We chat about Andrei Tarkovsky ( Andrei Tarkovsky ) to Wim Wenders ( Wim Wenders ), from Diane Arbus ( Diane Arbus ) to Alex Webb ( Alex Webb ), and from artistic creation to consumer society. He is not someone who lives in the past; he always enjoys going to different dimensions to play, contemplate, and create.

Tarkovsky (left), Wim Wenders (center), Diane Arbus (right) Image source: Douban

Having entered the industry in 1986, over more than 40 years of artistic career, Ye Jintian is like an “undercover traveler.” Stepping away from different “creative territories” is Ye Jintian’s way of “spacing out,” and it is also the way of his “being.”

Through film, theater, photography, writing, and multimedia art, he keeps building an enchanting “sky.” Under that sky, he sometimes drifts off, sometimes goes on distant journeys, and sometimes rushes into the fog.

Yesterday’s World Nostalgia of Old Days

During our conversation with Ye Jintian, the moment the topic turns to old friends and past affairs, he becomes calm at once, falling into an unknowable fog. What I need to do is not to figure out that cloud of fog, but to present—so far as possible—its instantaneous wandering and transformation.

In Yesterday’s World, Stefan Zweig writes: “Our generation is destined to seek its reflection on the ruins of civilization.”

Ye Jintian is just such a person who is searching for that reflection. His art creation has never been just a matter of visual presentation; he believes that “matter is only the manifestation of spirit.”

Over the past several years, Ye Jintian has mentioned in different settings how late-20th-century European cinema influenced him. He likes Godard, Wim Wenders, Tarkovsky, and David Lynch—those sharp-edged, angular films—and he also wants to express more innocent, intuitive things.

For example, the film Wings of Desire released in 1987 left him with an impact he can hardly put into words. “That kind of height relying on intuition, a poetic film language— for me, it’s really overwhelming. And it was this film that made me truly decide to make movies.”

That year, Ye Jintian had just joined the production of The Wedding Banquet directed by Guan Jinpeng, serving as the art designer.

Still from Wings of Desire Image source: a film screenshot

In Ye Jintian’s view, “We’re in a world changing at a rapid pace, and our understanding of the world keeps changing too. Now, we seem to be more efficient and more rational; yet our intuition and spirituality have disappeared, and many works are only repeating the past.”

He once wrote in The World Without Sequence: “Poetry may be the most precious thing in which a person can truly exist within culture, because it cannot be measured by the reality of time or space. It is a value that transcends a certain worldly order—a truly existing, metaphysical beauty. It forever exists beyond the meaning of facts, and it reflects human value more genuinely.”

Through The World Without Sequence, Ye Jintian tries to re-find the inner relationship among time, memory, and human beings in today’s modern society, where consumption and technology alienate us. And our conversation also tries to break a certain predetermined, rational framework, drifting across different fields.

“We enter a more consumer-driven society, where everything is highly datafied. Everyone is focused on business and technology, and many resources are poured into the ‘renewal’ of profit. I really like Jung’s theories—the concepts like the collective unconscious and irrationality give me a very good ‘coordinate for observation.’ I’ve always been paying attention to those things—the unconscious, the irrational, and the mysterious—and I find them very interesting,” Ye Jintian says candidly.

The World Without Sequence Image source: Douban

In recent years, there are fewer and fewer film and television works that can genuinely move Ye Jintian and get him truly involved, but he has never given up on a spiritual return to the “original world.” “I can’t find that kind of passion or spirit in today’s movies. As we talked about earlier, the era and spirit of ‘author films’ have disappeared.”

“A few years ago, I met Wim Wenders, and I hoped that someday we could collaborate,” a hint of melancholy comes through in Ye Jintian’s words.

Scenes and Spirits

In the cultural and humanistic core of the East, form and spirit have never been a proposition of a strict dualistic opposition. As one of the earliest artists to propose “Neo-Orientalism,” Ye Jintian always manages to glimpse the spirit’s “intangible” through the maker’s “tangible form.”

“I want to combine the ancient world, the departed humanistic spirit, and today’s context, to create an artistic language that belongs to me,” Ye Jintian does not hide his “ambition.”

As early as working with Ang Lee on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ye Jintian had already “forged” a systematic, distinctive visual language. His use of color and line reaches a level of mature mastery: the capital’s gray, the frontier’s red, and the bamboo grove’s green—all of which subtly hint at the complex inner spiritual world of the characters.

“I don’t like to build scenes based on tangible, physical logic. I want to start from inner feelings, dealing with those ‘external forms’—color, clothing, props, and so on—so as to create a kind of ‘enveloping sense’ rooted in Eastern aesthetics. Ang Lee and I both tried to pursue a kind of lost Chinese literati sensibility, and to construct a realm of pure mind, integrating the characters’ moods into it.”

Still from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Image source: Douban

At one point, Ye Jintian discussed a character’s inner world with Ang Lee. Ang Lee offered an idea: that certain actions by a character may come from an unconscious impulse that goes beyond real-world logic—like how a person’s actions in a dream may seem absurd but actually reflect desires deep within the heart.

The two then joyfully debated this topic, talking about differences in people’s unconscious minds under different cultural backgrounds, and how to present those subtle things in film through images and plot.

With this film, Ye Jintian successively won the British Academy Film Awards “Best Costume Design” and the U.S. Academy Awards “Best Art Direction,” placing him among the international top visual designers. “That period, when I look back, really felt like a dream— as if the whole world knew you.”

In fact, even earlier—in 1993, when the film Tempting the Monk was adapted from the novel of the same name by Li Bihua—Ye Jintian had already experimentally used seven colors of external variations to build the film’s overall art style, presenting a collision between modern and classical elements and producing an atmosphere that felt surreal.

Later, in The Banquet, he used a new visual language to express Eastern classical aesthetics; his design language seemed to exist as something special, separate from the film itself.

“Just like before, when I made Ang Lee’s The Heavenly Palace, none of the hairstyles matched the real situation of the Tang dynasty, but the overall feeling and atmosphere were right. ‘External form’ can reflect ‘inner spirit’ very well— that’s what matters most,” Ye Jintian said.

Still from The Heavenly Palace Image source: a TV drama screenshot

Outside the stages of film and theater, it seems Ye Jintian always has a knack for catching a character’s “decisive moment,” a capability that makes him drift into deep attention.

In spring 2024, his first autobiographical photography essay collection Gazing: My Photography and Life was published. Familiar faces—Mei Yanfang, Wang Zuxian, Zhang Guorong, Zhang Ziyi, Zhou Xun, and others—cross time and space and, through his lens, present unique expressions.

“What I want to show isn’t a fact or a form (fact), but people’s different traits and states of existence. A real photographer won’t see only one side of the so-called normal world; they might see what’s behind it—revealing the world hidden beneath the surface.”

Existence and Non-Being Behind the Lense

From the entanglement of desire in The Banquet, to the classical charm of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and then to the dreamlike melancholy of The Heavenly Palace, Ye Jintian is not someone who likes to repeat himself.

As he puts it: “I myself am a person full of motive, and I hope to keep trying new things, encountering new opportunities— that’s what makes it satisfying.”

To a certain extent, stepping away from different “creative territories” is Ye Jintian’s way of “spacing out,” and it is also the way of his “being.” “I’ve always liked going to different dimensions and spaces to take a look. I don’t fix myself in any single coordinate.”

At one time, he spent days and nights freely on the stage of theater, studying Peking opera, Kunqu opera, Vietnamese ancient melodies, environmental theater… trying to find back to a more authentic form of expression amid the waves of new and old artistic forms.

He often mixed around with Wu Xingguo, Lin Huimin, Lai Shengchuan, and others, tinkering with stage plays. Loulang Girl, Like a Dream, Peacock, The Most Beautiful of All, and international theater stages all gave him “more than enough of a thrill.”

“Stage lets me come into contact with more essential things, and more intuitive ones. Of course, I’m not saying film has no room to develop,” Ye Jintian said with a smile.

Ye Jintian with Lai Shengchuan Image source: China Stage Art Association

“Actually, I haven’t been doing things about the classics all the time. I’ve done a lot of things about the future. My ‘Neo-Oriental aesthetic’ is, in fact, about developing endless possibilities,” Ye Jintian said. “What I’m trying to do is not to copy tradition, and it’s not to deconstruct in the postmodern way. It’s to rebuild the worldview and the self within a Chinese perspective.”

In his view, the core of Eastern aesthetics lies in “no-self” and “total vision.” “Chinese people pursue a state of no-self. Art isn’t about painting what to paint; it’s a自在 space without any distinction between you and me,” he explained. This kind of transcendence beyond the individual and blending into nature’s mood is always present throughout his works.

Across a long artistic career, Ye Jintian deeply understands “emptiness.” The core of his creation and thinking always points to— the human state of survival and the humanistic spirit of the East. He has been active in different public domains as a photographer, writer, and artist. By drawing on sculpture, photography, installation art, and visual art, he keeps expanding the boundaries of his expression.

In recent years, after the camera work, he has successively published personal collections in multiple languages: Blossoms, Ye Jintian’s Creative Aesthetics: Morphology, Running Toward Infinite Transparent Blue, Fengshen: Notes on Eastern Aesthetics, Wonder and Art, and more. He sums up the driving force behind this cross-field work as his “endless curiosity.”

The Chengdu Biennial Exhibition that has just kicked off has attracted many big names in the art world: French national treasure-level artist Benne Bennev, British contemporary art master Julian Opie, as well as Xu Bing, He Duoduo, Liang Quan, Yin Xiuzhen, Jiao Xingtang, Yu Hong, and others.

Ye Jintian brings a work titled Deep Dream—a huge female figure installation, Lili, wearing headphones, listening to music, carrying out repeated interactions with unfamiliar audiences.

Ye Jintian with Lili Image source: provided by the interviewee

Lili is an artwork Ye Jintian has continued for nearly twenty years—existing in all kinds of forms such as sculpture, painting, performance, and video/installation—and traveling the world together with him, from Hong Kong, New York, and Paris to Budapest, and then to Shanghai and Chengdu.

“Lili is like a person without fixed numbers. She’s always in a floating state. What happens to her immediately echoes back into our real lives. With that, I hope to keep triggering everyone’s thinking about the conditions of living, and the precious connections between people.”

As our conversation comes to an end, the audience stands beside Lili either to pause and focus, or to pass by in a hurry, taking one “repeated photo” after another. This artist full of motive pushes up his glasses, shakes his thoughts, stands up, and steps into the fog.

“Within the天地 of life, it’s as if one suddenly set out as a far-traveling guest.”