Hugo Yang Fudong Lu Chunsheng

Hugo Tillman has been photographing "film stills of contemporary Chinese artist's subconscious'" The images are culled from brief interviews of the artists. I had the pleasure of translating for Yang Fudong, my Pig Year hero (who showed at MoMA, Marian Goodman and is often profiled in Art Forum etc. for his series of films that remake Chinese literature classics into updated, languid 35mm black and white films usually portraying a bunch of beautiful and desperate Chinese youth mulling around idlyllic landscapes in strange clothes); and Lu Chunsheng who follows in Yang's footsteps with a similar film series called "The History of Chemistry" which has little to do with either history or chemistry but according to him makes an inquiry into these belief systems.
Anyway
Both interviews were pleasurable for the fact that we talked very little about art, instead focusing on these artists childhoods. Yang Fudong whose very modest childhood (somehow giving birth to pretentious films) was defined by his father's military posting and later factory manager, whose mother was a cashier in a store, who had strange visions of horseback riders in the sky during the '76 earthquake in Beijing, and whose childhood toys were spent gun cartridges and bullets.
Lu Chunsheng also had some weaponry in his early years. Also a factory kid, though he's not certain what his father exactly did, traded two ping pong paddles for gun parts being assembled in the adjacent factory from a a bunch of other factory kids.