Yang Di
Of Course I Still Love You ，2026
Single-channel AI-generated video, with sound
Duration：3′40″
Edition: 3+2ap
Nan Ke Gallery is pleased to share two recent presentations of work by gallery artist Di Yang, in the video programme of ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair and at FOTO SIGMA. Working primarily with moving image and installation, Yang draws on photography, staged settings and cinematic techniques to explore how images shape our perception of reality.
Di Yang graduated from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2020, receiving both the distinction of Meisterschüler and the academy’s graduation prize that year. Working primarily with moving image and installation, he draws on cinema, fiction and popular culture to explore how power acts on individuals and how technology shapes our perception of reality. He often sets stories from the past and present in imagined futures, giving viewers some distance from familiar events.
ART021 VIDEOS SECTION
Venue： Shanghai Exhibition Center
Yang Di, represented by Nan Ke Gallery, takes part in the VIDEOS section of the 14th ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair with his work Of Course I Still Love You. Making its debut at this edition of ART021 SHANGHAI, VIDEOS focuses on artistic practices centred on the moving image and brings together works presented by five galleries and institutions across film, video and animation.
In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Emmi, a German cleaner, meets Ali, a Moroccan migrant worker, in a Munich bar frequented by migrant workers. Their encounter brings questions of identity, race and migration into view in 1970s West Germany. In Of Course I Still Love You, Yang uses generative AI to bring the encounter back to life, stretching the moment into a loop and relocating it to an imagined tourist destination of the future. The setting is modelled on the SpaceX offshore rocket recovery platform of the same name, which Yang imagines becoming a monumental public space. The name first appeared in Iain M. Banks’s science fiction novel The Player of Games (1988), where it belonged to an artificially intelligent spacecraft with a personality of its own. SpaceX later adopted it for the platform.
Yang completed the work during a recent trip to Europe. Street unrest in Paris and public debate in Germany over the rise of the right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) brought Fassbinder’s film back to mind, along with the sense that the questions it raised keep returning. In Safe Word (2020), Yang explored the hopes invested in the colonisation of Mars and the abuses of power it might entail. Here, as an encounter from half a century ago plays out over and over at a future tourist destination, the better future promised by space travel comes up against practical questions. Who can afford to make the trip? Who will pay for it and provide the resources it requires? From the distance of this imagined future, Yang invites viewers to reconsider the conditions of both the past and the present.
FOTO SIGMA
Venue：SIGMA Showroom
Nan Ke Gallery has been invited to participate in the 2026 ART021 FOTO | SIGMA project with gallery artist Yang Di. Jointly initiated by ART021 GROUP and SIGMA, the exhibition is on view at the SIGMA Showroom from 1 November to 13 December 2026 under the title “WHAT MAKES A GOOD IMAGE? One Question, Many Ways of Seeing.”
The work on view, Ideale Szene der Zukunft, grew out of Yang’s study of window types in Shanghai buildings from different periods. He photographs and reconstructs window frames from different eras, combining photographs taken on location with staged images and imagery of the cosmos from NASA. The window frame retains the scale and character of the architecture of its time, while the scene it frames draws the eye beyond the bounds of everyday experience.
Continuing his exploration of how we see, Yang turns a window that ordinarily separates inside from outside into an opening onto an inner world. The window frame close at hand and the distant cosmos share a single image, shifting our sense of what is near or far, inside or outside. Through this shift in how we experience space, Ideale Szene der Zukunft offers a response to the exhibition’s central question.
Yang Di
Ideale Szene der Zukunft，2026
Archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle baryta paper
80h x 100w cm
Installation view of WHAT MAKES A GOOD IMAGE? One Question, Many Ways of Seeing, 2026 ART021 FOTO | SIGMA, SIGMA Showroom, 1 November–13 December 2026.
