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THURSDAY

The career of Shanghai-based international art star Yang Fudong illustrates the head-spinning transformation of post-Mao China. Trained as a painter at Hangzhou’s China Academy of Fine Arts, Yang initially had no artistic use for technology. In 1997, however, he took a job designing video games, which led to a re-evaluation of digital media’s possibilities. Now he’s known primarily for such films and videos as Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, which updates to today’s China a third-century tale of sages who fled to the mountains to escape political turmoil and corruption. This ethereal 30-minute black-and-white parable, whose visual qualities recall traditional Chinese landscape painting, is included in “Yang Fudong: Select Film and Videos.” Although Yang has said he’s not political, his fascination with artists and scholars who insisted on intellectual freedom is as applicable to today’s crypto-capitalist China as to any previous incarnation. The program screens at 8 p.m. in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s Ring Auditorium, 7th Street and Independence Ave. SW. Free. (202) 357-2700. (Mark Jenkins)