Wang Bing was born in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, in 1967. He studied photography at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, an industrial city where, years later, he would film West of the Tracks. From there he moved on to the Beijing Film Academy, where he discovered the work of Antonioni, Bergman and Pasolini. He especially admires Andrei Tarkovsky. Through the 1990s he made a living working on various films as assistant director or cameraman, but, feeling that the mainstream filmmaking and television world would not let him develop as he wished, he decided to start producing his own films.
In 2002 he made West of the Tracks, a nine-hour documentary about the decline of a vast industrial zone in northeast China. A first five-hour version was screened at the Berlinale in 2003. The final version, in three parts, premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was distributed in France in 2004. Today, the film is considered both a masterpiece and a harbinger of the new possibilities opened up by the digital era. Since then, he has continued to work in the same mode, outside the system and always on highly challenging topics, such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s (Fengming, a Chinese Memoir and The Ditch), extreme poverty (Man with No Name and Three Sisters), and life in a psychiatric hospital (‘Til Death Do Us Part).
In April and May 2014, Wang Bing had a major show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, to great public and critical acclaim. The exhibition concept and design, developed jointly by the artist and the Pompidou’s curators, was the first to fully reflect the multifaceted nature of his work. It included a complete retrospective of his films, new material premiered as installations, and, for the first time, an exhibition of his still photography. In 2017 Wang Bing was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival for Mrs. Fang, and in 2018, Dead Souls was selected for the out of competition segment of the Cannes Film Festival. In 2021, Le BAL in Paris mounted an exhibition entitled The Walking Eye, and the French Cinematheque presented a retrospective of his films.
The three films of the Youth trilogy were selected for competition successively at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival (Spring), the 2024 Locarno Film Festival (Hard Times), and finally the 2024 Venice Film Festival (Homecoming).
