Photos capture moody edge of social change

Yang Fudong's staged photographs often feel like stills from film noir - strikingly dreamlike in the stories they imply. In the series Ms Huang at M Last Night, a lovely young woman and her admirers are depicted in black-and-white in various scenes that emulate the voyeuristic eye of a paparazzo.

"Sometimes I think that pictures are films," Yang says. "That one picture is only one image in a larger story. You can look at both photographs and larger films independently, but for me the most interesting thing is the existence of the image itself."

That series is among an expansive exhibition spanning 20 years of photographs, video installations and films no won display at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993-2013 is the first mid-career retrospective for the artist, who first shot to prominence with his 2002 film An Estranged Paradise, a meditative psychodrama based loosely on the American director Jim Jarmusch's 1984 film Stranger than Paradise.