San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, July 22, 2004
Installation artists Michael Lin, Wu Mali probe troubled Taiwanese identities in show at Asian
Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic

No one knows how to define installation art. But any definition must take into account its power to dissolve boundaries and combine incommensurables. These qualities have helped to make installations the lingua franca of contemporary art.

Borders, or the territorial claims they represent, form a political subtext of "Spaces Within: Installations by Michael Lin and Wu Mali," two Taiwanese artists, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

The ill fit between national and personal identity -- which pains many Americans these days -- also suggests itself as an unstated concern of the two artists.

China considers Taiwan a renegade province because of its political roots as the refuge for nationalists who fled the Communist revolution on the mainland in 1949. Taiwan's brutal origins in the transition from Japanese occupation to Chinese nationalist rule resulted in decades of martial law that ended only in 1987. Taiwanese politicians have long found leverage, at home and abroad, in the potentially incendiary prospect of declaring independence.

All this forms a distant but hard-to-ignore background to the two pieces on view.

Wu's "Follow the Dreamboat" has a room to itself. Colored lights tinge the whole space with an aquamarine glow. On the floor sits an old wooden rowboat, partially filled with inscribed and folded pages.

In the Asian Art Museum venue, the rowboat may bring to mind the boat as a figure for the passage through life in classical Chinese painting. But in the wider modern setting, it evokes more readily the fate of a refugee, and the various realities other than water that set Taiwan apart in the world.

Vertical rows of folded, colored paper "dreamboats" hang throughout the space of Wu's installation on nearly invisible filaments, aerating the room's somberness like chains of blossoms.

Visitors and others have made the "dreamboats," each inscribed with a wish or greeting. Handwritten words and phrases snag the eye of the visitors who walk through: "life in balance"; "I pray for equality and justice for all people"; "Daddy."

People familiar with the paper prayer chits adorning temples in Asia will think of them here. Wu also intends a reference to the water festivals celebrated by Chinese communities throughout the world.

But as more and more fragments of wishes and dreams come to one's notice, a sense of frustrated yearning gradually swamps the giddy impression the colorful "dreamboats" make.

Lin's piece covers much of the floor of the Asian's North Court. A colossal multipaneled painting, meant to be walked and sat upon, it magnifies floral patterns adapted from traditional Taiwanese textiles.

The huge blow-up of the flower motifs pushes them toward abstraction, similar to the effect of Roy Lichtenstein's enlarged newspaper comics.

Lin's "North Court, 11.06 -- 22.08.2004" makes a map of Asian folk sensibility, rendering it enterable, in a sense, by anyone, whether or not they recognize or care about its vestiges of traditional flower symbolism.

Both Wu's and Lin's pieces are examples of "relational art," to borrow the term of French critic Nicholas Bourriaud. That is, rather than await completion by viewers, they await activation and endlessly defer closure.

Visitors who have tracked the uses of installation art internationally for, say, the past 20 years will find "Spaces Within" thin soup.

The Asian Art Museum performs a service just by bringing before us new work by Asian artists we might otherwise never see. But in doing so it re- engages the old dilemma about whether a museum that shows living artists should try to be a chronicler or a connoisseur.

Spaces Within: Installations by Michael Lin and Wu Mali: Through Aug. 22. Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 200 Larkin St., San Francisco. (415) 581- 3500, www.asianart.org.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/07/22/DDG397PQDF1.DTL

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"House of Flying Daggers" fails to draw much blood
www.chinaview.cn 2004-07-21 15:42:19

BEIJING, July 21 (Xinhuanet) -- The much-anticipated "House of Flying Daggers" (Shimian Maifu), the latest martial arts blockbuster by internationally acclaimed director Zhang Yimou, finally flashed on screen for the first time last Friday.
Zhang Ziyi plays Mei, who pretends to be blind, but is skilled at both dancing and Kungfu. (China Daily/file photo)
The market response is nothing less than exciting. In many Chinese cities, movie-goers whose curiosity was stirred by the movie's massive media exposure over the past year, are swarming into the country's cinemas.

People are willing to pay twice the ticket price of other movies, so they can join in the gossip, because the movie has already become the talk of the town across the country.

Thin storyline

At the Cannes Film Festival in May, "Daggers" was shown as an out-of-competition entry.

According to reports in Chinese media, the audience broke out into applause on several occasions and the film solicited a long standing ovation at the closing curtain.

Unfortunately, the film is not getting the same kind of favourable comments from local audiences; the same embarrassment the famous director faced two years ago.

In many ways, "Daggers" is very similar to "Hero," Zhang's previous martial arts feature, released in 2002 and the box-office record-holder for Chinese movies.

Both are awesome in their action sequences but fail to touch the heart with their stories. It seems that Zhang Yimou in using the same bucket has failed to draw different water.

"House of Flying Daggers," is the English title used for the film outside Asia. It sounds like a cheap Hong Kong Kungfu production and does not convey the meaning of the movie's Chinese title, "Shimian Maifu," which means "ambush from ten directions."

And "Lovers," the title used for the Japanese market, is also a bad choice, because there are already many movies called "Lover(s)."

According to the director, it is "a love story, but also a martial arts film presented in the form of a timeless romantic saga."

The story is set in AD 859. The once flourishing Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) is in decline and rebel armies are rising in protest, with unrest sweeping across the country. The most powerful rebel group is the "House of Flying Daggers" (Feidao Men) which is now led by a mysterious new leader.

Two police captains, Jin (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro, or Gum Sing-mo) and Leo (Andy Lau), come up with an elaborate plan to capture Mei (Zhang Ziyi), a rebel who disguises herself as a blind showgirl at the newly opened brothel Peony Pavilion.

In order to win Mei's trust and to find the headquarters of the rebels, Captain Jin goes undercover, posing as a lone warrior come to rescue her from prison.

While Jin is escorting Mei back to her home, however, the two develop sensitive feelings for each other.

If the director had stopped here, the movie would have been just a bit threadbare.

But Zhang is determined to juggle the "Daggers" in a more complicated, hence dangerous way.

So, in the latter part of the movie we find that Captain Leo is actually an undercover agent for the House of Flying Daggers.

He also turns out to have once been Mei's lover for a period of three years.

The double-crosses and shifts of identity, which are too sudden to be even remotely persuasive, become a touch wearying.

Ultimately, the film's glorious cinematography is obscured by the stupid storyline which turns the whole production into a joke.

Zhang Weiping, producer of the film, claimed before the movie's release that it would move most people to tears.

He is obviously too optimistic about the movie's emotional power. It drew laughter not tears in Beijing.

When Mei "miraculously" recovers from the edge of death several times to talk nonsense with her fighting lover and admirer, the audience just couldn't hold back their guffaws of disbelief any longer.

Attempted breakthrough

Influences of the Hong Kong film "Infernal Affairs" (Wujiandao), a three-part blockbuster, can be easily found in "Dagger," although Zhang claims that he began working on "Daggers" long before "Infernal Affairs" came out in 2002.

The latter is about an undercover cop who infiltrates a gang, and a gang member who infiltrates the police force.

Interestingly, Andy Lau plays the gang member who poses as a high-ranking police officer. This is quite similar to his "Daggers" role as an important rebel disguised as a police chief.

Although he works hard at portraying his two-sided character in "Daggers," Andy Lau's great talents cannot really be tapped in the totally illogical, hence unbelievable, portrayal of the self-centred Captain Leo.

Zhang says he wanted to make a different kind of martial arts story so as to explore the full potential of the genre.

"As is the case in most martial arts novels, the story is totally an invention of the imagination," he said. "I wanted a more modern flavour for my film. I wanted it to present a contemporary love story that takes different turns than classical Chinese love stories, and then to inject elements of action to punctuate the romantic saga. It was very important for me to do something new with a traditional martial arts film."

Too eager to add modern elements to his love story under the umbrella of martial arts, Zhang seems to have failed to create a story convincing enough to touch people's hearts.

Lines like "I thought you were hot like fire, but you are actually cold like water" did not help save the film's flagging romance either.

Feast for the eyes

Despite gaping flaws in its plot, the movie, with a claimed budget of US$20 million, is a feast for the eyes.

Bringing together some of the best movie-makers in Asia and the world, the star-studded Kungfu movie outdoes most other productions in the genre, achieving a new height that few will be able to reach.

The action director Tony Ching Siu-Tung has choreographed a set of intricate fights that are almost literally jaw-dropping.

One of the most impressive scenes is the dance sequence early in the movie featuring Mei hitting the drums with her long sleeves.

The splendid costumes of the dancers, musicians and visitors to the brothel, as well as the delicate patterns on the musical instruments and the two captains' swords are calculated to hold the eyes of the audience, who might just catch a glimpse of the extravagance of the Tang Dynasty, long hailed as the high point of luxury in feudal China.

Another sequence worthy of mention is the battle in the bamboo forest, which, unfortunately, is thrust into the audience's faces immediately after the autumn birch forest scene, totally ignoring geological realities.

As is demonstrated in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," a fight in a jadeite bamboo grove is essential if a Kungfu film is to have an oriental flavour.

In "Daggers," the director has a troop of dozens gliding above the bamboo forest, hurling down sharpened bamboo sticks at Captain Jin and Mei who must fight and run on the ground.

Zhang Yimou has already displayed an amazing understanding of the colours of natural landscapes. In "Hero" he lets the action unfold amid landscapes as beautiful as oil paintings or ancient Chinese ink and water works.

This time, the film was shot in the wilderness of Southwestern China's Sichuan Province and also in the Ukraine.

The art direction and costumes designed by Oscar-winning Emi Wada, are on a level of artistry equal to the action. Many sequences, for example the Peony Pavilion and the snowfield battle, display an eye-striking lushness.

The music soundtrack, too, is stunning and richly complex.

Zhang Yimou also employs a lot of computer graphic imaging effects to make the action sequences more pleasing to the eye.

The flying daggers zip through the air like radio-controlled missiles. They even twist, plunge, ricochet and change direction, defying the law of gravity.

The three main characters are played by superstars.

Zhang Ziyi, who is better known internationally than she is at home, plays the stunning blind dancer, Mei.

Starring beside her is the dashing Takeshi Kaneshiro (Gum Sing-mo), who is very popular both in Japan and China, with his half-Japanese, half-Chinese origin.

And there is Hong Kong pop crooner and actor Andy Lau. In the early 1990s, he was one of the four most famous male actor/singers in China, and a household name across the country.

It is reported that Zhang Yimou once remarked that no one would be able to guess who the lethal dagger will hit until the very last moment of the movie.

The final trick seems more like a final failure to lead the audience back to the respectful somber mood the grandiose work is supposed to convey.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-07/21/content_1623449.htm

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indiewire.com
Takeshi Kitano's "Zatoichi," An Irreverent Take on the Blind Swordsman
by Peter Brunette
[image] A scene from Takeshi Kitano's "Zatoichi"

When Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano's first international hit, "Hana-bi" (Fireworks), was released, many critics, including this one, thought that they had been granted a privileged glimpse of the future of cinema. An enthralling combination of genre movie and foreign art film, "Hana-bi" indulged the audience's legitimate desire for spectacle yet also provided the resonant, stick-to-the-ribs ambiguity associated with art films. Since that time, however, Kitano has tipped this fragile, rarely achieved balance almost completely in favor of the generic (usually gangster films) and the comedic, which he is best known for in Japan.

Alas, comedy is notorious for traveling badly and subsequent films like "Kikujiro" and "Brother" have been largely unfunny and painful to sit through. (Granted, they may very well be regarded as absolutely hilarious by a Japanese audience.) Kitano's latest, "The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi," while always thoroughly watchable, once again fails to achieve the heights of "Hana-bi." Yet the film's often delicate merging of martial-arts genre elements with perky if occasionally over-broad comedy will win it many admirers. (Miramax opens it on Friday.)

What separates "Zatoichi" from other swordfight movies is that the eponymous hero, played, of course, by Kitano himself, is blind. Like the many other directors of films featuring this well-known character, Kitano gets a lot of mileage out of this fact, as we ooh and aah over Zatoichi's colorful ability to defeat multiple opponents by using all his highly-developed senses. As can be expected, the jokes concerning blindness, some of them funny, also run freely.

The fight scenes, interestingly enough, are more traditional in form, remaining within the realm of actual human possibility, rather than partaking of the high-flying, gravity-defying trapeze acts popularized by "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," and flamboyantly on display in Chinese director Zhang Yimou's two most recent films, "Hero" and "The House of Flying Daggers." There's also a brevity and economy of gesture that mark even the climactic fight scene in "Zatoichi" and that seem, to this non-expert at least, to mark a specifically Japanese rather than Chinese sensibility. Happily, much of the potentially repetitive fighting is undercut by humorous moments, as when a swordsman whips out his sword but only succeeds in nearly cutting off the arm of his comrade standing next to him. (This gag is less funny the second time it is used.) At other moments, arms and legs are lopped off, giving rise to the generically familiar, but always welcome, sight of spurting arteries.

One problem is that the forward movement of "Zatoichi" often threatens to grind to a halt and, especially in the beginning, the movie features little narrative impetus. A plot of sorts eventually develops, by means of two geishas bent on revenging the slaughter of their family -- one of the geishas is actually a man -- but it serves, as usual, mostly to provide an excuse for lots more fighting.

Much of the thematic spirit of the film is an homage to Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai," that Ur-text that no Japanese swordfight movie can ever escape. Thus, as in that earlier film, much is made of the way the samurai figures are forever alienated from the common people. A wonderful motif that occurs several times has the villagers working (hammering wood, hoeing fields) in delightful unison with a heavily punctuated tune on the soundtrack. It's funny and charming all at once.

This is an example of the best thing about the movie, Kitano's flighty, irreverent way of sticking in whatever occurs to him at any given moment. (For example, the film ends on a scene of communal tap dancing whose import completely escaped me. A celebration that brings the film, set in the 19th century, into the present?) But this is a high-risk strategy, obviously, and other bits just don't work, as when the village idiot, a samurai wannabe, runs screaming around a house, over and over. A couple of "Three Stooges"-style skits, focusing on Zatoichi's hapless sidekick, also fall flat. In another scene, when Kitano wants to contrast the geishas as children and as adults, he crosscuts between them so many times that a bored impatience quickly sets in.

At the very end, a couple of unexpected reversals will surprise some, but most viewers won't be too invested in plot by this point. Instead, they'll be enjoying the modest amusement and diversion many of the film's vignettes consistently provide.

http://www.indiewire.com/movies/movies_040721zatoichi.html

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East Bay Express Jul 21, 2004
©2004 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Off the Rails
Even with the radiant Gong Li, Zhou Yu's Train is a wreck.
BY BILL GALLO

Zhou Yu's Train
Film Director: Sun Zhou
Starring: Gong Li, Tony Leung Ka-fai, and Sun Hong Lei
Written By: Sun Zhou, Bei Cun, and Zhang Mei

The return to the screen of the ravishing Chinese actress Gong Li, who may have the most expressive face in film, should be cause for rejoicing among her millions of admirers around the world. After starring in a series of memorable and politically controversial films directed by her former paramour, Zhang Yimou -- among them, Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju, and Ju Dou -- and the sumptuous epic Farewell, My Concubine, she took a six-year break from acting to take up her new role as a housewife in Singapore. Now that she's back, we can look forward to more memorable performances by this radiant star.

But not even Gong Li can do much to salvage Zhou Yu's Train, a self-consciously arty meditation on desire, betrayal, and the quest for identity that suffers badly in its inevitable comparison to another recent Chinese film, In the Mood for Love. Gong Li is in familiar territory here -- once more, she's a seductive beauty caught up in a devastating romantic quandary -- but director Sun Zhou (Breaking the Silence) doesn't do much with her gifts. This vague, meandering chronicle of a love triangle is stuffed full of dreamy slow-motion shots, tricky jump cuts, and atmospheric views of the countryside in northwestern China, but its heroine never quite comes into focus, and Sun Zhou's incessant experiments with scrambled chronology and nonlinear narrative are more distracting than useful. Too often, Train looks like a parody of an art film. Any minute, you half-expect the Monty Python troupe to pop into the frame.

Gong Li's title character is a young artisan living in the industrial town of Sanming who, twice a week, takes a train to rural Chonyang to be with her lover, a shy, self-absorbed poet named Chen Ching (Tony Leung Ka-fai, not to be confused with Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who appears to live inside a library. Inspired by Zhou Yu's delicate beauty, he showers her with verse, but neither his overwrought poetry nor their frenzied lovemaking satisfies her restless heart. On one of her train rides -- the film has lots of them -- the melancholy heroine attracts the notice of a friendly veterinarian, Zhang Jiang (Sun Hong Lei), who says he wants to buy one of her hand-painted vases. She answers the newcomer's persistence by smashing the vase rather than yielding it to him, which might be all right as a character-development tool if it didn't signal the film's imminent deluge of symbolism. As it is, Sun Zhou and his fellow screenwriters (Bei Cun and Zhang Mei) are fatally addicted to poetic signs and portents, and even if the English subtitle-writers have done violence to their dialogue, it's hard to imagine the film's greeting-card inanities coming off any better in the original Chinese. "The blue china is smooth like your skin," the young poet declares to his love. "If it's in your heart, it's real," we are instructed. "If it's not, then it will never be."

Fine, but that doesn't explain why Zhou Yu can't make a choice between the dull poet and the moonstruck vet -- or even why she's attracted to either one of them in the first place. In fact, the entire movie is as short on human motivation as it is long on train commutes. It likely means to be a reflection on yearning, spiced up with a bit of emergent Chinese feminism. But there's more authentic emotion in any one scene from Raise the Red Lantern, in which Gong Li portrayed a tormented concubine of the 1920s, than in the whole length of this gushy ode to doomed love. And as delightful as it is to see Gong Li again, one of her probably would have been enough. Instead, director Zhou introduces a bewildering fourth character, a young woman named Xiu -- also played by Gong Li -- who observes the main action of the film and who may or may not be the title character's alter ego or double. Whoever she is, she, too, has a thing for train rides through the countryside in pursuit of her real feelings, her actual identity, and God knows what else. In any event, this Train jumps the tracks long before we can get interested in that particular riddle.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues/2004-07-21/movies3.html

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Taipei Times, Sunday, Jul 18, 2004,Page 19
Art's digitized future on show in Taichung
By Adam Ulfers, CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

[image] Digital art in a dining-room setting. PHOTO COURTESY OF NATIONAL TAIWAN MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung has finally reopened with its first exhibition since the 921 earthquake, titled Navigator -- Digital Art in the Making.

It's a progressive art display that displays the works of 18 artists from around the world, five of whom are from Taiwan. What is unique about it is that artistic creativity and expression has been lifted from the canvas and is instead digitally projected.

With the use of sophisticated digital-media technology, the museum-wide show is a look at the cutting-edge future of art, incorporating academic research, new technologies, and an avant-garde style that promotes audience participation.

According to the museum curator, Wang Jun-Jieh (???), "This exhibition of digital media will be a major event not only in Taiwan, but in all of Southeast Asia."

The works range from studies on emerging relationships between technology, humans and nature, to others involving computer manipulation requiring proficiency beyond the grasp of computer illiterates.

What is consistent throughout is the commitment to convince audiences of all ages, educational backgrounds, and artistic savvy that in digital art there is an emerging avenue for ideas, themes, inspiration and enjoyment for the artist and viewer.

An interesting attraction is Japanese artist Masaki Fujihata's Beyond Pages. The highly technical work, which is already considered a classic among digital-art collections, delves into the idea that the loss of cultural identity, an insurmountable threat to the environment and newly developed relationships to humanity have been the effects of technology.

A book is projected onto a desk in the middle of the room. Using a digital pen found on the desk the viewer can operate a lamp, a door projected onto an adjacent wall, as well as manipulate other projected objects such as a glass of water, leaves, an apple and Japanese characters -- the controls for each found on separate pages of the book.

A somewhat more disconcerting work is UCLA Media Arts professor Christian Moeller's Smiles. The piece focuses on the habitual hypocrisy employed through body language and illustrates the human capacity to maintain the pretext.

After vigorous interviews, six women were monitored by a machine, an emotion recognition system to be exact, and asked to smile for 90 minutes, all the while being video taped. Any lack of sincerity is recognized and displayed by the system through the use of a color code. If a lack is detected, an alarm sounds to alert the women to continue to display a "genuine" emotion.

It's obvious that the technology is imperfect, as the participants seem to be struggling as much as those straining to watch them.

In Pulsate, Sachiko Kodama has delivered an interactive magnetic soup with personality. In the middle of a white room stands a dinner table, set for two, covered in a pink tablecloth. Served for dinner is what a hungry patron might mistake for a bowl of chocolate or black bean soup. It is however, a magnetic fluid that responds to auditory gravitational discrepancies.

The work illustrates the expected accommodating interaction between the would-be dinner guests, portrayed by the black soup's symmetrical character transformations.

One of the most recent works on display is German art group ART+COM's Floating.Numbers. A stream of digits floats across an extended table and responds to touch, each disclosing a different secret message.

The included information hidden among the symbols refers to art, religion, science and items involved in people's daily lives -- portraying the aggregate confusion resulting from the information-age explosion.

In another room, one finds an authentic study of the relationship between technology and nature.

Austrian-born Christa Sommerer and French-born Laurent Mignonneau have combined efforts in Interactive Plant Growing. In this piece, through viewer interaction, the growing influence that technology has had on the natural environment becomes evident.

Arranged with sensors responding to touch, five plants lay before a wall-sized screen, which digitally constructs images of the respective plants being touched, creating juxtapositions between nature and technology and the diminishing gap between the two in imaginative cyber worlds.

Exhibition note:
What: Navigator
Where: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2 Wuchuan W Rd, Sec 2, Taichung (???????1?2?)
When: Until Sept. 5

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2004/07/18/2003179505

 

____________________

Matthias Arnold M.A.
Digital Resources
Institute of Chinese Studies
University of Heidelberg
Akademiestr. 4-8
69117 Heidelberg
Germany

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