ChinaDaily
Household name in entertainment
2004-08-05 06:18

When Anita Leung first started writing scripts for television at the tender age of 16, it was the beginning of a life-long love affair with the medium. "When I was still at university, I was doing part-time work for TV stations as a programme organizer. So I got my first experience in TV 40 years ago," says Leung.

But after countless scripts and books, many of which have been adapted for drama series and films, Leung's relationship with TV and film is nowadays multi-faceted. After obtaining her masters degree she went on to produce a a series that was the first from Hong Kong to get sponsorship from entertain-ment giant Sony.

It is this dual role, which combines both the art of writing and business, that sets Leung apart in an industry which does not make it easy to be involved in both sides of the business. After starting writing fiction in 1989, Leung wrote more than 100 pieces of work over the next 10 years. Since 1995, 22 of these titles have been adapted for TV or the screen - four of these became films (for television) and 18 TV series or movies. "So from 1995, I learned another business: the business of media services, since CCTV and other provincial TV stations began adapting my novels to TV," says the prolific writer.

Her books have developed a widespread following, particularly amongst women in mainland China where an often-used theme of successful women dealing with pressures from work and family strike a familiar chord.

But these days, Leung doesn't have much time to write, given her commitments to both her publishing career and Qin Jia Yuan Media Services Group, a company which provides a wide range of media-related services for television and film. "I enjoy writing but my main job is my career," she says. "From the beginning, writing has been a hobby so I am lucky. I have built up a network of readers so I am very lucky, but it is still a hobby."

And after the group's HK$128 million initial public offering (IPO) on June 30, business has taken off. "We are lucky as we are probably the first media services company dealing with television to be listed on the Hong Kong stock market," she says. "The IPO has helped us a lot. I was surprised - before the IPO, I couldn't picture that it would develop so rapidly."

Much of the company's success revolves around its unique one-stop TV media services business model, which is spread between offices in Hong Kong and Shenzhen and representative offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Guangzhou, and Dongguan, according to Leung.

"Our business scope is quite wide - concept, market research, promotion and distribution planning, syndication programming and also PR. We also have a centre in Guangdong which deals with script writing, foreign casting, sets, costumes and props. We do the whole package."

Between 2001 and 2003, the company supported 175 hours of TV drama plus two hours of variety shows, all shown at peak viewing time (7-10 pm), making the company a net profit of HK$90 million in the process. Enjoying the exclusive rights to adaptations of Leung's books to TV, the company was able to enjoy a steady income, since revenue generated from TV series tends to be much less affected by fluctuations in market conditions than film.

Most of the company's clients are national or international consumer brands - hence the importance of TV advertising. And advertising expenditure on the mainland is currently growing in leaps and bounds. In 2003, total spending on television amounted to 173.4 billion yuan (US$21 billion), of which fully 83 billion yuan (US$10 billion) - or 48 per cent - was spent on TV drama series.

And is she satisfied with the TV adaptations of her work?

Leung's response is refreshingly humble. "I am often asked if I am satisfied with a TV series or film I have done. I think that this is similar to a wife asking her husband who he loves more - his wife or his mother. If a book is a good book it is a good book. If a plot from a book is developed into a TV series then this is another thing. Further along from this, you can't even compare a TV series to a movie. The audience and format are both very different. The mainland Chinese are not affected by 'stars' as in other countries. They will watch to begin with, but if the series is no good then it will not work."

Contractually obliged "not to twist the spirit of the story", Leung firmly believes that writers adapting books to television or film should understand that it is not practical or desirable for a director to follow the script verbatim. "I can give them a rough idea what it is all about, but I leave them a free hand to develop their own programme," says Leung, "because a novel is a novel and fiction is fiction and a movie is movie and a TV series is a TV series.

"I am satisfied with all the TV series adapted from my scripts because I am grateful that somebody has invested money time and has confidence in my work," she says.

"Anyway, on the mainland, you'd be very surprised. I've found from my experience that they respect the author very much. They always come to me and say that they have signed on this director or star and ask me if I think they are suitable."

Leung's passion for TV is evident throughout the interview. So is her belief that the mainland produces some of the finest TV dramas in the world. "The mainland is a very unique market for TV series," she says. "I can tell you that the best-quality TV series are produced by mainland production houses and stations. They can beat productions from all over the world including the likes of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore."

But there are also many poor quality productions, she admits. This is partly due to the growing demand for thousands of hours of TV drama each year to fill airtime, giving plenty of room for substandard productions - 36 per cent of mainland TV airtime in 2003 was given over to dramas.

"There is a demand for thousands of hours of TV dramas per year, but you can count the number of quality production on your fingers. The average production in Hong Kong is of quite a good standard, but even Hong Kong cannot compare with the best productions from the Chinese mainland.

"On the production side, we have lot to learn from the PRC, but in management, marketing and packaging, we can contribute more than they can."

(HK Edition 08/05/2004 page18)
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-08/05/content_359094.htm

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China.org.cn, 6. August 2004
Internationale Fotoausstellung zum Palastmuseum

Dem im nächsten Jahr anstehenden 80-jährigen Bestehen des weltberühmten Museums im ehemaligen Beijinger Kaiserpalast ist schon in diesem Jahr eine internationale Fotoschau gewidmet. An der großangelegten Veranstaltung im Oktober unter dem Motto "Dialog zwischen verschiedenen Zivilisationen" werden mehr als 30 weltberühmte Fotografen aus China sowie anderen Ländern teilnehmen, u.a. aus den USA, Frankreich und Brasilien.

Im Verlauf der einmonatigen Fotoausstellung werden mehr als 300 Bilder präsentiert. Zum Programm gehören auch Fototermine in der Verbotenen Stadt sowie ein internationales Fotografie-Forum und Dia-Shows.

Dauer: 1. Oktober bis 1. November
Öffnungszeiten: 8.30 Uhr bis 17.00 Uhr
Eintrittspreis: 60 RMB
Telefon: (010) 6513 2255
Anfahrt: Buslinie 1, 4, 52, 103, 728 oder Metro Linie 1 bis Tian'anmen
Adresse: 4. Jingshan Qianjie, Dongcheng Bezirk, 100009 Beijing
Internet: http://www.dpm.org.cn/

http://www.china.org.cn/german/125843.htm

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Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida
Masterworks of Chinese Painting: In Pursuit of Mists and Clouds
10/16/2004 - 1/9/2005

This remarkable exhibition draws on the superlative collections made by world-renowned Chinese Art historian James Cahill. For over 50 years, Professor Emeritus James Cahill acquired Chinese paintings for the UC Berkeley Museum and his own family collections. The exhibition includes some 60 paintings in all the traditional Chinese formats—hanging scrolls, fan paintings, hand scrolls, and album leaves—dating from the 12th to the 20th century. Images of birds and flowers, figures from history and legend, and monumental landscapes testify to the extraordinary beauty and ancient traditions of Chinese painting. Organized by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum

http://www.norton.org/exhibit/frameset_current.htm

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The New York Times, August 6, 2004
'THE BISHOP JADES'
The Jade of China, Alive With Meaning Yet Glossily Elusive
By HOLLAND COTTER

book called "A Treatise on Superfluous Things" was a manual of style for climbers in the courts of the Ming dynasty. It skipped over the basics that everyone knew — you should be nice to your parents; only emperors wear yellow — to give tips on fine points of discrimination in luxury items. Jade is among the materials discussed. And at first glance, "superfluous" seems just the word for the preposterously exquisite jade objects, from scepters to table screens to paperweights, on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's reinstalled galleries for Chinese decorative arts.

No presentation of such small, marginally functional things can avoid having a Tiffanyesque air. And surely this impression was pronounced in 1902, when the American entrepreneur Heber Reginald Bishop — who did, indeed, shop for Chinese antiques at Tiffany — gave his jade collection to the Met with the stipulation that it be housed in a reproduction of the Louis XV-style ballroom of his Manhattan home. The Met complied.

Well, that was then. The present setting for 100 or so of Bishop's Chinese and Indian carvings is all-purpose spare, leaving the objects to send out a charge of luxe on their own, which is not so easy to do. Jade registers slowly on the Western eye. Its surfaces can look glassy or gummy. Its colors are unprecise, difficult to describe: green-gray? yellow-green? grayish-white? It has none of the optical punch of gold: jade absorbs light, doesn't reflect it. It lacks even the glamour of rarity. It is, after all, only semiprecious.

Jade in China is a whole other story. There it is rich with moral and spiritual meaning; it's alive. Luminous and quick to warm to the touch, it must have seemed heaven-sent when first discovered, imbedded in boulders washed down from mountains in Central Asia. Yet because it is unusually hard, direct carving was all but impossible. Slow abrasion was the only way to manipulate it, and this took patience and time.

From these characteristics, an emblematic profile grew. Confucius attributed human virtues to jade, among them integrity, purity and fortitude. The grueling effort required to shape the stone was compared to the discipline needed to train the mind. In predynastic China, jade was reserved for elite burials. In the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 220), it was believed to have vivifying properties. Emperors were buried in suits of jade to insure immortality.

Despite its prestige, the stone went in and out of favor, largely depending on availability. Jade is actually the common name for two minerals. By far the more common is nephrite, found in the Central Asian territory over which China periodically gained and lost political control. The other, slightly harder stone, jadeite, famed for its emerald-green color, was all but unknown in China before the late 18th century.

Although there are jades of great antiquity on view elsewhere at the Met, almost everything in the Bishop installation, which has been organized by Jason Sun, an associate curator in the Asian art department, dates from the 18th century, when the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) brought Chinese jadework to a peak of virtuosity. Odd that the Qing should have been the ones to do so: they were outsiders to Han China, a minority population from the northern forests of Manchuria. When the last Ming emperor hired them as mercenaries, they showed up for work, got rid of the Ming and took the throne. They also assumed a new identity, a kind of hyper-Chineseness, adopting not only the Chinese culture of their day, but also China's past and the art that belonged to it.

The greatest of the Qing art patrons and antiquarians was the Qianlong emperor, who reigned from 1736 to 1795. He was a walking power generator. He made endless inspection tours of the country, worked hard, worshiped intensely and composed tens of thousands of poems. As an art collector, he was a hoarder, a binger, stockpiling among many other things some 30,000 jade objects. Most of the Bishop carvings, including a few in agate, rock crystal, quartz, lapis lazuli and malachite, date from his time. Some are from his own collection.

The pieces range in size from two-inch-high figurines of astrological creatures to a hefty green basin modeled on an even larger one made for Khublai Khan. In style they run from a no-frills, starched-white incense burner with a fluted surface to a couple of all-frills vases with dragons perched on the rim and fruits spilling down the side.

As a practicing Buddhist, the emperor commissioned religious objects; a jade book inscribed with sutras is an example. But most of the Met's objects, from garment hooks to scholar's brushpots, are secular. A few partake of new styles; a rock crystal ball supported by three bronze cranes feels European in essence. But a jade version of an archaic bronze bell is one of many reminders of the fundamental conservatism of Chinese art, how it always circled back to the same few themes and forms, changing in subtle ways with each rotation.

Along with preserving culture, though, the Qing imported it. They were blown away by the spectacular jades that came to China from the Mughal courts of India. And the selection of such work at the Met is superb. While the Chinese had scant interest in the sort of inlay that turns the Mughal sword handles, boxes and bracelets in the Bishop collection into a serving of sweets, they were infatuated with the shaping of the jade, ground eggshell thin by Indian artists. Mr. Sun has placed Mughal and Mughal-inspired Chinese objects in close proximity in the gallery, and the inventiveness of the Chinese response is stimulating to follow.

So, in a more complicated way, is the interplay between jade carving and Chinese painting, evident in plaques of fanatically detailed relief landscapes and narrative scenes. Conventional painting themes are in place, but not the calligraphic lift, the contemplative gravity and the idiosyncratic esprit that define the Chinese painting style. Instead, the lapidary skill required to carve miniature worlds from intractable stone is what stands out: form over content.

Actually, the miniature in art has a formal and social content of its own. On the one hand, it can evoke the dynamic of childhood toys and play and the illusion they provide of personal control over a threatening world. On the other, reduction in scale can intensify the effects of virtuosity, make it appear doubly rarefied and ingenious. And because such examples of concentrated mastery tend to look expensive and to connote aristocratic taste, they become advertisements for their owners' power.

This is somewhat absurdly demonstrated at the Met in a portrait relief of Bishop himself, carved from spinach-green jade in 1898, when the Qing dynasty was in its twilight. It is an expert piece of photorealist sculpture in a challenging medium. But is it a thing of beauty to dwell on? No. It is a curiosity, and an illuminating one in the context of Qing culture as distilled in the surrounding display.

Qing art is old and new, Chinese and global, and for those reasons, confusing. Its finesse and variety are exciting in a mercurial modern way, but those traits can make its almost obsessive traditionalism look inauthentic, artificial, commercial, slight. Qing art is too close to our own time for us to view it as "classical," or as more than a falling off of classical ideals. Yet it is too distant for us to approach it as contemporary, with the useful adjustment of values and expectations that might allow. The same is true of late work from most Asian cultures. We dismiss it because we can't see it.

And there is a ton of this unseeable stuff around. An exhibition titled "Splendors of China's Forbidden City: The Glorious Reign of Emperor Qianlong" is at the Field Museum in Chicago through Sept. 12, and a striking selection of mostly Qing jades from the Alan and Simone Hartman collection is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through Nov. 22.

Older Chinese art has long since been edited down and canonized by time. But Qing art is all still here, waiting to be made sense of. If for no other reason than because it holds keys to understanding contemporary China, we are sure to be taking its measure. The Bishop jades are as good a place as any to start. In the study of history, there is no superfluous; everything has a soul.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/arts/design/06COTT.html

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english.eastday.com (shanghai daily)
Avant-garde film salon
Shanghai Daily news

A pair of young directors are breaking down the barriers of Chinese film and creating a vibrant future for an art form that many believed could not survive Hollywood, writes Michelle Qiao.

Young directors Yan Yao and Huang Yin call their digital video (DV) salon ``Dramatic 0.01%,'' a name as edgy and avant-garde as their works. Tonight they will offer a taste of their talent, with the screening of seven short video pieces at the Room with a View gallery on Nanjing Road E.

Both Yan and Huang are graduates of Tongji University, which is renowned nationwide as an architecture school. In recent years, however, the university has been gaining a name for smart DV works produced by its science major students -- students like Yan and Huang. ``Most works on show are experimental, with a minimum of dramatic elements, which gave the salon its name,'' explains Huang, 25, an environmental engineering graduate currently studying for a master's degree in film art at Shanghai University. Four years ago, longtime film buff Yan, a 2000 Tongji industrial trade major, and Huang borrowed a camera and co-produced their first video film, ``A Real Fiction.'' The movie vividly tells the story of an introverted boy who furtively records conversations and a shy girl who secretly photographs the lives of the people around her. The 53-minute movie garnered the duo Best Experimental prize at the 8th Beijing Students' Film Festival in 2001. Since then, Tongji, which held the Second Shanghai Students' Independent Film Exhibition in 2003, has been reaping awards and building a film culture. Today, the university has two film magazines and runs a film club that shows nearly 200 movies every semester. ``They (Yan and Huang) are among my most outstanding students,'' says Ying Yuli, documentary director and film art professor at Tongji, who teaches Film and TV Appreciation. ``Their film dreams began with their involvement in the university drama club during their college days. It's incredible to me that more than 10 of these former drama club members are still creating, so long after graduation, like these two. They never allowed their dreams to fade, even in an era when the Chinese film is threatened by Hollywood blockbusters. They will be among the subjects in my new documentary on the Chinese movie phenomenon.'' Yan says it was a passion for film but a lack of equipment that led him to found the university drama club in 1998, which has entertained students with about 20 high-quality plays over the years. Huang was also an active participant in the club during her student days, gaining a measure of sensational campus fame for acting and directing in a lesbian drama and another about incest -- the latter adapted from a novel by Chinese writer Zhang Ailing. Yan, for his part, confesses to a movie addiction that goes back to his middle school days. ``In those days, only video tapes of Hollywood movies were available,'' recalls Yan, 26. Hungry for any type of film, he borrowed tapes any way he could, borrowed machines to make copies and has accumulated three drawers full of tapes. It was only a short step to the realization that watching wasn't enough: He wanted to make his own movies. ``Founding the drama club was a more accessible way to release my imagination and creativity,'' he says. After graduation in 2000, Yan went to Germany to study sociology -- and he readily admits that Europe, for him, was much more about experiencing the art, the museums and the film festivals than it was about pursuing a degree. ``Imagine Cannes'' is what he witnessed -- inverted images in water during the Cannes Film Festival. Europe is the inspiration for the five pieces by Yan, which will be shown tonight. In ``To Be Or Not To Be,'' Yan uses a cup of black tea, a picture of Sir Laurence Olivier and an electric oven to illustrate the contradiction of life in Shakespeare's ``Hamlet.'' ``Go Dancing'' tells of a day in the life of a German woman, who lives alone in a new apartment, trying to forget a painful past. She wants to meet new friends but her heart remains closed, but one day, circumstances dictate that she runs into a male German neighbor three times. Huang uses the subtle yet powerful medium of music to convey different moods in her film. ``In `This Way Or That Way,' I use different background music for the same scene of daily life. When it switches from the sounds of making love to the rousing Young Pioneer song and light music, the same scene has a very different meaning,'' she says. ``Yan and Huang each have different talents, although their works are both experimental and avant-garde,'' says Ying. ``Yan is extraordinarily smart -- he hardly ever went to class, but won scholarships year after year; he acquired his proficient command of English from pirated DVDs. He is a man of ideas and idealism. Huang's talent, on the other hand, lies with drama: content over form. She is sensitive, wild, more practical than Yan and is a sharp judge of character. She had experience of being an art model; she is like a wild flower, hardy but with fragile bits.'' Although Yan and Huang's lack of a formal film background limits their technique, Ying is quick to point out that even without high-tech equipment, the pair's works are able to compete with those material coming out of the prestigious Beijing Film Academy. ``A film is not evaluated by technique alone,'' Ying adds. What's in store for the future? Yan is writing a full-length script, a love story of a man suffering from schizophrenia, who ends up killing his lover. ``I prefer strong dramatics and interesting details,'' he says. ``I love this script -- it has taken me nearly a year to complete just half of it. I've loved movies for more than 10 years, and I want to create one. I want to calm down and slowly create a perfect movie, a movie that will remain a cherished memory after 50 years.'' With young, talented filmmakers like Yan and Huang, the future of Chinese films has easily more than a 0.01-percent chance of success. Date: August 7, 7pm Address: 12/F, 479 Nanjing Rd E. Tel: 6352-0256 With English subtitles For more information, please visit www.topart.cn Brief synopsis of the seven works 1. To Be Vs Not To Be (by Yan Yao, 2002) Six minutes, video art, color, no dialogue A personal narration in video form of William Shakespeare's ``Hamlet.'' 2. (Time) On Wall & In Astray & In Video (by Yan Yao, 2002) Six minutes, video art, color, no dialogue How do we feel the existence of time? 3. 1:27... 1:37 (by Yan Yao, 2003) 11 minutes, video art, color, no dialogue Does time have the shape of itself? Yes, only in the dancing night. 4. Go Dancing (by Yan Yao, 2003) 17 minutes, short feature, German dubbing A woman, a day and the exit. 5. Image Cannes (by Yan Yao, 2004) 10 minutes, video art, color, no dialogue A memory of Cannes in water in May 2004. 6. This Way Or That Way (by Huang Yin, 2004) Seven minutes, video art, color, no dialogue What is life? Eating, wearing, moving and... Life is the different topic we give it. 7. Moaning in Languagelessness (by Huang Yin, 2004) 17 minutes, video art, color, Chinese dubbing Are you talking to me? Yes. Am I speaking to you? Yes. But, you are me and I am you.

http://english.eastday.com/epublish/gb/paper1/1354/class000100006/hwz206230.htm

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the star, Saturday August 7, 2004
The story of Zhang Yimou

Story by S.B.Toh
ZHANG Yimou is many things to many people. He’s been labeled a feminist, hailed as a rebel, and deemed a trouble-maker. Film critic Tony Rayns commented in a 1995 article that his “primary instincts are rebellious” while critic-filmmaker Evans Chan charged that with Hero, Zhang has now become – brace yourself for it – “the closest thing to being China’s Leni Riefenstahl”.

Now that you’ve picked your jaw up from the floor, it’s time to ask: So who is Zhang Yimou, really?

A scene from Hero
If you search the Net for a quote by the man, you will likely come up with just one: “To survive is to win.” These five spare words probably best sum up Zhang’s approach to his career and life.

The story of Zhang Yimou the director, spanning 22 years and 13 films, has been the story of a man who, until recently, has had a contentious relationship with the powers-that-be. His two early masterpieces Judou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), both films about cruel patriarchal figures, were initially banned from China’s theatres while 1994’s To Live, still Zhang’s boldest film by far today, reportedly earned him a ban from foreign funding and the humiliation of writing a Cultural Revolution-styled “self-criticism”.

When the writer Lynn Pan visited Zhang on location during the filming of The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), she asked if he was making the film to appease the authorities after Judou and Lantern. Zhang apparently neither answered in the affirmative nor negative. Instead, she said, he lifted his hands to his neck in mock strangulation.

“Do you know how difficult things have been for me?” he said.

If one were familiar with Zhang’s personal history (some say mythology), one would appreciate just how difficult it has been. Born in 1951 to parents of “bad” element, Zhang’s mother was a doctor (intellectuals and the bourgeoisie were not in favour back then) and his father an officer with the Nationalist Party, which had fought unsuccessfully against the Communists in the Chinese civil war.

During the Cultural Revolution, when he was a teenager, Zhang was sent to work in a farm and eventually ended up as a janitor in a factory in Shaanxi province. The story goes that Zhang sold his blood to buy a camera, the photos of which finally earned him a place in the Beijing Central Film Academy in 1979. This was twice after he had been rejected.

Asked during our 15-minute telephone interview if filmmaking had always been a calling, Zhang said no. It came about as a result of desperation.

Zhang in discussion with actress Zhang Ziyi during the shooting of House of Flying Daggers.
“When I was accepted in 1979, university enrolment had just been resumed in 1978. At the time I was working in a factory. I enrolled for just one reason: to change my life. There were no other reasons. I just wanted to get out of my factory job.”

Observers have noted that unlike his fellow Fifth Generation filmmakers, Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang, who were born into prominent communist families and therefore had some leeway with the authorities, Zhang was resigned to living under a political cloud.

“Zhang Yimou has no leg to stand on when the authorities choose to object to something he has made or done . . . More than once, Zhang has been forced into the position of abasing himself,” observed Rayns.

Given his difficulties at home and his lionisation abroad, Zhang Yimou’s films are rarely free of politics whatever the director’s intentions may be. When he is seen to be trenchant, critics applaud and the authorities fume. When he is thought to be soft, critics talk of capitulation and the authorities beam.

To be sure, Zhang has received his share of flak from critics – for The Story of Qiu Ju (which was seen as an “appeasement”), Not One Less (a “long infomercial”), Hero (a “fascist project”), and even The Road Home (“the turmoil of a whole era is dislodged by the story of a young peasant woman’s romantic torment”). Not all of us agree with these harsh interpretations (see sidebar on page 17) but they are a baggage Zhang cannot escape. What many Western critics fail to grasp is that Zhang may be leery of being used as a rallying point for anti-China campaigns, that he is really the fierce individual the protagonists in his films so often are and nobody’s fool.

That today he has come full circle from being something of a dissident filmmaker to one who is officially endorsed has certainly helped add fuel to his critics’ fire.

When I asked what he thought of accusations that he had softened his political stance, Zhang shrugged them off, professing not to be political while also taking care not to dismiss politics entirely from his storytelling.

“I’m actually not keen to do political films,” he said in his still and deep voice.

“If you want to highlight these kinds of issues, there will be no end to it. This is not my focus. All along my interest has been to tell stories about the people, and politics has never been the main focus.

“How people perceive my films I’m not sure, but in making a film I’m very clear that you have to tell stories about people. That’s the most important thing. You don’t have to worry about the political issues. We are artists; politics is not what we specialise in. My new movie Shi Mian Mai Fu (literally “Ambush from 10 Directions” a.k.a. House of Flying Daggers) is different too. It has nothing to do with my political views, neither does it reflect whether I have changed my political views.

“I have always been the same,” Zhang insisted.

Zhang’s contention – as I read it – is that an artist is not a political activist, which is a restricting tag, but neither does he stand outside of the ebbs and flows of society. In other words, politics is not life but life can be political. A sensible maxim, surely?

Writing in the Boston Review (Oct-Nov 2001), Harvard law professor Alan A. Stone suggested that “a compelling argument can be made that Zhang does not intend to criticise or protest the Chinese government but is simply pursuing his own personal sense of artistic truth.”

“To be sure, one can see all sorts of political messages in any story that seriously explores the moral adventures of life . . . But that exploration – not a specifically political ambition – provides the most fundamental impulse in Zhang Yimou’s films,” he argued.

Rayns made a similar observation, saying that Zhang has spent his life fighting to succeed on his own terms and that he is merely describing China as he experienced it, and in images that don’t necessarily flatter.

“When Zhang disavows any political intent behind his work, he’s not being cagey or coy. His visions of China as a country doomed to tragedy or as a feudal household in the process of destroying itself are not ‘political’ in the sense understood by China’s Communists but simply accurate reflections of the ‘system’ as he knows, loves and hates.”

If Zhang Yimou is an artist whose personal vision sometimes gets him into trouble, he has also, conversely, always been a filmmaker who is savvy about both commercial and censorship concerns. His latest film’s period setting and love triangle steer it from controversy, just as its star-studded cast guarantees people will flock to see it. Zhang Ziyi is well-known internationally, Andy Lau’s popularity in Hong Kong is unquestioned, and heartthrob Takeshi Kaneshiro’s Taiwanese-Japanese heritage will surely take care of both those markets.

When asked about the pan-Asian cast, Zhang began by saying, “I think they are excellent actors and I am very happy to have been able to work with them.” Then he admitted, chuckling, “Besides their skills in acting and their presence, they have a big following, so it’s an advantage to have them.”

“Yimou has always been pretty savvy about the need to market a film,” remarked Barbara Robinson managing director of HK’s Columbia Pictures in a June 2000 article (Guardian). “For him it has always been more than, ‘This is my art, love it or loathe it’.”

Zhang has to be flexible if he is to continue working in China, which he sees as inseparable from his art. We’ve seen Chen Kaige’s English film, Killing Me Softly, and really, the only notable thing about it is Heather Graham’s assets . . . and this from a man who gave us Farewell, My Concubine.

In a 1995 interview, Zhang declared: “My roots are in China, and I can only make Chinese films in Chinese. My sole ambition is to make different films in different styles and to reach even larger audiences around the world.”

Are the films about the Cultural Revolution over and done with now that he’s making more commercial films, I asked.

“The chaos of the time is very interesting and make good movie subjects. But you can’t make this kind of movie anymore in the present environment,” he replied, because neither the market nor the state approves.

As he told Time magazine after making Hero, “You gradually start to feel that audiences don’t want to see certain kind of films. I’ve made adjustments to accommodate the spirit of the times.”

Accommodation. Compromises. The question everyone is still debating right now is: Has Zhang Yimou sold out in the process?

Evans Chan seems to think so. For him Hero is a “powerful summation of the apologist streak in Zhang’s work”, and Zhang’s career is careening ever more towards conformism. Certainly, a straightforward reading of Zhang’s more recent films will suggest this is the case. But Zhang’s great strength is his ambiguity and the capacity of his films to contain and defy interpretations. The theme of the individual-vs-the-collective is, however, virtually a constant in all of his films, and this is true even in House of Flying Daggers’ love triangle premise.

Here’s Tony Rayn’s assessment of Zhang way back in 1995, and one that I think still holds true: “Whenever his visions have given offence . . . he has retreated with practised ease into a project designed to buy himself some time or space, and then launched into another ‘quiet’ rebellion . . . It is the strategy of a man who stands outside the ‘system’ but refuses to bang his head against its wall in a futile gesture of self-destruction.

“It is the strategy of a seasoned survivor.”
http://www.star-ecentral.com/news/story.asp?file=/2004/8/7/movies/8563604&sec=movies

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the star, Saturday August 7, 2004
Layers of truth, shades of meaning

IN his impressively mounted, though not always convincing, arguments in Film International (March 2004), Evans Chan contended that Zhang Yimou’s Hero is the “stupendous summation” of the “glaring streak of pernicious apology for a totalitarian regime” evident in some of his work.

In that film, four assassins conspire so that one of them gains the confidence of the King of Qin, and therefore, the opportunity to slay him. Told in a maze of colour-coded narrative strands, the story weaves its way to the climax whereupon the assassin played by Jet Li – sword in hand and poised to strike – gives up his mission, and his life, for the greater good, having been convinced by the would-be emperor’s vision.

“The pseudo-Rashomonesque structure is not meant to examine motivations, rationalisations, or the unreliability of human perception. It is an unfolding plot device that leads us to the final epiphany – the assassin(s) must die.”

The impulse of the film, Chan wrote, “can be called fascist – it promotes a personality cult that claims oneness with the progression of the national destiny, which inspires wilful, bloody sacrifices.”

Jet Li in Hero, Zhang Yimou’s cleverest and most controversial work.
I would argue that Chan’s interpretation is just one possible reading – and the most obvious at that. There’s an oft-quoted saying about travelling that may apply when one engages Hero: It’s the journey and not the destination that counts.

To wit, it isn’t how the film concludes that matters, given the kind of restraint Zhang has to work under, but what the film presents us with. And what Hero presents us with is many points of view. In its complex narrative we find layers of truth and shades of meaning. Read this way, Hero, rather than a reinvention of the founding myth of China, as Chan would have it, is about the competing narratives that go into the tumultuous formation of the national identity.

The rebels in the movie are reviled (red) idealised (blue), humanised (green), torn asunder (white) and, finally, sacrificed (black). The colourful narratives are not, unlike Kurosawa’s Rashomon, a commentary on the human inability to tell the truth precisely because that is not their purpose. What they represent, I think, is a clamouring of voices that are ultimately eliminated one by one in the ruthless logic of power.

In one of the most compelling scenes in the film, the king is torn between letting the interloper who has just spared his life get off scot-free or liquidating him as his edicts dictate – only to run into the implacable Greek-like chorus of his anonymous courtiers who chant for the intruder’s death. He no longer has a choice.

The tyrant’s decrees, once issued, outweighs even his royal self. Power has a logic all its own, and once unleashed, it is devastating.

Zhang Ziyi in The Road Home, which is a love story with political nuances.
Hero is essentially a film in which the rebel and the ruler sit down to a difficult dialogue. How it ends may be a foregone conclusion but the exchange is illuminating. If To Live represents Zhang Yimou at his most scathing, Hero is Zhang at his cleverest yet. We might do well to ask which of the many points-of-view in the movie actually constitute the authorial voice. I’ll wager it’s not the most straightforward one. –

The Road Home

Does 1999’s The Road Home, about a young girl’s infatuation with the new teacher in her village during the Cultural Revolution, trivialise a whole turbulent era with its excessive focus on a young woman’s romantic torment?

Scarcely.

The Road Home begins and ends in the present day. In between is the main narrative, which is the past. Effectively then, the present bookends the past. What is immediately striking is that it is the present which is shot in murky monochrome whereas the past is in clear vibrant colours. It is as if Zhang is saying that in the murkiness of the present-day there is a lesson to be learnt from the events of the past.

The important events, though, are merely hinted at. We know that the teacher wrote his own textbooks instead of relying on the official curriculum. We know that the teacher is embroiled in some kind of political trouble, which is why he is called away, which is why, in turn, Zhang Ziyi’s character (right) suffers.

And what delirium and agony she goes through.

Watching the film, one gets the feeling that the approach of doggedly avoiding the political is a conscious and conspicuous one.

Even as we are drawn into the self-absorbed world of Zhang Ziyi’s besotted protagonist, we become acutely aware that the political is impinging upon the personal. The personal becomes political, and vice versa.

Sure, it’s a love story but The Road Home is a story in which love is dramatically disrupted by the turbulence of the era. Subtle by subversive.

The Story of Qiu Ju

In The Story of Qiu Ju, Gong Li plays a simple village woman who goes to the city to seek justice from the authorities after her husband is kicked in the groin by the village chief.

She encounters one sympathetic officer after another, each one of them a model of efficiency and credibility.

When the chief saves the pregnant protagonist when she goes into labour, their dispute is resolved – but not as far as the law is concerned.

The authorities finally give Qiu Ju what she seeks, and more.

The chief is hauled away for punishment just as the film is about to conclude on a conciliatory note. Qui Ju is stunned by this turn of event, by what her action has yielded.

“I only want an apology; why an arrest?” she asks.

In this movie, Zhang Yimou may on the surface flatter the state, but as Australian academic Mary Farquhar noted, “The story of Qiu Ju is subversive; it portrays the law as re-rupturing a local community, criminalising a civil dispute . . .”

Rather than take it as the realist drama its documentary approach implies it to be, The Story of Qiu Ju is best viewed as an absurdist tale in which all is not what it seems and there is more to things than meets the eye.

http://www.star-ecentral.com/news/story.asp?file=/2004/8/7/movies/8577041&sec=movies

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the inquirer
Chinese Foreign Ministry deletes Korean history from database
Big Trouble in Little China
By Tamlin Magee: Friday 06 August 2004, 16:06

CHINA HAS REMOVED all pre-1948 Korean history from its Foreign Ministry website, following disputes with the Korean government about distortion of Koguryo history.
The Koguryo kingdom was founded way back in 37 B.C, and is well-known for making a huge contribution to the formation of traditional Korean culture, such as dance and art.

The Chinese government is not complying completely with Korean demands – that the section of Koguryo history be restored correctly – and has responded by deleting every piece of Korean history prior to when the Republic of Korea was founded, in 1948. Korea is accusing China's action as an attempt to "evade the truth."

Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman Shin Bong-kil said on Thursday that "Koguryo history is an indivisible part of our people's history, a historical fact on which we cannot yield."

Additionally, the Chinese government has removed all accounts of Japanese history that occurred before World War 2
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17710

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