The Tsai Ming-liang retrospective opens at the Museum of the Moving Image, and Film Society screens one of his films. There’s a great overview of Tsai’s work by David Hudson at Fandor.
Other things this week: hands-on Chinese folk arts on tour; an art salon on photo manipulation; a talk about fashion during the Cultural Revolution, traditional music from Taiwan; a Neo-Confucianism-themed exhibition; films and a talk about identity…
This might be our longest event post so far this year. So, take a look to see what else is going on…
Coming up:
The Tribeca Film Festival includes two Chinese films, Stranded in Canton about an entrepreneurial man from The Democratic Republic of Congo who tries his hand at selling political in China and All Eyes and Ears, a look at former U.S. Ambassador and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman experiences in China and his adopted Chinese daughter’s experiences growing up Chinese American.
Asia Society celebrates Earth Day with a film by Chinese wildlife photographer Xi Zhinong on April 22.
Fou Gallery is back with a new exhibition, Vanitas/Traces on April 24.
We add listings to our one-time and short term event and ongoing exhibition calendars as we learn of them. If you know of anything or would like to contribute photos or an article, shoot us an email at beyondchinatown@gmail.com.
Upcoming Events
1) The School of Nature and Principle Opening Reception – Opening for a group show that explores Neo-Confucian philosophy, speculating on the relationship between metaphysics and contemporary society. See the exhibition section below for further details.
Friday, April 10, 6 – 8 PM
EFA Project Space, 323 W. 39th St., 2nd Floor
Free
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2) Slow Made in China: Transmitting Cultural DNA – 11 masters of Chinese folk art from 8 provinces of China will show amazing works in various media such as embroidery, paper cutting, silver inlay, olive nut carving. Artists will also present talks, and attendees will be able to try their hand at these crafts.
Friday, April 10, 6:30 – 9:30 PM
NYU Kimmel Center, 60 Washington Sq South
Free
Monday, April 13, 4 – 7 PM
SIPA, Columbia University, 420 W 118th St.
Free
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3) Vive L’amour /《愛情萬歲》– Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 1994, 118 mins. Archival 35mm print. Chen Chao-jung, Lee Kang-sheng, Yang Kuei-mei. Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and, for critic Robin Wood, Tsai’s “finest,” Vive L’Amour is the film that introduced him to an international audience, garnering comparisons to Antonioni’s studies in urban anomie. Lee plays Tsai’s emblematic onscreen double Hsiao-kang, who works in the funeral urn business and is unsurprisingly death-obsessed. When he goes to attempt suicide in a mostly vacant apartment building, Hsiao is distracted by the sounds of a steamy affair between a real-estate agent and a street vendor in an adjacent apartment. As Hsiao shadows them, a strange love triangle emerges, with tension building until the wrenching emotional outburst of the famous final shot.
Introduced by Kent Jones
Followed by a reception sponsored by the Taipei Cultural Center of TECO in New York
Part of the series Tsai Ming-liang
Friday, April 10, 7 PM
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria
$12/Admission; $9/Senior Citizens and Students
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4) MOCAFAMILY: Qing Ming Family Festival! – Join MOCA for a fun-filled afternoon of activities celebrating family, springtime, and Qing Ming traditions! Share your family memories and learn all about this unique holiday by making nature inspired crafts, listening to classic tales, and creating a community kite.
Saturday, April 11, 12 – 4 PM
Museum of Chinese in America, 215 Centre Street
$10/person; $8/ for MOCA Dual and Individual Level Members; Free/MOCA Family Level Members and above, children under 2, and Cool Culture families.
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5) Boys /《小孩》– Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 1991, 50 mins. Digital projection. With Lee Kang-sheng. While preparing to shoot this short feature for television, Tsai discovered and auditioned a young man working as a guard at a video arcade. This was Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai’s muse-to-be, who has appeared in all of his feature films to date. Lee plays a junior-high student who bullies and blackmails a younger boy, then receives the same treatment at the hands of some older students, in what could be a practice run for the presentation of dog-eat-dog youth in the following year’s Rebels of the Neon God. One of ten television features Tsai wrote between 1989 and 1991, Boys offers a rare glimpse into his apprenticeship period. “I decided to be more accepting of Hsiao-kang’s acting, rather than force him to react quicker,” said Tsai. “If that’s the way he reacts, that’s the way he is.”
Part of the series Tsai Ming-liang
Saturday, April 11, 2 PM
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria
$12/Admission; $9/Senior Citizens and Students
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6) The River / 《河流》– Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 1997, 115 mins. Archival 35mm print. With Miao Tien, Lee Kang-sheng, Lu Yi-ching. “Perhaps the most harrowing of Tsai’s meditations on urban isolation… trains the director’s unblinking gaze on the breakdown of the nuclear family.” (Elvis Mitchell). Talked into playing a dead body on a film shoot, Hsiao-kang agrees to lie face-down in the polluted Tamsui River, and shortly thereafter develops a mysterious neck pain. The lingering effects create tension in the apartment that he shares with his parents, which each member of the family escapes to pursue some kind of satisfaction on their own. Concluding with a startling eruption of repressed desire, The River is among Tsai’s most divisive and uncompromising works. (Museum of the Moving Image)
Part of the series Tsai Ming-liang
Saturday, April 11, 3:30 PM
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria
$12/Admission; $9/Senior Citizens and Students
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7) MOCAFILMS: Finding Samuel Lowe: From Harlem to China – Dir. Jeannette Kong. USA, 2014, 58 Min. The moving story of former television executive Paula Williams Madison, a Jamaican American woman who went in search of her mother’s father, Samuel Lowe—and discovered her own Chinese roots.
Saturday, April 11, 5 PM
Museum of Chinese in America, 215 Centre Street
$12/person; $7/Students & Seniors; Free/MOCA members
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8) The Hole / 《洞》– Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 1998, 95 mins. Archival 35mm print from UCLA Film & Television Archive. With Yang Kuei-mei, Lee Kang-sheng, Miao Tien. Part musical, part-apocalyptic fable, and entirely without precedent, Tsai’s fourth feature begins a week shy of 2000, as Taipei is in the grip of a mysterious epidemic (“Taiwan Fever”) ensuing after a monsoon. Lagging behind the evacuation, Hsiao-kang meets his downstairs neighbor when a plumber accidentally creates a hole connecting their apartments, a breach that gradually widens. Tsai contrasts the dreariness of the apartment block with the splendiferous production numbers set to the lip-synched music of Grace Chang, sequences that are lavish expressions of bottled-up desire.
Saturday, April 11, 6:30 PM
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria
$12/Admission; $9/Senior Citizens and Students
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9) Twin Bracelets /《雙鐲》– Dir. Yu-shan Huang 黃玉珊. 1999, 99 mins. In a small Chinese fishing town, two teenage girls who are best friends become torn apart when one becomes happily married to a stranger and the other is cruelly betrothed to the abusive son of a wealthy family. Seeking to free herself from a lifetime of abuse, she desperately looks for a way out.
Read more about this feminist film on Wikipedia.
Part of Taipei Cultural Center’s Female Directors from Taiwan series
Sunday, April 12, 2 PM
Mid-Manhattan Library, 455 5th Avenue
Free
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10) MOCACITIZEN: Uncovering My Family Story with Amy Chin – Amy Chin’s multi-generational family story – told through 12 graphic novel panels – is part of the exhibition Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion at the New-York Historical Society. Join us for a behind the scenes look at how Amy researched and uncovered her family’s century-old history in America.
Sunday, April 12, 2:30 PM
Museum of Chinese in America, 215 Centre Street
$12/person; $7/Students & Seniors; Free/MOCA members
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11) Chirping Bird Salon Vol. 003 | What You See Might Be False – A discussion of the history and influence of photomanipulation on photography, fine arts, and society. In Mandarin.
Sunday, April 12, 3 PM
1510 Lexington Ave, Rooftop
Free
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12) The Wayward Cloud / 《天邊一朵雲》– Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 2005, 112 mins. 35mm. Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-chyi, Lu Yi-ching. A diversion, digression, or break from Tsai’s ongoing process of paring down his style to an ever-more-deadpan minimalism, The Wayward Cloud is perhaps the most misunderstood of his films, and ripe for reappraisal. Hsiao-kang, now working in Taipei’s porn industry, lives in the same building as Shiang-chyi, and an initial meet-cute soon leads down a wormhole of dark, depersonalized sexual transactions. Tsai fills his film with uncharacteristically expressive cutting and colorful, often crassly humorous musical numbers, including a showstopping Black Widow number for Tsai mainstay Lu Yi-ching. “Tsai’s least perfect film…and also his boldest” (Michael Koresky, Reverse Shot).
Sunday, April 12, 6:30 PM
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria
$12/Admission; $9/Senior Citizens and Students
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13) Native Peoples of Taiwan in Present-day Society – Scott Simon, sociology professor at the University of Ottawa talks about native peoples of Taiwan in present-day society. Part of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute’s Modern Taiwan Lecture Series.
Tuesday, April 14, 4:10 PM
Schermerhorn Hall, Room 963, Columbia University
Free
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14) Beyond the Surface: Contemporary Photography Group Exhibition – Opening reception for a photo exhibition featuring Korean and Chinese artists
Tuesday, April 14, 7 PM
Ouchi Gallery, 170 Tillary Street, Suite 105, Brooklyn
Free
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15) Saving Face – In this film, a Chinese-American lesbian and her traditionalist mother are reluctant to go public with secret loves that clash against cultural expectations.
Hosted by Fordham University’s Office of Multicultural Affairs
Tuesday, April 14, 6:30 PM
Fordham University Lincoln Center, South Lounge (Cafeteria)
Free
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16) Fashion and Gender in Mao’s China – Was the Maoist revolution anti-fashion? From the eyes of the women who lived through the tumultuous decades, the answer was not so simple. Come see how women’s dress was in fact more colorful and changeable than it may appear in the propaganda posters. Presented by Dorothy Ko, Professor of History, Barnard College and Columbia University
Wednesday, April 15, 6:30 PM
China Institute in America, 125 East 65th St.
$10/Members; $15/Non-members; Free/Friends of the Gallery
17) The Charms of Silk and Bamboo – Taipei Cultural Center will present Taiwan Traditional Music Concert featuring:
Wei-yang (Andy) Lin（Erhu）
Yimin Miao（Dizi & Xiao）
Shih-hua Judy Yeh（Guzheng & Guqin）
Joy Chi Wang（Piano, Noseflute & Ruan）
Thursday, April 16, 2 – 3 PM
Taiwan Academy, 1 E. 42nd Street
Free
Ongoing Films and Shows
1) Rebels of the Neon God /《青少年哪吒》 – Ahead of its screening as part of the Tsai Ming-liang retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image, the film gets a week-long run in Manhattan.
Tsai Ming-liang’s feature debut introduces antihero Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng, who has reprised the role in nearly all of Tsai’s later works, including Stray Dogs, NYFF51), a sullen youth sharing a Taipei apartment with his mother and cabbie father who believes he’s the reincarnation of a spiteful god. Something of a low-key anarchist, Hsiao-kang impulsively drops out of his college-prep course and pockets the tuition money. Striking out on his own, he falls in with the bikers who vandalized his father’s cab (Chen Chao-jung and Jen Chang-bin) and the disaffected girl (Wang Yu-wen) who follows them around. A stark but sympathetic portrait of teenage alienation, Rebels of the Neon God reimagines Rebel Without a Cause amid a nocturnal landscape of urban decay, a Taipei bathed in the glow of arcade machines, noisy mopeds and festering back-alley sludge. A perversely funny and haunting sign of things to come in Tsai’s singular and acclaimed career, Rebels of the Neon God deserves to be counted among the most auspicious debuts of the past several decades. A Big World Pictures release. (Film Society)
See Film Society page for screening times.
April 10 – April 16
Howard Gilman Theater, Lincoln Center 144 W. 65th St.
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2) Let’s Get Married / 《咱们结婚吧》 / 《咱們結婚吧》– Wenwen, the owner of a bridal boutique, longs to find Mr. Right and walk down the aisle in one of her beautiful wedding gowns. Yi Wen, a violinist, wavers over her engagement after meeting a mysterious man in a foreign country. Lei Xiao, an airport employee, tries to force her pilot boyfriend to marry her. And Hai Xin, a successful business woman, finds herself in a broken marriage and unexpectedly pregnant. Based on the hugely popular Chinese TV series of the same name, Let’s Get Married follows the lives of four couples looking for love and to find that special someone to say “I do.”
Opens April 3. Check listings at AMC Empire 25
Exhibitions
Just added and Opening:
1) Beyond the Surface: Contemporary Photography Group Exhibition (Ouchi Gallery, 4/14 – 4/19) – Show featuring Korean and Chinese photographers include Zilan Fan (范子岚), Xiao Fu (符晓), Zhongsheng Gu (顾忠升), Xingyi Shi (史迎曦,) Bo Zhang (张波), Yingxi Huang (黄映晞), Ming Yang (杨 明), Zheheng Hong (洪喆恒)
2) The School of Nature and Principle (EFA Project Space, 4/10 – 5/30) – An ensemble of works speculating on the relationship between metaphysics and various aspects of contemporary society. The exhibition also addresses, partly through the way it was conceived, the gradual evolution (or deterioration) of highly organized thought systems from their initial implementation to their eventual adaptation to society and actual human behavior. Taking Neo-Confucianism as his departure point (specifically the branch known as the School of Nature and Principle, which proposes a way of relating to and behaving in the world), curator Emiliano Valdés has assembled an international group of artists whose work explores the validity of non-rational knowledge, our relation to the natural world and technology, and simply what it means to be alive today.
Artists: Javier Barrios, Tyler Coburn, Regina Jose Galindo, Rodrigo Hernández, Federico Herrero,
Akira Ikezoe, Chosil Kil, Catalina León, Gabriel Lester, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, and Yu-Hsien Su.
3) Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera (Grey Art Gallery, 4/21 – 7/11) – Tseng Kwong Chi (born 1950, Hong Kong; died 1990, New York) is internationally known for his photographic series Expeditionary Self-Portrait Series a.k.a. East Meets West. In over 100 images, he poses in front of iconic architecture and sublime nature as his invented artistic persona, a Chinese “Ambiguous Ambassador” in the classic Mao suit. “A cross between Ansel Adams and Cindy Sherman,” the work explores tourist photography in a playful juxtaposition of truth, fiction, and identity.
The exhibition’s subtitle, Performing for the Camera, points to the masquerade and theatricality at the root of Tseng’s conceptual photography. Performance allowed Tseng to maneuver like a chameleon, insinuating himself with equal poise into nightclubs, art openings, beach parties, and posh society galas. Yet in nearly every photograph of these encounters, Tseng’s unchanging costume and Asian identity mark him as an outsider. Exemplifying the complexity of “East meets West,” Tseng’s work illuminates the eclectic practices of this fascinating period, when artists mixed personal politics, public display, and social disruption to break down barriers between various media and reinvent performance art.
Closing soon:
Anicka Yi: You Can Call Me F (The Kitchen, 512 W 19th St, 3/5 – 4/11)
Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion (New York Historical Society, 4/19)
Beyond the Surface: Contemporary Photography Group Exhibition (Ouchi Gallery, 4/14 – 4/19)
Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution (China Institute, 4/26) (review)
Let us know if there’s something people need to see.
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Visit the exhibition calendar (http://ow.ly/pxe9o) for details for the following shows below. As always, check the museum or gallery’s website for hours of operation. We’ve noted exhibitions for which a review has been published.
Anicka Yi: You Can Call Me F (The Kitchen, 512 W 19th St, 3/5 – 4/11)
Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion (New York Historical Society, 4/19)
Beyond the Surface: Contemporary Photography Group Exhibition (Ouchi Gallery, 4/14 – 4/19)
Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution (China Institute, 4/26) (review)
Shen Shaomin (沉少民 / 沈少民) : Handle with Care (小心轻放 / 小心輕放) (Klein Sun Gallery, 3/7 – 5/2)
Yan Shanchun (严善錞): West Lake (西湖) (Chambers Fine Art, 2/26 – 5/9)
The View of Formosa’s Landscape from Photographers (Taipei Cultural Center of TECO, 3/13 – 5/15)
The School of Nature and Principle (EFA Project Space, 4/10 – 5/30)
Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera (Grey Art Gallery, 4/21 – 7/11)
Water to Paper, Paint to Sky: The Art of Tyrus Wong (Museum of Chinese in America, 3/26 – 9/13)
Image: An artist on “Calligraphy Street”, Xian, Photo by Andrew Shiue