Spring finally looks like it’s here to stay in New York, and events abound. Highlights this week include the opening of the new exhibition at Fou Gallery, Min Xiao-fen performing as part of an avant-garde jazz trio, the Asian American Writer’s Workshop discussion about the Chinese diaspora exploring their roots, and China Remix, a film about the African community in Guangzhou.
The Tsai Ming-liang exhibition closes with his “slow monk” films and two critically acclaimed films, Stray Dogs and Goodbye, Dragon Inn.
My Camera Doesn’t Lie? Documentary Aesthetics in East Asia, a series that looks influence of art and society on documentary opens at Columbia University this Friday, April 24. The series screens five films from directors from Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan:
- Toshio Matsumoto’s Nishijin (1961)
- Sung Hwan Kim, From the Commanding Heights… (2007)
- Zhou Tao, Blue and Red (2014)
- Wang Jianwei, Living Elsewhere (1999)
- Chen Chieh-jen, Realm of Reverberations: Tree Planters (2014)
Films are followed by a discussion with panelists from Columbia, Yale, Harvard, the International Center for Photography, and Getty Research Institute and is moderated by Jane DeBevoise, Chair of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong and New York.
Coming up:
S/K, an experimental play by Tingying Ma questions whether the past must burden the present will be staged at the Signature Theater on May 1 and 2
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) Horizontal Transmission and the Formation of Chinese Dialects – Lecture with Zhongwei Shen, Professor of Chinese, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Moderated by Lening Liu, Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University; Director, Confucius Institute of Chinese Language Pedagogy.
Friday, April 24, 10 AM
Kent Hall Room 403, Columbia University
No registration required
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2) ISCP Spring Open Studio 2015 – Taiwanese artists, photographer Isa Ho and mixed media artist Sung-Chih Chen (陳松志) participate in ISCP’s spring Open Studios.
Friday, April 24, 3 – 8 PM
Saturday, April 25, 3- 8 PM
ISCP, 1040 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn
Free
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3) Meet Me in Venice: A Chinese Immigrant’s Journey from the Far East to the Faraway West – Award-winning journalist and author Meet Me in Venice, Suzanne Ma will draw parallels between the Chinese experience in Italy and the Chinese-American experience and talk about the unique challenges she faced reporting and researching her book in China and in Europe. She will also tackle some hard questions: Is life better in the West? And why do so many Chinese immigrants (the largest diaspora in the world) continue to seek better lives outside of China?
Friday, April 24, 6 PM
CUNY Asian/Asian American Research Institute, 25 West 43rd Street, 19th Floor (Room B & C)
Free, but registration requested
4) Zhe Zhu and Zhangbolong Liu : Vanitas/Traces Opening Reception – Opening reception for Fou Gallery’s exhibition of Zhe Zhu’s Vanitas and Zhangbolong Liu’s Traces.
In his Vanitas series, the young photographer Zhe Zhu focuses on a certain type of mood created by the process of deterioration and decay within everyday objects. Zhangbolong Liu’s Traces, on the other hand, the artist captures subtle hints tracing back to past performances or removed objects on a now empty stage.
Friday, April 24, 6 – 8 PM
Carma, 38 Carmine St.
Free
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5) MOCAFILMS: Sneak Preview of Chinese Couplets – Dir. Felicia Lowe | USA | 2015 | 53 mins
In her latest film, Felicia Lowe searches for answers about her mother’s emigration story during the Chinese Exclusion era. Through tough intergenerational conversations, Lowe weaves history into a personal narrative that takes her on a surprising trip to Cuba and a family history in Hawaii in her quest of “the hardest story for me to crack.” Part memoir, part history, part investigation, Chinese Couplets reveals the often painful price paid by immigrants who abandoned their personal identity, the burden of silence they passed onto their offspring, and the intergenerational strife between immigrants and their American born children.
Followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, moderated by Jack Tchen.
Friday, April 24, 6:30 PM
Museum Of Chinese In America, 215 Centre Street
$12/Adult; $7/Students & Seniors; Free/Members
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6) What Time Is It There? / 《你那邊幾點》– Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 2001, 116 mins. 35mm. With Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-chyi, Lu Yi-ching. Hsiao-kang, now selling wristwatches on the streets of Taipei, has a fateful brief encounter one day with Shiang-chyi, a young woman about to leave for France. Things are messy at home, with Hsiao’s mother seeing his father’s reincarnated spirit everywhere, so he escapes by fantasizing about the stranger he barely knows, and the film details their parallel stories. While he sets Taipei clocks to Paris local time, she wanders a strange city alone; while he watches The 400 Blows, she has a chance meeting with star Jean-Pierre Léaud in a Parisian cemetery. “Filled with purposeful, if absurd, activity rendered gravely hilarious through Tsai’s deadpan, distanced representation of extreme behavior.” (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice).
Part of the series Tsai Ming-liang
Friday, April 24, 7 PM
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria
$12/Admission; $9/Senior Citizens and Students
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7) Mbira: Dark Lady of the Sonnets – Pipa player Min Xiao-fen joins avant-garde jazz trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith and drummer Pheeroan Aklaff.
Friday, April 24, 8 PM
The Stone, Corner of 2nd Street and Avenue C
$20/Admission
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8) All Eyes and Ears – When former Utah governor Jon Huntsman was appointed United States Ambassador to China, the charming career politician arrived at his new post with his entire family—including his adopted Chinese daughter, Gracie. Huntsman’s diplomatic struggles and triumphs are explored in the broader context of China’s relationship with the rest of the world, and intersected with Gracie’s personal experience living in China as a Chinese-American.
Part of the Tribeca Film Festival.
Friday, April 24, 9:45 PM
Bow Tie Cinemas Chelsea, 260 W. 23rd Street
Rush tickets available
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9) Beauty of Beauties /《西施》 – The film “Hsi Shih”, based on one of the China’s “Four Great Beauties” who lived during the Spring and Autumn Period, was at the time the biggest-budget Chinese language movie ever made in Taiwan. Actress Ching Chiang (江青) made close to 30 films in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1960′s and 1970′s. She hit her big time in Taiwan’s film industry and won the Best Actress Award at the Taiwan Golden Horse Film Festival in 1967. She was the only movie/stage artist who traversed the three Chinese political entities – PRC, British colonial Hong Kong, and Taiwan – during the Cold War.
More about the film here (in Chinese).
Part of the Taipei Cultural and Economic Office’s series Following in Their Footsteps: A Recollection of Three Influential Taiwanese Artists
Saturday, April 25, 2 PM
Taipei Economic & Cultural Office in New York, 1 E. 42nd St.
Free, but RSVP requested
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10) Journey to the West / 《西遊》and Walker – Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 2014, 56 mins. Digital projection. Tsai’s latest is a study in defiant serenity amid chaos. In the daytime hustle-bustle of Marseille, Lee Kang-sheng, dressed in the orange robes of a Buddhist monk, inches his way along the street at a snail’s pace, his head hung down and eyes fixed on the pavement, to the mystification of the passersby not too busy to notice. Journey to the West is one of a series of films Tsai made with Lee’s Walker character, drawing inspiration from the life of a seventh-century monk who traveled China in search of Buddhist scriptures. Preceded by Walker (2012, 27 mins), in which Lee’s monk makes his way through frantic Hong Kong. (Museum of the Moving Image)
Part of the series Tsai Ming-liang.
Saturday, April 25, 4:45 PM
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria
$12/Admission; $9/Senior Citizens and Students
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11) Stranded in Canton – Lebrun is an entrepreneur from The Democratic Republic of Congo who goes to China intent on making a fortune selling political T-shirts. When things don’t go as planned Lebrun spends more time in karaoke bars and falling in love than he does on business. Somewhere between documentary and fiction, this fascinating story explores new trade routes and their impact in two separate continents.
Part of the Tribeca Film Festival.
Sunday, April 25, 6:45 PM
Bow Tie Cinemas Chelsea, 260 W. 23rd Street
$21.50/General Admission
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12) Stray Dogs / 《郊遊》 – Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 2013, 138 mins. DCP. With Chen Shiang-chyi, Lee
Kang-sheng, Lee Yi-cheng. Tsai’s most majestically desolate feature stars Lee Kang-sheng as a father caring for two young children despite dire poverty, all living in a shipping container while he works as a human signpost to advertise luxury real estate. Keeping the exact nature of interrelationships willfully vague—Why does a female grocery store clerk take a matronly attitude towards the children? How do they land in this bleak, waterlogged apartment with their mother?—Tsai proceeds with a sort of dream-logic to a mysterious, cathartic conclusion that seems to summarize his body of work from Vive L’Amour to Goodbye, Dragon Inn.
Part of the series Tsai Ming-liang.
Saturday, April 25, 7 PM
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria
$12/Admission; $9/Senior Citizens and Students
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13) The Shoe Fairy /《人魚朵朵》 – Dir. Yun-Chan Lee 李芸嬋. 2005. 95 mins. A girl who was born disabled always stays home reading fairy tales. She often wonders whether she has to exchange her voice for a pair of feet like the Little Mermaid if a prince really appears in her life. After a surgery, she can suddenly walk again. One day, she meets a man and they fall in love. Will they live happily ever after?
Part of Taipei Cultural Center’s Female Directors from Taiwan series.
Sunday, April 25, 2 PM
Mid-Manhattan Library, 455 5th Avenue
Free
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14) The Orphan of Zhao – A Chinese Inspiration for the American Revolution? – The Orphan of Zhao (趙氏孤兒), a Chinese opera composed in the 13th century AD, the work expresses elements of the most profound and sublime themes of Greek tragedy, the dialogues of Plato, the greatest stories of the Bible, and the classical drama of Shakespeare, Schiller, and Verdi.” So writes historian Philip Valenti in a recent ground-breaking article. Based on intensive historical research inspired by the December 6, 2014 performance of the opera presented by NYCOS at Pace University, Valenti concludes: “Zhao Shi Gu Er shows that the inner spirit of Chinese culture and the original revolutionary spirit of the United States are almost identical.” He proposes that this discovery could provide a new basis for understanding and cooperation between America and China.
Sunday, April 25, 2:30 PM
NYCOS Office, 120 Broadway, Suite 3650
Free
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15) Past Present / 《昨天》and Walking on Water – Dir. Tiong Guan Saw. 2013, 76 mins. Digital projection. With Chen Shiang-chyi, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee. Preceded by Walking on Water (Dir. Tsai Ming Liang, 2013, 30 mins). With Shiang-chyi, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee. Malaysian filmmaker Tiong Guan Saw’s documentary creates perhaps the most intimate filmed portrait of Tsai by asking him to tell his story from the very beginning—the city of Kuching, where he was raised, and the cinemas where he religiously consumed kung-fu movies with his grandparents—before following him to Taiwan, where he relocated in the 1970s. Tsai’s recollections are combined with testimonials from longtime collaborators like Lee Kang-sheng and Chen Shiang-chyi, as well as admiring colleagues like Ang Lee and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
In Walking on Water (Dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 2013, 30 mins.), Lee’s Walker monk traverses the Kuching housing block that Tsai grew up in.
Part of the series Tsai Ming-liang.
Sunday, April 26, 3:30 PM
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria
$12/Admission; $9/Senior Citizens and Students
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16) Goodbye, Dragon Inn / 《不散》and The Skywalk is Gone – Dir. Tsai Ming-liang. 2003, 82 mins. 35mm. With Lee Kang-sheng, Chen Shiang-chyi, Kiyonobu Mitamura. It’s the last night for a crumbling Fu-Ho movie theater in Taipei, and the film is Dragon Inn (1966), the seminal wuxia by Taiwan-based filmmaker King Hu. The kinetic soundtrack contrasts the theater’s melancholy, slow-moving denizens, including a female box-office attendant with a limp, a cruising Japanese tourist, and two of the stars of Hu’s film. Filled with expertly timed sight gags, Goodbye, Dragon Inn is Tsai’s rueful backwards glance at the disappearance of the filmgoing culture of his youth—and one of the seminal films of the 21st century. “Its simple, meticulously composed frames are full of mystery and feeling; it’s an action movie that stands perfectly still” (A.O. Scott, The New York Times). Preceded by The Skywalk Is Gone (2002, 25 mins. 35mm), a return to the characters of What Time Is It Over There?
Part of the series Tsai Ming-liang.
Sunday, April 26, 6:30 PM
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria
$12/Admission; $9/Senior Citizens and Students
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17) Leaving and Returning to China – So if China’s going to be the capital of the 21st Century, what does it mean to leave this new metropole or come back? Photographer Alan Chin and writers Suzanne Ma and Val Wang, moderated by Wah-Ming Chang. touch upon what it means to immigrate from China and what it means to return–in a time when 50 million Chinese live overseas, and when more people migrate within China than anywhere else in history. (AAWW)
Monday, April 27, 7 PM
Asian American Writers Workshop, 110-112 W 27th Street, Suite 600
Free
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18) Taiwan as a Global Actor: Regional Economic Ties and International Participation – Szu-yin Ho, Tamkang University, and Vincent Wang, University of Richmond talk about Taiwan’s role in the world. Part of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute’s Modern Taiwan Lecture Series.
Tuesday, April 28, 4:10 PM
Schermerhorn Hall, Room 963, Columbia University
Free
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19 The Forbidden City: Then and Now – Nancy S. Steinhardt, Ph.D talks about the Forbidden City as part of China Institute’s short course, Beijing, the City Through Its Architecture.
Wednesday, April 29, 6:30 PM
China Institute in America, 125 E. 65th St.
Members: $150 for full series
Non-Members: $175 for full series
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20) China Remix – Screening of the film China Remix followed by a discussion with Dorian Carli-Jones and Melissa Lefkowitz. Film synopsis: The city of Guangzhou is home to China’s largest community of African immigrants. This short documentary explores the city’s burgeoning African entertainment industry through the lives of three African hip-hop artists who are trying to find success in the face of China’s challenging labor and immigration laws. The film follows the entertainers as they prepare for their shows, perform, and live their daily lives with their Chinese and African family members and friends. Runtime: Approx. 29 min.
Thursday, April 30, 7 PM
NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Free
Ongoing Films and Shows
1) Let’s Get Married / 《咱们结婚吧》– 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 forcehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED-iZFj0wSA 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.”
Check listings at AMC Empire 25
Exhibitions
Just added and Opening:
1) Zhe Zhu and Zhangbolong Liu: Vanitas/Traces 朱喆与刘张铂泷：维尼塔斯/痕迹 (Fou Gallery at Carma, 4/24 – 6/28) – In his Vanitas series, the young photographer Zhe Zhu focuses on a certain type of mood created by the process of deterioration and decay within everyday objects. Zhangbolong Liu’s Traces, on the other hand, captures subtle hints tracing back to past performances or removed objects on a now empty stage.
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2) 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience (New Museum, 2/25 – 5/24) – The New Museum’s signature initiative, the only recurring international exhibition in New York City devoted to early-career artists from around the world, explores the effects of an increasingly connected world both on our sense of self and identity as well as on art’s form and larger social role. The exhibition looks at our immediate present, a time when culture has become more porous and encompassing and new considerations about art’s role and potential are surfacing. Artists are responding to these evolving conditions in a number of ways, from calculated appropriations to critical interrogations to surreal or poetic statements.
Featuring fifty-one artists from over twenty-five countries, including Nadim Abbas (b. 1980, Hong Kong, China. Lives and works in Hong Kong, China); Guan Xiao (b. 1983, Sichuan Province, China. Lives and works in Beijing, China); Li Liao (b. 1982, Hubei, China. Lives and works in Shenzhen, China); and Firenze Lai (b. 1984, Hong Kong, China. Lives and works in Hong Kong, China).
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3) The Revival: William Pang Solo Exhibition (Gallery 456, 4/23 – 5/15) – William Pang ( constructs a poetic utopia with drawings and ceramics – “leftovers of an imaginary city”. Both mediums have interconnected gestures that revive an unfulfilled prophecy of the past that could remind us of the organic Art Nouveau. Pang orchestrates the traditional Chinese skills of drawing in a simultaneous narrative of contemporary urgency; the real power is that of poetry making. The dramatic imagery reveals heavy craft labor that reflects meditative nourishment. The artist offers this to the spectator as an immersive experience. Pang re-charges Chinese history with a weaving loom, appropriating tradition and adding his own visionary narrative of the future as a monk in an urban context.
The artist says of himself: “I am used to be an outsider of outsiders”. (CAAC)
Closing soon:
Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution (China Institute, 4/26) (review)
Wong Kit Yi: North Pole Futures (K., 4/12 – 4/26)
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)
Myth and Mutations (REVERSE, 4/10 – 5/2)
Yan Shanchun (严善錞): West Lake (西湖) (Chambers Fine Art, 2/26 – 5/9)
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.
Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution (China Institute, 4/26) (review)
Wong Kit Yi: North Pole Futures (K., 4/12 – 4/26)
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)
Myth and Mutations (REVERSE, 4/10 – 5/2)
Yan Shanchun (严善錞): West Lake (西湖) (Chambers Fine Art, 2/26 – 5/9)
The Hugo Boss Prize 2014: Paul Chan, Nonprojections for New Lovers (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 3/6 – 5/13)
The Revival: William Pang Solo Exhibition (Gallery 456, 4/23 – 5/15)
The View of Formosa’s Landscape from Photographers (Taipei Cultural Center of TECO, 3/13 – 5/15)
2015 Triennial: Surround Audience (New Museum, 2/25 – 5/24)
The School of Nature and Principle (EFA Project Space, 4/10 – 5/30)
Zhe Zhu and Zhangbolong Liu: Vanitas/Traces 朱喆与刘张铂泷：维尼塔斯/痕迹 (Fou Gallery at Carma, 4/24 – 6/28)
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: Food to Go in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, Photo by Andrew Shiue