This week’s highlights include LEVEL UP, a game design exhibition; TAP-NY’s night market; and the brilliantly titled book release part Welcome to the Republic of Extraordinary Ability.
Events with contemporary Chinese writers or their films continue through Sunday. If you’re curious about Chinese contemporary fiction or are already familiar with the authors, be sure to attend one of the events. Those interested in crime fiction should check out A Perfect Crime with A Yi ((阿乙) on Friday. If spy thrillers are your thing, then Mai Jia (麦家) is the event to catch. Those interested in a contemporary perspective of Beijing might enjoy Running Through Beijing + Beijing Beijing with Feng Tang (冯唐) and Xu Zechen (徐则臣). If you want a broader overview of the literary scene, attend the two events at China Institute on Saturday.
We are compiling a list of Chinese artists are participating in Bushwick Open Studios on June 5 – 7. If you or someone you know is participating, send an email with your name, studio address, and a short artist statement to our exhibitions editor, Hansi Liao at hansi [at] beyondchinatown.com by June 3.
Coming up:
Food of Taiwan author Cathy Erway’s Taiwanese Pub Dinner at Jimmy’s No. 43 which was originally scheduled for March 29 but was canceled because of the building explosion Second Avenue has been rescheduled for June 7. Tickets are available!
Beijing band Birdstriking comes to Brooklyn on June 15.
The New York Asian Film Festival will run from June 26 – July 8 at Film Society of Lincoln Center and July 9 – 11 at SVA Theatre. We’ll have details soon.
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) A Cherry on a Pomegranate Tree 《石榴树上结樱桃》– Guanzhuang Village’s Kong Fanhua will stop at nothing to maintain her position as village head. First she orders her husband back from his job in a coastal city to visibly support her in the upcoming elections. Then she visits the village’s power brokers and young upstarts one-by-one so as to keep them under her control by fair means or foul. But when a villager goes missing – a woman who broke the family planning policy when she became pregnant with a third child – the chaos that ensues transforms the power dynamics in the village and creates the opportunity for a new candidate to emerge. Kong meets her greatest challenge yet in the form of Meng Xiaohong, the young woman whom Kong trained up and once considered her successor. Meng proves herself a worthy competitor by coming up with innovative solutions to the many complex issues facing the village. Adapted from Li Er’s celebrated and controversial novel.
The May 29 screening is followed by a Q&A with author Li Er.
Friday, May 29, 4 PM
Queens Library, Flushing Branch, 41-17 Main Street, Flushing
Free
Saturday, May 30, 1 PM
Brooklyn Public Library, Central Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn
Free
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2) Fantastic Teen Fiction – Cao Wenxuan (曹文轩), author of The Amber Tiles 《大王书：黄琉璃》, joins young adult fiction authors Virginia Boecker, Melissa Grey, Michael Buckley, Rae Carson and Kass Morgan for a panel discussion.
Friday, May 29, 6 PM
Books of Wonder, 18 W. 18th Street
Free
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3) Back to 1942 《一九四二》– A moving historical epic based on a novel by award-winning writer Liu Zhenyun (刘震云) and directed by one of China’s most commercially successful directors, Feng Xiaogang (冯小刚). Joining a well-known Chinese cast in this film that was 19 years in the making are Academy Award winners Adrien Brody and Tim Robbins.
A Q&A with Liu Zhenyun follows Friday’s screening at Asia Society.
In 1942, Henan province was devastated by one of the most tragic famines in modern Chinese history, resulting in the deaths of at least three million people and tens of millions of refugees. Although the primary cause of the famine was a severe drought, it was exacerbated by locusts, windstorms, earthquakes, disease, and the corruption and incompetence of the Nationalist party who had imposed harsh taxes and seized grain to feed the army.
Liu’s novel is based on eyewitness accounts of Pulitzer Prize-winning Time Magazine journalist Theodore H. White. White’s scathing report on the extent of the famine embarrassed Chiang Kai-shek. As the story unfolds, the Chinese government must decide who is fed: their troops or their people.
Friday, May 29, 6:30 PM
Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue
Free
Saturday, May 30, 4 PM
Brooklyn Public Library, Central Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn
Free
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4) Taiwanese Night Market – The Taiwanese American Professionals New York chapter invites you to their Fourth Annual Night Market – a delectable chance to savor and enjoy the culinary creations of some of NYC’s top vendors. This year’s night market will feature authentic Taiwanese dishes, drinks, games, and crafts, recreating the wonderful bustle of Taiwan’s night markets in New York City.
Friday, May 29, 7 PM
The Villain, 50 North 3rd St., Williamsburg
$40 – includes one dish from each of the ten vendors
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5) A Perfect Crime with John Freeman and Chinese author A Yi – Writing at the margins of Chinese society and literature, A Yi’s (阿乙) fiction draws heavily on his experiences as a rural policeman, layering onto this mundane foundation a cutting humor, bizarre narrative twists, and an unnervingly cruel take on human desire and violence. Join A Yi and editor John Freeman in conversation about the balance between fictional material and imagination, and the limits of honesty.
Friday, May 29, 7 PM
Center for Fiction, 17 East 47th Street
Free
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6) Running Through Beijing + Beijing Beijing – Feng Tang (冯唐), author of Beijing, Beijing 《北京北京》joins Xu Zechen (徐则臣), author of Running Through Beijing 《跑步穿过中关村》for a discussion of their books on China’s capital city.
Friday, May 29, 7 PM
Barnes & Noble, 2289 Broadway (82nd and Broadway)
Free
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7) LEVEL UP 2015: Taiwan Game Design Festival in New York – The first edition of the Taiwan Game Festival, held by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York and Taiwanese students in the U.S.
LEVEL UP is designed to bridge the boundaries between cultures and foster cooperation between game makers to achieve their maximum potential. The two-day event will showcase a wide variety of games, board and video, and game-related works by twenty individuals in many diverse fields, including game audio and visual design.
The first day includes panel discussions on design, industry, and business topics with Kyle Li, Program Director of BFA Design & Technology, Parsons; Colin Williamson, Director of Partnerships, SHINRA Technologies; Howard Tsao, CEO, Muse Games; and Tim Doolen, Art Director, Muse Games.
Day two includes screenings of No One is an Island, an hour-long video that expands on the conceptual and formal ideas engaged in by works in LEVEL UP. The game environment, whether that’s the board or the screen, always functions by rules similar to but not quite the same as the larger world.
A kind of separate world within a world, the video game is a virtual island, separated from the continent of the real world by different rules.
Visit the LEVEL UP event page for schedule details.
For event updates, visit the LEVEL UP Facebook page and the No One is an Island Facebook page.
Saturday, May 30, 10 AM – 8 PM
Sunday, May 31, 10 AM – 8 PM
Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York, 1 E. 42nd Street
Free
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8) Literature and Film – with Mai Jia (麦家) and Su Tong (苏童) – Born in 1963 in Suzhou and now living in Nanjing with his family, Su Tong is a bestselling author who attained international recognition in 1993 when Zhang Yimou’s film of his novella, Raise the Red Lantern was nominated for an Academy Award. A number of translations in English, including Madwoman on the Bridge, his first collection of short stories to be published, his novel, Check, a violent drama set in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, published by Doubleday in 2009, and Boat to Redemption, shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in the same year.
Mai Jia, (the pen name of Jiang Benhu), was born in 1964. In 2002, he published his first novel Decoded, which took him eleven years to write, but made him famous overnight. After which he has commonly been acknowledged as the “father of Chinese thrillers,” and the “king of spy novels”. After Decoded, he published five novels including, Plot, Sound of the Wind, Whispers on the Wind and The Edge of the Knife, all of which became overnight bestsellers. Currently, he is one of China’s most famous spy thriller author
Saturday, May 30, 11 AM
New Utrecht Library, 1743 86th St. at Bay 17th St. Brooklyn
Free
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9) Chinese and American Poetry Reading – Chinese and American Poetry Reading Featuring Lan Lan (蓝蓝), Zhao Lihong (赵丽宏), Edwin Frank, Canaan Morse and Peter Gizzi with an Introduction and Moderated by Eleanor Goodman
Saturday, May 30, 1 PM
Bowery Poetry, 308 Bowery
Free
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10) Celebrated Voices of Contemporary Chinese Fiction: A Dialogue with Liu Zhenyun, Mai Jia, Sheng Keyi, Su Tong, Xu Zechen – China Institute hosts Liu Zhenyun (刘震云), Mai Jia (麦家), Sheng Keyi (盛可以), Su Tong (苏童), and Xu Zechen (徐则臣).
Saturday, May 30, 3 PM
China Institute in America, 125 E. 65th Street
$10/Members; $15/Non-members
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11) A Roundtable Discussion: A Yi, Cao Wenxuan, Lan Lan, Li Er, Su Kui, Xu Zechen – China Institute hosts A Yi (阿乙) ,Cao Wenxuan (曹文轩),Lan Lan (蓝蓝), Li Er (李洱), Su Kui (苏葵), and Xu Zechen (徐则臣).
The discussion will be in Mandarin.
Saturday, May 30, 5:30 PM
China Institute in America, 125 E. 65th Street
$Free/Members; $5/Non-members
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12) The Stolen Years《被偷走的那五年》 Hong Kong writer director Barbara Wong sets the story in Taipei, 2012. After being in a coma for a month, He Man (Bai Baihe) wakes up in hospital with amnesia. The last thing she can remember is having an accident on a motorbike with her husband Xie Yu (Joseph Chiang) while on their honeymoon – but that was five years ago, and He Man is told that she and Xie Yu are now divorced. He Man and Xie Yu have to find out whether they can re-ignite their original love.
Sunday, May 31, 1 PM
Brooklyn Public Library, Central Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn
Free
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13) Chinese Music Ensemble NY: 2015 Annual Spring Concert – Features ancient Chinese classical to modern compositions performed on traditional Chinese instruments in various settings from small ensembles to the entire full orchestra.
Sunday, May 31, 2:30 PM
Kaufman Music Center, 129 West 67th Street
$25/General Admission; $15/Students and Seniors
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14) I am a Genius 《我不是傻瓜》, aka My Running Shadow 《我的影子在奔跑》 – Director Fang Gangliang tells the beautiful story of Xiuzhi, a math wizard with Aspergers syndrome, who meets his father who comes back from America for the first time when he is seventeen years old. His father intends to take him to America for further studies. When Xiuzhi is about to leave his mother, he finally realizes what she means to him.
Sunday, May 31, 4 PM
Brooklyn Public Library, Central Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn
Free
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15) Welcome to the Republic of Extraordinary Ability – A book release party with theatre, music, and poetry for Alien of Extraordinary Ability: Collected Short Plays by Zhu Yi to raise awareness on the institutional barriers that international artists are facing in the US.
Sunday, May 31, 7 PM
Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie Street
Free, but RSVP required
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16) Sung-Chih Chen: Time After Time Opening Reception – Opening reception for a new solo exhibition featuring mixed media artist Sung-Chih Chen. See exhibition details below.
Thursday, June 4, 6 PM
Gallery 456, 456 Broadway, 3rd Floor
Free
Ongoing Films and Shows
We’ll let you know as soon as we know.
Exhibitions
Just added and opening:
1) Huang Rui: Language Color (Zürcher Gallery, 5/26 – 7/4) – Huang Rui’s (黄锐) first solo exhibition in the United States is focused on painting, a practice which marked significantly each step of Huang Rui’s artistic process from the eighties through today.
Huang Rui (Born in Beijing, 1952) is one of China’s most highly regarded artists. He was a founding member of the Chinese avant-garde group the Stars (Xing Xing), which included artists Wang Keping, Ai Weiwei, Ma Desheng, among others and was active from 1979 to 1983. This groundbreaking group of artists was the first active art collective to protest government censorship after the Cultural Revolution.
Huang Rui has been considered a major vocal advocate of the 798 Art Zone in Beijing. He was instrumental in the establishment of the art district in 2002, and in the efforts to protect the area from demolition in 2004 and 2005. In 2006, 798 became the first state recognized and protected art district in China. This success was due in a large part to Huang Rui’s efforts to promote the district through the Dashanzi International Art Festivals (DIAF) and his book Beijing798. Huang Rui most often creates paintings referencing various Western artistic styles. However through the development of his style, he became more experimental and began exploring different mediums including photography, printmaking, installation, and performance art. As a result, his work is not easily classified.
2) Sung-Chih Chen: Time After Time (陳松志: 落花) (Gallery 456, 6/4- 6/26) – Sung-Chih Chen was born in Taiwan in 1978. Over the years, his works began with their concepts, and used the vocabulary of the materials themselves to present the emotional fragments often overlooked in life. The main presentation method is mixed media installation. He is adept at exploring the substantial character and aesthetics in order to consider the dual opposition and causal relationships between “daily life/art” and “construction/destruction.” In past creative work, he used daily life as the topic, blending in the narration of temporal events in the individual and society. These existing ordinary materials are rearranged by the creator, converting the original character unlike roughness and coldness, intricately injecting thick and complex psychological elements, and his works tend to have warmth and poetry.
“Time After Time – Sung-Chih Chen’s personal exhibition” showed the work “Untitled 2015” in response to Gallery 456’s invitation for a site specific installation in New York. The work continued the lingering depictions of time and traces in the work of Sung-Chih Chen; the coincidence of blooming flowers in the spring in New York elicited the artist’s curious observations for weak matters in the natural scenery. In the work, recycled printed sheets and plastic bags were molded to create a space with fallen blossoms to elicit entangled likes, dislikes, and refusals in the viewer. In this imaginative space gathered complex emotions, full of invalid and cheap materials in the world of consumption. The artist used the artistic event to continue the meaning of material existence, creating a mosaic of the disappearing marks of time from the collected fragments. An overview of the connected and remaining parts, the artist guides the viewer in a process of emptying meaning and using speed to convert emotional perception. Between form and meaning, it teases the viewer’s artistic philosophical thought about existing materials, the displays, and life. Flowers blooming and falling are normal phenomena of natural life and existence, “falling flowers (Time After Time)” are manifested in another value to re-evaluate the deep meaning of the rise and fall of life (substance).
Closing soon:
The School of Nature and Principle (EFA Project Space, 4/10 – 5/30)
Chien-Chi Chang: Double Happiness (inCube Arts SPACE, 5/15 – 5/30)
Open Door Discourse (NARS Foundation, 5/21 – 6/18)
Guang Zhu: Aquarium of Equations #2 (HERE, 4/30 – 6/20)
Cecile Chong: Time Collision (Project Room at BRIC House, 5/21 – 6/21)
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.
The School of Nature and Principle (EFA Project Space, 4/10 – 5/30)
Chien-Chi Chang: Double Happiness (inCube Arts SPACE, 5/15 – 5/30)
Open Door Discourse (NARS Foundation, 5/21 – 6/18)
Guang Zhu: Aquarium of Equations #2 (HERE, 4/30 – 6/20)
Cecile Chong: Time Collision (Project Room at BRIC House, 5/21 – 6/21)
Sung-Chih Chen: Time After Time (Gallery 456, 6/4 – 6/26)
Ciu Xiuwen (崔岫闻): Awaking of the Flesh (崔岫聞:肉身的覺醒) (Klein Sun Gallery, 5/7 – 6/27)
Wu Yuren: On Parole (吳玉仁:假釋) (Klein Sun Gallery, 5/7 – 6/27)
Su-Mei Tse: one thousand and one dreams behind us (Peter Blum Gallery, 4/24 – 6/27)
Building Stories (ATP Gallery, 5/8 – 6/27)
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)
Huang Rui: Language Color (Zürcher Gallery, 5/26 – 7/4)
Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera (Grey Art Gallery, 4/21 – 7/11)
New Ways of Seeing: Beyond Culture (Dorsky Gallery, 5/10 – 7/12)
Happy Together (Tina Kim Gallery, 5/15 – 7/3)
China: Through the Looking Glass (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 5/7- 8/16)
The Great Ephemeral (New Museum, 5/27 – 9/6)
Water to Paper, Paint to Sky: The Art of Tyrus Wong (Museum of Chinese in America, 3/26 – 9/13)
Image: Helmets in Taipei, Photo by Andrew Shiue