Cinema on the Edge: The Best of the Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012 – 2014 wraps up its amazing presentation of Chinese films with a series of documentaries, including Hu Jie who looks critically at Mao’s China.
Photography pop-up Photoville includes two exhibitions presenting three photographers who document China and a panel that shares insights about doing documentary photography from inside China, where journalists often face restrictions and unpredictable obstacles.
Get ready for the Mid-Autumn festival with an opera-in-progress at Flushing Town Hall about Chang E.
Local artists Fu Xiao, Fina Yeung, and Naomi Kuo open exhibitions, and Klein Sun Gallery, Chambers Fine Art, and Paul Kasmin Gallery have shows opening this week. WhiteBox Gallery in Chinatown presents a group show of 22 artists which include 6 Chinese artists that uses the situation of “comfort women” as a starting point to discuss the theme of sexual violence against women.
Coming up:
SVA’s Social Documentary MFA program thesis showcase will include films by four Chinese filmmakers.
Mezzo-soprano Pang Yixuan graces the stage at Carnegie Hall and performs operatic works and Chinese folk songs on October 3.
The Modern Sky Festival returns to New York for a second year on October 4 with an incredible line up of American and Chinese bands.
In October, the New York Film Festival presents U.S. premieres of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin 《聶隱娘》 and Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart 《山河故人》, hosts talk with both directors, and screens King Hu’s A Touch of Zen 《俠女》.
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.
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Coming up this week…
1) Xiao Fu Solo Exhibition Opening Reception – Xiao Fu’s installation Pixel World was originally shown as part of Home Improvement, a group show of outdoor sculpture curated by Deborah Brown and Lesley Heller on Rock Street for Bushwick Open Studios 2015. For her exhibition at STE, Fu has reconfigured the work to respond to an indoor gallery space. Fu creates works that are mainly concerned with her personal observations about the urban experience. Fu responds to experiences and perceptions unique to densely populated urban settings, such as a sense of crowded loneliness and the resulting psychological distance between people in close physical proximity. As an international artist living in New York City, she often feels dislocation and stress due to cultural differences, the scale of the architectural surroundings and the crowded conditions of daily life that create a metaphorical and literal wall around her. In response to these sensations, Fu minimizes the cityscape in her work to simple geometric forms to present how she sees the urban environment and the relationship between its people, spaces and structures. The goal is to allow a viewer the opportunity to observe contemporary social constructs from a distance, providing them with a new perspective.
The exhibition runs through October 11.
Friday, September 11, 6 PM
Storefront Ten Eyck, 324 Ten Eyck St, Bushwick, Brooklyn
Free
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Directed by Yang Pingdao
2014, 101 min, digital
In Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles
Yang Pingdao is one of China’s most exciting emerging filmmakers. His astonishingly creative camera eye brings unexpected beauty to his new feature length film. Using an innovative structure, based on the distinctive texture of family memory through space and time, Yang invents something poised delicately between fiction and documentary to capture crystallized moments in his family history, to recreate in cinematic form its emotional weight and variety, woven around the life and death of his grandmother, and the birth of his child. In order to combine extended family chronicle, implicit national history, and intimate soul-bearing autobiography, Yang employs gentle formal experimentation to invent new cinematic pathways.
Followed by a post-screening discussion via video conference with the director.
Part of Cinema on the Edge: The Best of the Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012 – 2014
Friday, September 11, 7:30 PM
UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, 322 Union Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
$9/Admission
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3) “Who is My Neighbor? NYC” – Opening Reception and Artist Panel – Fina Yeung and Naomi Kuo, two local artists whom we interviewed earlier this year, are part of this exhibition that juxtaposes the work of artists from throughout New York City, whose artwork reflects positive interaction with diverse neighbors and communities, this exhibition features multiple perspectives on the ways art can be a conduit for dialogue and interaction. In a city where diversity abounds, and communities can change from block to block, we invite artwork that interrogates, critiques, affirms, and contributes to healthy exchange around what it means to “live well” in diverse community in New York City. What does it mean to practice hospitality and welcome in a New York City neighborhood?
The exhibition runs through December 18.
Saturday, September 12, 4 PM
Walls-Ortiz Gallery and Center, 2204 Frederick Douglass Boulevard
Free
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4) Wang Dongling: New Works Opening Reception – In the new body of works dating from 2015 in the present exhibition, Wang has achieved a new level of freedom of expression. Although they refer to poems and texts from the Tang and Song dynasties, sometimes just focusing on several characters, the meaning resides in the unmistakable character of Wang’s calligraphy. Whether nearly filling the sheet of paper or canvas with dense accumulations of brush strokes or less densely applied skeins of strokes of varying degrees of intensity, Wang’s calligraphies are immediately recognizable. In a discussion of this form of calligraphy, critic Gao Shiming has observed that “writing becomes pure trace. Thus the corporality and the gesture of writing becomes the essence.”
The artist will give a calligraphy demonstration during the opening reception at 5 PM.
Saturday, September 12, 4 PM
Chambers Fine Art, 522 West 19th Street
Free
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5) Spark 《星火》–
Directed by Hu Jie
2014, 101 min, digital
In Mandarin with English subtitles
Probably China’s most important unofficial historian-filmmaker, Hu Jie documents with his camera episodes that Chinese official history, for now, ignores. Spark was an underground magazine published in 1960 by four young intellectuals who wanted to expose the devastating famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a horrendous period of national suffering that is still unmentioned in China’s history textbooks today. This is filmmaking as urgent historical investigation: with a shoestring budget Hu combines years of research, and a knack for getting people to talk without fear about the most taboo subjects in China’s recent past. His alternative oral history approach knits together courageous and frequently moving interviews with the magazine’s surviving editor, supporters, and readers, who were ready to sacrifice themselves to alert their countrymen to unprecedented disaster.
Political scholar Andrew Nathan will introduce the film and lead a post-screening discussion.
Here’s an interview with Hu Jie
Part of Cinema on the Edge: The Best of the Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012 – 2014
Saturday, September 12, 5 PM
UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, 322 Union Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
$9/Admission
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6) Stratum 1: The Visitors 《底层1:来客》
Directed by Cong Feng
2013, 71 min, digital
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Poet and filmmaker Cong Feng started to film a documentary about whole-scale urban demolition in the Beijing suburb of Tongzhou, but discovered that the extraordinary rapidity of change and the furious power of China’s history of destruction required something more experimental, more essay-like. From hallucinatory (are they perhaps utopian? despairing?) images of a bulldozer seeming to conjure up a building from its rubble, we follow two characters wandering through debris, telling stories of childhood trauma (featuring canine, not human loyalty during a horrific episode from the Cultural Revolution). Cong, like a visual paleo-geologist, unearths surreal, chilling images of otherworldly beauty emanating from the buried strata of this collapsing world, whose history threatens to be suffocated by layers of experience, of loss, of unremembered suffering.
Saturday, September 12, 8:30 PM
UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, 322 Union Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
$9/Admission
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7) Reporting Inside the Great Wall: Photographers on Covering China – Many photojournalists rely on the basic protections of freedom of speech and freedom of the press to move freely, to access their subjects, and to bring their images to the public. But what is it like to photograph and report in the People’s Republic, where censorship is the norm and journalists often face more restrictions than regular citizens? How do journalists and the organizations who support them navigate this system in order to continue sharing complex, comprehensive stories from within China?
Michael Yamashita, who has been photographing for National Geographic for over 30 years; Muyi Xiao, a former staff photographer for China’s news site Tencent; and David Barreda, Visuals Editor for ChinaFile will share their insights from reporting in China. The panel will be moderated by The Economist’s Gady Epstein, who has been reporting on China since 2002.
Sunday, September 13, 1-2 PM
Photoville Pavillion, Photoville, Brooklyn Bridge Park
Free
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Painter Huang Jing Yuan will talk with art historian Christine I Ho about how a single artist might have a collective practice.
Part of Really, Socialism? (Facebook series page), an exhibition curated by David Xu Borgonjon that examines the past of the socialist image in order to speculate on the future. Through the work of artists intimately involved in the aesthetic legacies of socialism, this exhibition seeks to stimulate viewers into a reappraisal of post-war art and its relevance for strategies of exit from the world-as-market.
Sunday, September 13, 2 – 3:30 PM
Momenta Art, 56 Bogart St, Bushwick, Brooklyn
Free
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9) I Want to Be a People’s Representative 《我要当人民代表》
Directed by Jia Zhitan
2014, 78 min, digital
In Hunanese with English subtitles.
Can a documentary camera be a tool for democracy in China? Jia Zhitan certainly thinks so, and wields his camera like an anti-bureaucratic weapon. Jia, a member of Caochangdi’s influential Villagers Documentary Project (organizer Wu Wenguang has been training local villagers to use digital video cameras to record their participation in ultra-local politics), wants to run to be a delegate to the National People’s Congress. He wins the first round, but is deemed unqualified by officials for reasons they keep to themselves. As the irrepressibly scrappy and stubborn Jia seeks explanations and redress from ever higher levels of authority, he records their interactions scenes that would play as entertaining satiric comedy if they weren’t so frustratingly real.
Part of Cinema on the Edge: The Best of the Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012 – 2014
Sunday, September 13, 3 PM
UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, 322 Union Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
$9/Admission
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10) Moon in the Mirror – Monodrama Opera – Just ahead of the Moon Festival, Flushing Town Hall Space Grant recipients Martine Bellen, Zhang Er and Stephen Dembski tell the story of a contemporary Chang E who chooses immortality and life on the moon over a childless sentence of domesticity with her absent husband. Featuring Hai-Ting Chinn in the role of the disgruntled demigoddess of the moon, accompanied by Vicky Chow on piano. Music by Stephen Dembski. Libretto by Zhang Er & Martine Bellen.
Part of Cinema on the Edge: The Best of the Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012 – 2014
Sunday, September 13, 3 PM
Flushing Town Hall, 137-35 Northern Blvd., Flushing
Free
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Directed by Zou Xueping
2011, 88 min
In Shandong dialect with English subtitles.
Zou Xueping’s took her first documentary The Hungry Village (part of Caochangdi Workstation’s Folk Memory Project) — made up of first-person testimony about the effects of the Great Famine of 1960 (see Hu Jie’s Spark for another view) on her home village in Shandong — back home to show her subjects. They unanimously disapproved. Frustrated and full of doubt, Zou then made this second documentary discussing the villagers’ reactions to her first. This wonderful, searching, self-reflexive film questions the necessity and usefulness of truth-telling via cinema, when it brings pain and even shame upon neighbours and family. Zou’s 9-year-old niece emerges as its star, a girl who can balance competing exigencies of truth and love with a wisdom beyond her years.
Followed by a Q&A with Zou Xueping
Part of Cinema on the Edge: The Best of the Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012 – 2014
Sunday, September 13, 6:30 PM
UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, 322 Union Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
$9/Admission
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12) Rice – Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan – On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, Taiwan’s Cloud Gate Dance Theatre takes grain, field, and flower as verdant muse in this celebration of the life cycle and natural beauty of the island’s essential crop. Dramatically poised against stunning video vistas of the Chihshang growing region, 24 dancers cross-pollinate modern dance and martial arts, ballet and qigong to become wind-rippled paddies, erotic agents of springtime germination, and fire walkers returning scorched seed to soil. Wielding bamboo sticks, recast as field implement, slender stalk, and weapon, they prod the seasons and coax valley rains as Taiwanese folk songs and Bellini arias waft in the wind.
Wednesday, September 16, 7:30 PM
Thursday, September 17, 7:30 PM
Peter Jay Sharp Building, BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn
Tickets begin at $20
Ongoing Films and Shows
Office 《華麗上班族》– Based on the hit play ‘Design for Living’ by star and producer Sylvia Chang, Office is a movie musical spectacular revolving around corporate maneuvering and romantic intrigue. Hong Kong legend Johnnie To, continuing his surprise shift from gritty gangster movies following last year’s rom-com Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2 《单身男女2》 , delivers a biting takedown of capitalism, detailing the financial crisis following the Lehman Brothers collapse and what one company has to do to fight to stay alive — all in a lavishly detailed, wholly original musical production. Stars Chow Yun-Fat and Tang Wei.
Review by Hollywood Reporter
Opens on September 18 at AMC Empire 25.
Exhibitions
Just added and opening:
1) Xiao Fu – Pixel World (Storefront Ten Eyck, 9/11 – 10/11) – Xiao Fu’s installation Pixel World was originally shown as part of Home Improvement, a group show of outdoor sculpture curated by Deborah Brown and Lesley Heller on Rock Street for Bushwick Open Studios 2015. For her exhibition at Storefront Ten Eyck, Fu has reconfigured the work to respond to an indoor gallery space. Fu creates works that are mainly concerned with her personal observations about the urban experience. Fu responds to experiences and perceptions unique to densely populated urban settings, such as a sense of crowded loneliness and the resulting psychological distance between people in close physical proximity. As an international artist living in New York City, she often feels dislocation and stress due to cultural differences, the scale of the architectural surroundings and the crowded conditions of daily life that create a metaphorical and literal wall around her. In response to these sensations, Fu minimizes the cityscape in her work to simple geometric forms to present how she sees the urban environment and the relationship between its people, spaces and structures. The goal is to allow a viewer the opportunity to observe contemporary social constructs from a distance, providing them with a new perspective.
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2) Documentary China (Photoville, 9/10 – 9/20) – For a second year, ChinaFile and Magnum Foundation have partnered to administer the Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography. This year we are showcasing the work of Yuyang Liu and Souvid Datta.
The works look at migrant labor and environmental pollution, both of which pose serious challenges to China’s future and impact its relations with the rest of the world.
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3) WWII Chinese Veterans (Photoville, 9/10 – 9/20) – Chinese veterans of the Second World War are scattered in remote villages in China. A lot of them are ignored by the society. There are just several thousand registered WWII veterans who are still alive in China, and their average age is above 90 years old. Each veteran’s life is a legend. For example, one 93-year-old veteran became a monk later, living in a temple in Hunan Province, praying for the 8,000 comrade-in-arms buried near the temple who died in the battle with 90,000 Japanese.
Chinese documentary photographer Li Qiang spent nearly one month in July 2015, visiting ten places in four Chinese provinces to shoot around 50 veterans. This year is the 70th anniversary year for the Chinese people’s Anti-Japanese War and the world’s anti-Fascism war, an opportunity for everybody to recall the history and the ignored heroes.
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4) “Who is My Neighbor? NYC” (Walls-Ortiz Gallery and Center, 9/12 – 12/8) – Fina Yeung and Naomi Kuo are part of this exhibition that juxtaposes the work of artists from throughout New York City, whose artwork reflects positive interaction with diverse neighbors and communities, this exhibition features multiple perspectives on the ways art can be a conduit for dialogue and interaction. In a city where diversity abounds, and communities can change from block to block, we invite artwork that interrogates, critiques, affirms, and contributes to healthy exchange around what it means to “live well” in diverse community in New York City. What does it mean to practice hospitality and welcome in a New York City neighborhood?
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5) Tai Xiangzhou (泰祥洲) – Celestial Tales (Paul Kasmin Gallery, 9/10 – 10/3) – Tai’s latest works reinterpret traditional Chinese ink painting through the study of meteorites and reveal an increasingly more vibrant and expressive style than his previous series, Genesis, which explored these traditions through biomorphic forms.
Under the tutelage of master ink painter Liu Dan for over a decade, Tai incorporates the old master’s tradition of landscape painting with a fresh approach incorporating the philosophies and ethos of today. Exclusively using paper created with 10th century techniques and Qianglong era ink, Tai believes that “to present landscape painting that meets modern tastes, we must start from the experience of modern society – by properly accessing the living spirit of art, researching the materials, techniques, medium and modern time-space experience. In short, we should not only keep alive traditional art, but also the tradition of art.” The artist’s lively brushstrokes exude an incredible energy and style that are uniquely his own.
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6) Intimate Transgressions (Whitebox Gallery, 9/3 – 10/4) – A multimedia exhibition of twenty-two artists from around the world, including Chinese artists Chen Mei-Tsen, Chen Qingqing, Xin Song, Ma Yanling, and Gao Yuan, responding to the challenging theme of sexual violence as a tactic of terror. The exhibition is presented by WhiteBox and CAPA. The artworks on display react to the transnational issue of violence against women during times of conflict from both a historical and contemporary perspective. As a starting point for Intimate Transgressions, the disturbing situation of the ‘Comfort Women’ during and after WWII is also the project’s central highlight. This open-ended investigation includes performance, installations, and a series of concurrent talks and workshops.
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Closing soon:
Water to Paper, Paint to Sky: The Art of Tyrus Wong (Museum of Chinese in America, 3/26 – 9/13)
The Moment: Taiwanese American Contemporary Arts (New York Hall of Science, 8/8 – 9/13)
Being Here: Mei-Ling Liu and HsiangLu Meng New Work in New York (Cuchifritos Gallery, 8/14 – 9/13)
Fertility, Blessings and Protection – Taiwanese and Asian Cultures of Baby Carrier (Taipei Cultural Center of TECO, 7/29 – 9/20)
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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.
Water to Paper, Paint to Sky: The Art of Tyrus Wong (Museum of Chinese in America, 3/26 – 9/13)
The Moment: Taiwanese American Contemporary Arts (New York Hall of Science, 8/8 – 9/13)
Being Here: Mei-Ling Liu and HsiangLu Meng New Work in New York (Cuchifritos Gallery, 8/14 – 9/13)
Fertility, Blessings and Protection – Taiwanese and Asian Cultures of Baby Carrier (Taipei Cultural Center of TECO, 7/29 – 9/20)
Documentary China (Photoville, 9/10 – 9/20)
WWII Chinese Veterans (Photoville, 9/10 – 9/20)
Jun-Te Hwang (黃榮德): From Mountains to Monuments: The Hidden Corners of China (Hwang Gallery, 8/11 – 9/30)
Mary Ting: Compassion – For the Animals Great and Small (Gallery 456, 8/12 – 9/27)
Ishu Han: Memory of Each Other (ICSP, 7/8 – 10/2)
Tai Xiangzhou (泰祥洲) – Celestial Tales (Paul Kasmin Gallery, 9/10 – 10/3)
Intimate Transgressions (Whitebox Gallery, 9/3 – 10/4)
Ji Zhou (计洲) – Civilized Landscape 《文明的景观》(Klein Sun Gallery, 9/10 – 10/10)
Xiao Fu – Pixel World (Storefront Ten Eyck, 9/11 – 10/11)
Wang Dongling (王冬龄) – New Works 《新作》 (Chambers Fine Art, 9/12 – 10/24)
Willie Yao – 2 Solo Exhibition (Carma Restaurant, 9/9 – 10/31)
“Who is My Neighbor? NYC” (Walls-Ortiz Gallery and Center, 9/12 – 12/8)
Lead image: “the Famous Cross by Flickr user Dizzy Fripper, licensed through Creative Commons