Sunday is the Mid-Autumn Festival. It won’t be just another holiday where you eat mooncakes and gaze at a regular full moon. This year, an eclipse of a supermoon.
This week, student filmmakers at SVA showcase their social documentary films, you can learn about Chinese cooking, the New York Film Festival hosts films by and about Jia Zhangke, a Taiwanese aboriginal singer, history lessons about Chinese and U.S. cooperation during World War II, and a festival dedicated to time-based art from Asia opens.
Don’t forget that seven films from the recent Cinema on the Edge series which brought films from the Beijing Independent Film Festival to NYC, are available on MUBI.
Coming up:
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.
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.
See an event you like? Did you know you can copy events listed on the right side of each page on our site to your personal Google Calendar? All you need to do is expand the entry for the event, and click “copy to my calendar”. Modify the details to fit your needs and click “save” to make it part of your calendar. If you see an event or exhibition that interests you, use this method of adding it to your calendar so can make a reminder to go without needing about making a calendar event yourself.
Coming up this week…
1) 2015 Taiwan Excellence Product Showcase – A free, interactive family event showcasing Taiwan’s cutting-edge, innovative design and functionality. It will feature over 100 award-winning Taiwanese spanning the consumer electronics, home & decor, homecare medical, sporting, and lifestyle industries.
Throughout the event, additional activities, including musical performances, product demos and giveaways, will be held designed to entertain, inform, and excite consumers about Taiwanese products.
Thursday, September 24 – 27
Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal
Free
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2) National Memories: U.S.- China Collaboration During World War II Opening Reception – Opening reception for a travelling exhibition that looks at when China and the United States joined forces in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War II.
Followed by The Great Wall Our Bloodline Overseas Chinese and the Anti-Japanese Wall .
RSVP to Ms. Yan Han at 212-679-8833 or ny@acngusa.com
Friday, September 25, 3 PM
Asian Fusion Gallery, 15 E. 40th Street, 12th floor
Free
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3) Sister Jolin 《卓琳》– This film by Siyan Liu & Danni Wang follows 22-year-old Jolin, a former factory girl, who has found work as a soft-core-porn model and undergoes risky plastic surgery to look more “sexy.” She tries to find her estranged father for reasons that go beyond healing her fractured family. She hopes to leave Dongguan behind and become a famous actress in Shanghai, instead of working in the sex industry.
Part of SVA’s Social Documentary MFA Thesis Showcase.
Friday, September 25, 7 PM
SVA Theater, 333 W 23rd St.
Free
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4) Celebrate Taiwan: Fashion, Food, Art – On Smithsonian’s Museum Day, stop by Grand Central to join Taiwan Tourism Bureau and Smithsonian Media for a celebration of the food, fashion, and art of Taiwan. Enjoy live performances, Taiwanese cuisine, and fashion shows featuring Taiwanese designers Malan Breton and Jessica Chen.
Saturday, September 26, 11 AM
Grand Central Terminal, East side of Vanderbilt Hall
Free
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5) China and the West during World War II: A Confucius Institute Day Celebration – The Confucius Institute at China Institute (CI@CI) will join nearly 500 Confucius Institutes around the world to celebrate Confucius Institute Day, a collaborative effort to celebrate the 11th anniversary of the founding of these institutions, with a shared mission to promote the understanding of Chinese language and culture. This year, in recognition of the 70th anniversary of the Anti-Fascist Victory in World War II and the Founding of the United Nations, this collective celebration will be guided by the theme “Understanding and Peace.” Join us for two lectures with Daniel Jackson and Professor Steve Hochstadt exploring China’s relationship with the West during World War II. There will be a tea reception for the authors between the two talks.
Saturday, September 26, 2 PM
China Institute, 100 Washington Street
Free
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6) Martial Arts: Movie Fantasy vs. Reality – This special edition of the Fist and Sword series will be a talk and demonstration in the Museum’s Kaufman Courtyard. Ten different martial arts masters have been invited to discuss their favorite martial arts movie fight scene and explain and demonstrate how martial arts works in the movies versus real life.
Participating masters include Carl Albright (7 Star Praying Mantis), Gregory Mosley (Kenpo), and Vincent Lyn (actor and kung fu master best known for his onscreen fight with Jackie Chan). Additional participants will be announced soon.
Warrington Hudlin, Fist and Sword series curator and long-time martial arts practitioner will moderate the discussion.
Saturday, September 26, 5 PM
Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria
Free with museum admission, $12/Adult; $9/Senior and Student; $6/Child
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7) Indigenous Voices From the East Coast of Taiwan – An improvisational indigenous Taiwanese contemporary performance and video.
In Eru, the language of the Truku tribe, “Elung” means “a path.” Founder of Elung Art Corner, Don Don Houmwm, hopes to cross art disciplines and styles, to clear his vision, and to stay aware of the ancestral path. In 2009, when finished with life in Taipei, Don Don chose to return to Tongmeng where he grew up. While walking and living there, he could feel his grandparent’s breath, and found gigantic energy for creativity. His work is the story of his land. It is involved with myth, history, family, even tribal issues. All these empowered his creativity. He mingles traditional musical instruments and ideas of theatre, and further transforms performance to become installation and video. His work combines the language of harmony and conflict. He meant to establish this “Elung” to share his childhood purity, and the energy belonging to the mountain and the valley. He hopes to transmit this emotions continually.
Sunday, September 27, 2 PM
Queens Museum, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens
Free
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8) The Class Two Grade Three – Director Qianfan Sun revisits his junior high school classmates after having gone to another city for college. With a focus on urban middle class kids in China rather than poverty and tragedy, he envisions the series as a long-term project like the Up Series.
Part of SVA’s Social Documentary MFA Thesis Showcase.
Sunday, September 27, 3 PM
SVA Theater, 333 W 23rd St.
Free
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9) Water Ghost 《武陵》 – Witnessing the death of a man falling into the Yuanjiang River led filmmaker Wen Li to an old man whose job is to fish dead bodies from this river in Changde, Hunan Province and began a personal contemplation of life and death. Death is never far away from us. Facing the death in the river is like facing the death in my life. The ferryman of the soul makes me think about the meaning of life and death.
Followed by a Q&A.
Part of SVA’s Social Documentary MFA Thesis Showcase.
Sunday, September 27, 3:30 PM
SVA Theater, 333 W 23rd St.
Free
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10) Mountains May Depart 《山河故人》
Directed By Jia Zhangke
2015 China/France/Japan
Chinese with English subtitles
DCP 126 minutes
The plot of Jia Zhangke’s new film is simplicity itself. Fenyang 1999, on the cusp of the capitalist explosion in China. Shen Tao (Zhao Tao) has two suitors—Zhang (Zhang Yi), an entrepreneur-to-be, and his best friend Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong), who makes his living in the local coal mine. Shen Tao decides, with a note of regret, to marry Zhang, a man with a future. Flash-forward 15 years: the couple’s son Dollar is paying a visit to his now-estranged mother, and everyone and everything seems to have grown more distant in time and space… and then further ahead in time, to even greater distances. Jia is modern cinema’s greatest poet of drift and the uncanny, slow-motion feeling of massive and inexorable change. Like his 2013 A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart is an epically scaled canvas. But where the former was angry and quietly terrifying, the latter is a heartbreaking prayer for the restoration of what has been lost in the name of progress. A Kino Lorber release.
U.S. Premiere. Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao in person. Part of the New York Film Festival.
Monday, September 28, 6 PM
Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center
$25/General Admission; $20/Student
Tuesday, September 29, 9:15 PM
Francesca Beale Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 W. 65th St.
$25/General Admission; $20/Students
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11) MOCAEATS: The Essential Techniques of Authentic Chinese Cooking – What’s the difference between pan-frying, oil seeping, and yin-yang frying? Please join Kian Lam Kho, author of the new cookbook, Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees: Essential Techniques of Authentic Chinese Cooking, in demystifying the art of Chinese cooking and address unique technical differences between Eastern and Western cooking. Followed by book signing and tasting.
Tuesday, September 29, 6 PM
Museum Of Chinese In America, 215 Centre Street
$12/Adults; $7/Students and Seniors
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12) HBO Directors Dialogues: Jia Zhangke
Directed By Walter Salles
2014 Brazil/France
Mandarin with English subtitles
DCP 99 minutes
If, hundreds of years from now, anyone wanted to know what it was like to be alive at this moment—what life felt like and what changes were occurring and the ways in which they affected us as individuals—they could get the whole picture from watching the films of Jia Zhangke. From the moment he burst on the scene with Xiao Wu in the late ’90s, this artist has given us a river of films, made with a team of regular collaborators (including his wife and principal actress Zhao Tao and his cinematographer Yu Lik-wai), each film as pungently human but wide in scope as a Breugel canvas. The world itself is a character in Jia’s films, urging the characters on and informing the speed of life. We’ve shown many of his movies in the NYFF over the years, from Platform in 2000 on, and we’re proud to have him here with his newest movie, Mountains May Depart, and we’re very happy that he’s agreed to join us for a talk about his extraordinary body of work.
Part of the New York Film Festival.
Tuesday, September 29, 6:00 PM
Howard Gilman Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 W. 65th St.
Free
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13) Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang – Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles accompanies the prolific Chinese director Jia Zhangke on a walk down memory lane, as he revisits his hometown and other locations used in creating his ever-growing body of work. At each location, they visit Jia’s family, friends, and former colleagues, and their conversations range from his mother’s tales of him as a young boy to amusing remembrances of school days and film shoots to memories of his father and to the shared understanding that if not for pirated DVDs, much of Jia’s work would go unseen in China. All roads traveled are part of one journey—the destination of which is Jia’s relationship to his past and to his country. The confluence of storytelling, intellect, and politics informing all of Jia’s work is brought to light in this lovely, intimate portrait of the artist on his way to the future.
North American Premiere. Walter Salles in person.
Part of the New York Film Festival.
Wednesday, September 30, 9 PM
Thursday, October 1, 9 PM
Francesca Beale Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 W. 65th St.
$15/General Admission; $10/Students
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14) Retina of the Unconscious Exhibition I Opening Reception and Artist & Curator Talk – Opening reception for Curator Wang Chun-Chi’s first portion of inToAsia: Time-based Art Festival 2015, the one and the only art festival dedicated to Asian time-based art in North America, gathers together a group of time-based art work, including videos, short film, kinetic installations and real-time sound art performances, featuring 27 artists from Taiwan, Japan, Korea, China, Canada, United States, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Philippines.
Thursday, October 1, 6 PM
The Sylvia Wald + Po Kim Art Gallery, 417 Lafayette Street 4th floor
Free
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15) NYFF Live: Walter Salles (‘Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang’) – Brazilian-born Walter Salles has been a mainstay of the international film circuit with features such as Central Station (1998), Behind the Sun (2001), The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), and On the Road (2012). His latest, the documentary Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang, which is having its North American premiere at the NYFF, spotlights the prolific Chinese director as he walks down memory lane and revisits his hometown and other locations used in creating his body of work. Salles will be present to reflect on the making of the film.
Part of the New York Film Festival.
Thursday, October 1, 7 PM
Film Center Amphitheater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 W. 65th St.
Free
Ongoing Films and Shows
1) Lost in Hong Kong 《港囧》– In this sequel to China’s second highest-grossing movie of all time, Lost in Thailand, A mid-aged mainland Chinese bra designer (Xu Zheng) takes his baby-crazy wife (Zhao Wei) and DVD-pirating brother-in-law (Bao Bei’er) to Hong Kong, ostensibly on a sight-seeing trip, but really wishes to use this opportunity to secretly meet his old flame (Du Juan). Never did he imagine he would be embroiled in a murder investigation.
Variety says “Trading the earlier film’s goofy fish-out-of-water gags for robust action acrobatics and fail-safe family drama, the laffer induces the warm-and-fuzzies as an ode to Hong Kong cinema and its role in mainland Gen-Xers’ sentimental coming of age.”
Opens at AMC Empire 25 on September 25.
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2) 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.
The New York Times deemed the film a Critic’s Pick and says the film is “[a]t once sharp and exceedingly playful” and “[i]ts smashing look gives visible form to the idea of China as an enormous machine. The AV Club said it “one of the most original and imaginative musicals of the last decade” and “puts Hollywood’s recent attempts at reviving the musical to shame.”
At AMC Empire 25.
Exhibitions
Just added and opening:
1) 2015 inToAsia: Time-based Art Festival (Queens Museum, The Sylvia Wald + Po Kim Gallery, and inCube Arts SPACE, 10/1 – 10/24) – The 2nd edition of the first festival specialize in promoting Asian media arts in North America gathers together a group of time-based art, including videos, short film, animations, kinetic installations, and sound art performances. Organized by CHEN Wei-Ching, Joanne and curated by Wang Chun-Chi, Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani, and Carol Yinghua Lu, with three curatorial concepts, the festival invites a group of time-based Asian artist total of 27 coming from Taiwan, Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Singapore.
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Closing soon:
Mary Ting: Compassion – For the Animals Great and Small (Gallery 456, 8/12 – 9/27)
Jun-Te Hwang (黃榮德): From Mountains to Monuments: The Hidden Corners of China (Hwang Gallery, 8/11 – 9/30)
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)
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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.
Mary Ting: Compassion – For the Animals Great and Small (Gallery 456, 8/12 – 9/27)
Jun-Te Hwang (黃榮德): From Mountains to Monuments: The Hidden Corners of China (Hwang Gallery, 8/11 – 9/30)
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)
2015 inToAsia: Time-based Art Festival (Queens Museum, The Sylvia Wald + Po Kim Gallery, and inCube Arts SPACE, 10/1 – 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)
SUB URBANISMS: Casino Urbanization, Chinatowns, and the Contested American Landscape (Museum of Chinese in America, 9/24 – 1/31/16)
Chinese Style: Rediscovering the Architecture of Poy Gum Lee, 1923-1968 (Museum of Chinese in America, 9/24/15 – 1/31/16)
Lead image: by Flickr user hartini licensed through Creative Commons