NYC Chinese Cultural Events and Art Exhibitions: July 28 – August 2, 2017

This week: The Asian American International Film Festival screens films about Hong Kong’s identity, a daughter’s relationship with her lesbian Taoist priestess mother, a game said to be more complex than chess, a woman who finds herself working in an illegal massage parlor, a foley artist; MOCA’s summer jam; Taiwanese music festival returns to Central Park following last year’s very successful staging; Taiwanese manufacturing and technology prowess are showcased at Columbus Circle; an exhibition that links Tainan, Taiwan with New York; two new listings of exhibitions by local artists Lulu Meng and Heidi Lau; and more.

Coming up:

Through August 5 – More films at the Asian American International Film Festival.

August 4 and 7 – Death Ray on Coral Island 《珊瑚岛上的死光》, China’s first sci-fi movie at MoMA

We add talks, films, performances, exhibitions, featuring or relating to Chinese, Taiwanese, diasporic artists and topics to our event and ongoing exhibition calendars as we learn of them.

We post frequently on our Facebook page.  So check the page for links we share and get a heads up on events before we include them in these weekly posts.  For art, images, and other instances of Chineseness we see, follow our Instagram page.

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We’re looking for contributors!  If you’re interested in writing an article, contributing photos or artwork to be featured with our weekly events and exhibitions listing, letting us know about an event, send a pitch at beyondchinatown@gmail.com.

UPCOMING EVENTS

1) MOCA Mixer: Summer Jam – A celebration of artistic expression featuring YouTube Musician Nix and Brooklyn-based folk duo Heartland Nomads.

The event will include:
Performances from local artists within the community.
Unlimited libations, including Hiro Sake, Tiger Beer, and Bruce Cost Ginger Ale.
Light hors d’oeuvres, provided by food sponsor Xi’an Famous Foods.
Sneak peek of MOCA’s upcoming exhibition FOLD: Golden Venture Paper Sculptures.

Summer Jam will also feature a cash raffle and an exclusive MOCA Shop sale. Proceeds benefit the Museum in delivering its educational mission to 15,000+ students per year.

Friday, July 28, 6:30 – 8:30 PM
Museum of Chinese in America

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2) Made in Hong Kong 《香港製造》 – Lee plays Moon, a high-school dropout and small-time hoodlum who resents his absentee father and his succession of mistresses from China. Moon is friends with the half-witted Sylvester (Wenders Li Tung-chuen) and harbours puppy love for the severely ill Ping (Neiky Yim Hui-chi), but none of them is enlivened by these feelings.

Made in Hong Kong forms the first part of Fruit Chan Gor’s (陳果) “1997 Trilogy” – whose other components are The Longest Summer and Little Cheung – and is shot with a rawness and urgency that would in time become the writer-director’s signature.

Dir. Fruit Chan Gor
1997, Hong Kong, 109 min.
Chinese with English subtitles

Screens as part of the Asian American International Film Festival.

Friday, July 28, 8 PM
Asia Society

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3) Taiwanese Waves – This music festival, Taiwanese bands Fire EX (滅火器); Dadado Huang + Berry j (黃玠 +黃小楨); and Sangpuy (桑布伊) returns to Central Park

Check out videos from the bands in this playlist:

Saturday, July 29, 6 – 10 PM
Rumsey Playfield, Central Park (near Fifth Avenue and 69th Street)

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4) Small Talk 《日常對話》 – The director Huang Hui-chen attempts to reveal and reconcile a painful past shared between herself and her mother A-nu, a lesbian Taoist priestess.

Produced by Hou Hsiao-hsien, the film premiered at the 53rd Golden Horse Film Festival and Awards, and was nominated for Best Documentary and Best Editing. Small Talk had its international premiere at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival in the Panorama section, and won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary film.

Dir. Hui-chen Huang
2016, Taiwan, 88 min.
Taiwanese with English subtitles

Screens as part of the Asian American International Film Festival.

Saturday, July 29, 7 PM
Asia Society

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5) The Surrounding Game – The game of Go, hailed as mankind’s most complicated board game, has claimed centuries of play. Today in East Asia, you can find children get trained in special Go academies and reach high levels of mastery at young ages, while in the West, the Go scene is much less dignified and mainstream despite the community’s burning enthusiasm for the game.

The Surrounding Game follows lives of America’s top young Go players over the course of four years in China, Korea, Japan, and the United States, using their efforts to launch the first Western professional Go system as a framing device while delving into the beauty of this three-thousand-year old intellectual art/sport, as well as its fanatical players’ quest for greater meaning of life by dedicating thousands of hours in the game. In ‘The Surrounding Game’ we meet Andy Liu, Ben Lockhart, and Curtis Tang as they participate in the first professional Go certification exam in the United States and vie to become the first-ever American professional Go players. The three young Go prodigies reveal their hopes and anxieties about life as they embarked on the journey through the world of Go, illuminating the tight-knit Go scene in North America in particular, as well as a coming-of-age story of what it means to live a meaningful life as a whole.

Directors/Producers Will Lockhart and Cole Pruitt are master players of Go and co-founders of the American Collegiate Go Association. ‘The Surrounding Game’ is their debut feature film and the first feature documentary about the game of Go.

New York City premiere

Dir. Will Lockhart, Cole Pruitt
2017, USA, 97 min.
Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean with English subtitles

Screens as part of the Asian American International Film Festival.

Sunday, July 30, 4:30 PM
Village East Cinema

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6) The Receptionist 《接線員》 – The story of a Taiwanese graduate named Tina who is struggling to find work in London. After landing a job as a receptionist at an illegal massage parlor, Tina finds herself caught up in a world of secrets and mistreatment as the owners’ and employees’ lives begin unraveling before her eyes.

U.S. premiere

Dir. Jenny Lu
2016, Taiwan, UK, 100 min.
Chinese, English with Chinese, English subtitles

Screens as part of the Asian American International Film Festival.

Sunday, July 30, 7:30 PM
Village East Cinema

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7) Baby Steps – Danny, a Taiwanese-American man, and his partner Tate long to have a baby, but the complex world of international surrogacy is further complicated by Danny’s well-meaning but extremely meddlesome Ma who wants to control every aspect of the process all the way from Taipei.

From the Oscar-winning producer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, and Pushing Hands, and presented by MOCA in partnership with Asian Pride Project, API Rainbow Parents-PFLAG NYC, GAPIMNY (Gay Asian and Pacific Islander Men of New York).  Directed by Taiwanese American actor/writer/director Barney Cheng.

Dir. Barney Cheng
2015, Taiwan, 103 min.

Screening begins at 7 PM and is followed by a discussion.

Thursday, August 3, 6:30 PM
Museum of Chinese in America

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8) A Foley Artist 《擬音》– Sound-making of a film is a complicated process that is divided into pre-production, on-set recording, and post-production, while the post-production includes dubbing, music scoring, Foley, and final mixing. Every job in filmmaking requires an immense amount of creativity, but none are quite as entertainingly inventive as that of the Foley artist, who in order to recreate, amplify or emphasize the sound of the film, either mimics the character’ move with a number of inventive props, or use counterintuitive, unconventional means to make the audience believe they are actually seeing what they are seeing.

A Foley Artistis a look at the behind-the-scenes work of Hu Ding-yi, the master Foley artist in Taiwan, whose inventiveness of the sound effects makes it easy to lose ourselves in the daydream on the screen but doesn’t save him from facing a career crisis. Following the daily life of Hu Ding-yi, Director Wan-Jo Wang celebrates and evokes the “spirit of craftsmanship” of the unsung artist who worked in the oldest Taiwanese movie company, Central Motion Picture, since 1975 and devoted 40 years of his life to the film industry, doing Foley for 70 films, and tried to pass on his knowledge on to the younger generations. By chronicling the triumphs and hardships faced by the Foley artists who struggled with tenacity against the fact that their job has been gradually replaced by the arrival of digital sound effects, the documentary further extends to give a broader perspective of the development of the entire Chinese-speaking film industry in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, shedding light on the often forgotten sound wizards of Foley – an art in and of itself.

U.S. premiere

Dir. Wan-Jo Wang
2016, Taiwan, 100 min.
Chinese with English subtitles

Screens as part of the Asian American International Film Festival.

Thursday, August 3, 7 PM
Village Cinema East

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9) Absurd Accident 《提着心吊着胆》 – Bouncing with nail-biting suspense and ingenious humor, young Chinese filmmaker Li Yuhe’s feature debut portrays a puzzling crime that happens in a small, rural town, where greed, lust and wit battle it out in one night. It all starts with a sexually impotent motel owner who hires a professional killer to punish his cheating wife. Everything goes exactly as planned until two blind daters, a robber, a policeman, and a strange dead body unexpectedly arrive. Confident, informed and effortless, Absurd Accident welcomes the audience to a new chapter in the Chinese indie film scene.

New York City premiere.

Dir. Li Yuhe
2017, China, 97 min.
Chinese with English subtitles

Screens as part of the Asian American International Film Festival.

Thursday, August 3, 7 PM
Asia Society

ONGOING FILMS, SHOWS, AND EVENTS

1) Asian American International Film Festival – Now in its 40th year, this festival by Asian CineVision is the first and longest running festival the country devoted to films and about Asians and Asian Americans.  This year, over 30 feature-length narrative and documentary films and nine shorts programs featuring films will be screened.  The festival opens with Gook, Justin Chon’s story of the 1992 LA riots that followed the Rodney King verdict. on July 26.  Hou Hsiao-hsien-produced Taiwanese film Small Talk 《日常對話》 about director Huang Hui-chen’s attempts to reveal and reconcile a painful past shared between herself and her mother A-nu, a lesbian Taoist priestess is the Centerpiece film, and Chinese film Free and Easy 《轻松+愉快》is the closing film.

The festival with also highlights four independent Asian American filmmakers who premiered their narrative coming-of-age feature films transcending identity politics in 1997 and are considered by cinema and Asian American studies scholars as part of the Asian American New Wave. Rea Tajiri (Strawberry Fields), Chris Chan Lee (Yellow), Eric Nakamura and Michael Idemoto (Sunsets), Quentin Lee and Justin Lin (Shopping for Fans) will attend screenings of their breakthrough films and join for a joint panel discussion.

About a dozen feature-length films, including Fruit Chan’s essential Made in Hong Kong 《香港製造》and Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China 《塑料王国》, and a number of shorts by filmmakers from China, Taiwan, or Hong Kong and Chinese American filmmaker are in the line-up.  We’ll have a look at them soon.

The festival runs from July 26 – August 5 at Asia Society and Village East Cinema.

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2) Taiwan Excellence Product Showcase – Featuring over 60 award-winning products from Taiwan’s leading technology and innovation companies, the event will allow visitors to experience some of the latest breakthroughs in virtual reality, gaming computers, Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, alternative transportation and more.

The showcase will also feature interactive VR experiences, 8 gaming stations, daily giveaways, and chances to win great prizes.

The event runs from July 27 – July 30 at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle.

ART EXHIBITIONS

Opening and New Listed:

1) Bio-study Studio : Yi-Kuan Lin Solo Exhibition (Gallery 456, 7/28 – 8/25) – Yi-kuan Lin has always explored the relationship between nature and the human body in her work. She grafted branches and flowers to human limbs in drawings, defining the body as the receptacle of desire for the urges of life. Using anatomical forms as a stylistic element, her works cut open the flesh and bones of humans and animals alike to reveal the lack of difference between living beings, since all corporeal forms are endless passageways connecting life to death.

Bio-study Studio is the project Lin created in-residence at Brooklyn’s International Studio & Curatorial Program in 2016. The artistic project, executed through observations of a life abroad, is a whole new experiment for the artist, who had mainly worked with drawings on paper as a medium of expression up until then. This exhibition is the culmination of the artist’s daily observations and environmental studies during her residency in New York. It includes visual records for her practice as an urban farmer; the spatial files for the greenhouse; the images and research material she collected during visits to the Museum of Natural History, the botanical gardens, and the Morbid Anatomy Museum; and her drawings and textual documentation of local natural objects.

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2) Heidi Lau: The Primordial Molder (Bronx Museum of the Arts, 7/19 – 10/22) – Heidi Lau’s practice centers on the recreation of histories that have been lost to time. Colonial history, folk Taoist mythology and provincial superstitions provide essential source material through which her work explores homelessness and nostalgia. Painstakingly crafted and glazed by hand, her ceramic work is modeled after ritual objects, columns, funereal monuments, and fossilized creatures, while simultaneously deconstructing, and rebuilding these models into new hybrid forms. Lau uses symbolic artifacts and zoomorphic remnants as symbols of the archaic and the invisible, taking inspiration from colonial architecture and tenement houses in Macau that have mostly been demolished or modified beyond recognition. In her process, she strives to reenact the non-linearity and materiality of the past, molding a tactile connection to the disappearing, irretrievable identity of home.

The Primordial Molder, is a continuation of her large-scale ceramic sculpture series that ruminates on the creation myth from Taoist tradition: in the primordial world, Nüwa the Snake Goddess marked the beginning of humanity by patching a giant hole in heaven with five-colored stones, using the legs of a great turtle as pillars to support the collapsed sky from the earth. The Primordial Molder is the representation of Nüwa’s form as a snake that is both anthropomorphic and architectural. Its body curls and tangles around itself to form a ring – a symbol of eternal return and the infinite life cycle.

Installation view of Heidi Lau, ‘The Primordial Molder’, 2017
Glazed Ceramics, wood.
Photo by Ayesha Akhtar

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Asia Society hosts Inspired by Zao Wou-Ki as part of a series of exhibitions that presents the work of New York City students created in response to the great artistic traditions of Asia.  This year the exhibition presents student artwork inspired by the Asia Society fall 2016 exhibition No Limits: Zao Wou-Ki.  The exhibition runs through August 6.

Ceramicist Heidi Lau is part of Morph, a group show at Asya Geisberg Gallery of contemporary ceramic sculpture.  The artists in Morph paint expressionistically with glaze, weave in hair, inlay surfaces, squash perfect forms, recombine tchotchkes, and subvert genres heedless of strict boundaries.  The exhibition runs through August 11.

In addition to an installation at Fully Loaded: Tainan – New York 2017, Lulu Meng‘s will also exhibit her sculpture series Impression in which “softness and movement [of articles of clothing are] frozen in the solidity of the object” is part of the Fourth AIM Biennial at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Lulu Meng – ‘Impression’, 2017. Resin. Dimensions of installation variable, single piece approx. 27 x 23 in.

We visited Drea Cofield & Ping Zheng: Summer 2017 at Nancy Margolis Gallery and was fascinated by Ping Zheng’s work on paper! Check it out before the show closes on July 29th.

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Closing soon:

Jennifer Wen Ma: Eight Views of Paradise Interrupted (Sandra Gering Inc, 5/11 – 7/28)

Material Mythos (Group show with Heidi Lau) (Geary Contemporary, 6/22 – 7/29)

Drea Cofield & Ping Zheng: Summer 2017 (Nancy Margolis Gallery, 6/29 – 7/29)

The Cosmos of Seeds: Paintings, Sculptures, and a Chapbook “Sculptures Of Arhat” by Ye Qin Zhu (The Hand, 7/8 – 7/29)

Ye Funa: An Alternative Cinema (Metro Pictures, 7/13 – 7/30)

Design by the Book: Chinese Ritual Objects and the Sanli tu (Bard Graduate Center 3/24 – 7/30)

Nightshift (The Clemente, 7/8 – 7/31)

Sun Xun: Time Spy  (Times Square, 7/1 – 7/31)

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Infinite Compassion: Avalokiteshvara in Asian Art (Staten Island Museum, 10/22/16 – 9/25/17)