Cultural listings Cinema
Outside the Comfort Zone Three weeks after its release, The Great Hypnotist, directed by Leste Chen from Taiwan and starring mainland actor Xu Zheng and Taiwanese singer-actress Karen Mok, has taken 250 million yuan (US$40m) at the box office. Dubbed “the Chinese Inception” by some, the movie tells a story involving several layers of hypnosis between a hypnotist (Xu) and his patient (Mok). Fast-paced, well-structured and reflective of some of the emotional perplexity of modern urbanites, the movie is seen as bringing the thriller movie, a genre with which Chinese directors and audiences are typically uncomfortable, to a new level of production and market appeal. A relatively new director, Leste Chen, 33, has directed nine features and a number of short films, and is seen as one of China’s few directors adept at making both commercial and independent movies.
Music
Book
A Long Way to Prominence
Our Generation: Faces of the Young
After winning the first season of The Voice of China, a reality talent show that premiered in July 2012, Liang Bo seemed to be slow to launch his career. After a nearly two-year absence from China’s music scene, this 23-yearold pop-rock singer-songwriter has only recently released his self-titled debut album. While in the past two years, singing reality talent shows have competed fiercely with each other, Liang remained almost entirely out of the public eye, polishing his first batch of work, as his fans believed. Liang wrote all the songs and lyrics for the album, which was produced in the US. For many critics, this was evidence of Liang staying true to the pursuit of his own voice, the melodies ranging between rock and pop, and the lyrics reflective of Liang himself. However, many listeners have found little of note on the release in terms of its creativity, arrangement or production. Yet critics believe that given time, this young, persistent singer-songwriter might have a few surprises in store.
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By Xiao Quan
Exhibition
Fresh-faced Heroes Xin Wangjun, born in 1983, is known for his performance art, particularly a piece for which he walked the streets wearing a suit made of Chinese banknotes, with shackles on his hands and neck. On May 4th, Youth Day in China, however, an exhibition of his paintings opened at Beijing’s Taihe Art Space. These paintings, all roughly the size of a palm, were careful pencil portraits of famous figures from the Republic of China era (1912-1949). Influential in politics, art, literature, philosophy and other domains, the subjects of the portraits have left a great legacy to today’s Chinese society, though many of them were heavily criticized and attacked in the first three decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. According to the exhibition’s academic advisor Li Xianting, a famous curator and promoter of China’s contemporary arts, these portraits are not only careful representations of their subjects, but also a reflection on the Chinese youth’s persistence in discovering the truth of history.
Photographer Xiao Quan has shot portraits of nearly all the key figures in today’s Chinese art and cultural scenes. These include director Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, rocker Cui Jian and director and actor Jiang Wen among many others. Impressively, Xiao managed to shoot all of these people in their youth, and often before their ascension to celebrity. Xiao has even been called the best portrait photographer in China. Our Generation, an album of his portraits, was in fact first published in 1996, but soon sold out, resulting in a rapid rise in the prices of second-hand copies in the following years. The re-publication of the album has excited many readers and critics. The photos in the book are accompanied by a text of some 100,000 Chinese characters, introducing the stories behind the images. NEWSCHINA I July 2014