Abstract

Chapter 1 accounts for Sylvia Chang's role as the “mother of Taiwan New Cinema,” and her several wenyi melodrama or “woman's films” made in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China since the 1980s. These films probe the tension between romantic love and “kin-love” in Chinese culture through moving portrayals of women's independence and bonding across generations and geographical locations.

Keywords: Sylvia Chang, Taiwan New Cinema, Sinophone geography, “woman's film,” wenyi melodrama, migration

Chinese film scholar Chen Feibao's book, The Art of Taiwan Directors, one of the earliest scholarly studies on Taiwanese cinema in the prc, has chapters on Ang Lee and Sylvia Chang back-to-back. This arrangement occurred simply because the two were born just one year apart. However, the two have more in common than this age connection. Both came of age and embraced cinema as their creative medium in the burgeoning Taiwan New Cinema movement in the 1980s and early 1990s, and both have actively pursued a career beyond Taiwan, with Lee shuttling between the island and the United States and Chang operating between Taiwan and Hong Kong (and occasionally Singapore and the United States). In subject matter and style, each has demonstrated a shared propensity for family and romantic melodrama and the attendant cultural and ethical concerns with the changing meaning and practice of love and kinship in cross-cultural and transnational contexts. These features set them apart from the rigorous modernist formal experiments and introspective intellectual orientation that underscore the mainstay of the Taiwan New Cinema and post-New Cinema, whose most internationally renowned figureheads are Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang. In comparison, most of Lee’s and Chang's art-pop melodramas seem sentimental fare with their skillful orchestration of broken hearts and torn ties. The audiences they address and the spectatorship their textual and extra-textual systems construct tend to be Sinophone and trans-Asian in terms of demographic base while extending into other intercultural domains. Ang Lee's recent works have shown a greater variety in genre experimentation, including period pieces and fantastical 3D films, and he is proving himself to be a leading global auteur who has transcended linguistic and cultural boundaries in terms of artistic identity, having entered the pantheon of great American or Hollywood directors.