Maverick director and writer Edward Yang has been one of the key figures in Asian filmmaking since the 1980s. With the other contemporary Taiwanese sensation, fellow filmmaker and friend Hou Hsiao-hsien, Yang, more than simply putting modern Taiwanese cinema on the map, has redrawn the map, "redefining modernity in the world as well as in cinema," as critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote. Yang's overarching theme, the search for cultural and individual identity in contemporary Taiwan, has taken him through the high modernism of his earlier urban landscapes to the rapid-fire pace and social clutter of his newest, Mahjong; from psychologically complex female protagonists to middle-class males running in packs through the boomtown of Taipei. One can almost feel the shift and sway of the glittering high-rises, built as they are on a shaky moral foundation. Yang is known for the dizzying complexity of his plots in which characters and sets of characters cross, interact, and double-cross, all the while remaining seemingly unrelated. With a love/hate relationship with the U.S. (where he was partly educated) as a foil, Yang has gone beyond Godard's "children of Marx and Coca-Cola" to try to define the strange hybrid of his country's youth, and therefore its future. Yang: "The bombs we plant in each other are ticking away."Edward Yang: A New Day in Taiwan is a touring series organized by The Film Center at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, and curated by Barbara Scharres with the cooperation of Edward Yang. Special thanks to Dr. Li Lang and Roger Garcia. Saturday March 7, 1998
