Huang Yu-shan (; born 1954) is a Taiwanese filmmaker. She has made significant contributions to Chinese cinema in the areas of aesthetics and cultural history. Her focus is the woman's viewpoint, and frequently challenges the status quo in what has been a male-dominated society.See the short biographical note by Huang, attached to: Huang Yushan, "Creating and Distributing Films Openly: On the Relation between Women’s Film Festival and Women’s Rights Movement in Taiwan", in: Dossier on the Independent Cinema, Inter Asia, Vol.4, No.1 (print edition; the online version that contained only the introduction to her article no longer exists).Linzhen Wang, “Chinese Woman’s Cinema”, in: Yingjin Zhang (ed.), A Companion to Chinese Cinema, Malden (Wiley-Blackwell) 2012, p.341.Huang, Yu-shan and Wang, Chun-chi, “The Films of Huang Yu-Shan” (sub-chapter of their chapter on “Post-Taiwan New Cinema Women Directors and Their Films”, in: Linzhen Wang, Chinese Women’s Cinema, Transnational Contexts. New York (Columbia Univ. Press) 2011, p.140.
Early life
Although originally from Penghu Island, situated in the Taiwan Straits, Huang Yu-shan grew up in Kaohsiung, South Taiwan.Lingzhen Wang, Chinese Women's Cinema: Transnational Contexts. New York (Columbia Univ. Press) 2011, p.140“HUANG Yushan: Jury Member for fiction, HAFF 2011.”(short biography) http://www.douban.com/event/14606044/discussion/41736278/. Her family later moved to Taipei. Her father was a successful calligrapher who sold his works in Kaohsiung for many years. Huang Yu-shan's early awareness of the beauty of this art may have influenced her own creative development. Among her larger family she counts an important Taiwanese sculptor of the 1930s. Yushan Huang's feature film The Strait Story as well as the documentary The Petrel Returns are focused on this artist, Ching-cheng Huang (黃清埕; 1912–1943).Měi-xuě Líng (凌美雪), “Xiàndài yìshù zuòpǐn shǒu lì Huáng Qīngchéng diāosù zhǐdìng wéi zhòngyào gǔwù” [Ching-cheng Huang’s Sculpture is the first modern art work designated as an important national heritage], in the Taipei daily Liberty Times, March 25, 2009 [print edition].- The article refers to the work titled Study of a Head. Amongst other things it says, “The sculpture titled Study of a Head that was created by the late artist Ching-cheng Huang and that is presently part of the collection of the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts is the first piece of modern art designated as an important cultural heritage, in accordance with the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act.” Ching-cheng Huang is recognized as one of the early modernists in Taiwan who were influenced by Westernized modern Japanese art as well as reproductions of late 19th century Western art that they saw in Japan. See also the website of the Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts http://collectionweb.ntmofa.gov.tw/eng98/02_fineworks.aspx.
Early career After completing high school, she studied literature at Chengchi University in Mucha, Taipei. In the mid-1970s she worked for Yishu Gia (Artist Magazine) in Taipei, interviewing many painters, but also other artistically significant personalities on this island, such as the novelist and founder of the Cloud Gate Dance Theater, Lin Hwai-min, and the pioneer film director, Lee Hsing. In ca. 1977–79, Huang Yu-shan took an interest in the works of Eisenstein, Alain Resnais, Werner Herzog, Kenji Mizoguchi etc. She counted a number of cinéastes, such as Chien-yeh Huang (a film critic) and Ivan Wang, the editor of the film journal Yinxiang and founder of the Taipei Film Museum (today, the National Film Archives or Film Library) among her friends. And she belonged to a circle that organized private screenings of films such as Kurosawa's Red Beard, then forbidden by the censors of the Kuomintang dictatorship. She also saw works by Rainer Maria Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, F. W. Murnau, Hellmuth Costard, Werner Nekes, Dore O., Werner Schroeter and others at the German Cultural Center in Taipei. At the time, the center had just begun to depart from its routine of simply showing ‘Guten Tag’ movies for learners of the German language, thanks to the encouragement of a friend of Werner Nekes, the German poet and film critic Andreas Weiland who was teaching German and English literature at Tamkang University.See “About Take-Offs and Failures: Thoughts offered in place of an editorial”, in: Street Voice No. 2, These screenings attracted a number of cinéastes in Taipei and may have encouraged independent filmmakers.See: Preface, in: Andreas Weiland, Day for night in Taipei: notes of a cinéaste. [Taipei], [Qi Xing Shan Chubanshe], 1982 [Available at: Aachen University Library
In 1978, Huang Yu-shan began reading Pudovkin, Vertov, Eisenstein, André Bazin, Dudley Andrew and others whose writings she obtained in English. After she had worked as script writer for three movies of the film director Lee Hsing (李行) in 1977–1979, she went to study film-making at the University of Iowa and later, transferred to New York. In 1982 she graduated from New York University, having obtained an M.A. in Cinema Studies.See: Lingzhen Wang, Chinese Women's Cinema: Transnational Contexts, p.140. See also: Linzhen Wang, “Chinese Woman’s Cinema”, in: Yingjin Zhang (ed.), A Companion to Chinese Cinema, Malden (Wiley-Blackwell) 2012, p.341.
The late 1970s: A time of protest The late 1970s were a time for debates but also of protest in Taiwan. Students organized big song events in the Taipei New Park, inviting folk singers considered subversive by the regime. Music cassettes with forbidden songs were distributed on campus. The protests on behalf of the regionalist and socially committed Nativist Literature, that was condemned by the pro-government media, was under way. In this period which preceded her departure to the U.S. in 1979, Huang Yu-shan quietly participated in relevant debates. In view of her South Taiwanese roots, it is clear that Huang Yu-shan objectively shared a closeness to the regionalist culture with the blind old singer of protest songs, Chen Da, with the four Tamsui-based political activists Lee Shuang-tze (李雙澤 pinyin: Li Shuāngzé, a young composer of songs considered subversive by the KMT government), Lee Yuan-chen (李元貞; the founder of Women Awakening), Liang Jingfeng (梁景峰) (who published under the pseudonym Liang Demin in the pro-democracy journal Summer Tide that was suppressed in 1979), and Wang Jinping (scholar and activist) (王津平). And – subjectively – even more with Annette Lu (呂秀蓮 Lu Hsiu-lien pinyin: Lǚ Xiùlián – another pioneer of the women's lib movement in Taiwan), with the progressive Chengchi University teacher and later political activist Wang Tuoh (王拓) and with the Hakka author Chao-cheng Chung (鍾肇政) whose novel Chatianshan zhi ge later on became the basis of one of her feature films. But she herself seems to have shied away from the protest movement. She preferred discussions with pro-democracy dissidents inside the governing party. But she was courageous enough to discuss Lu Xun (魯迅|s鲁迅|) (still a forbidden writer) with young authors and to write an article about the novelist Yang Kui (楊 逵, 1905–1985), a forerunner of Nativist writers like Chen Yinzhen, and a man whose commitment to social justice had resulted in a dozen short prison sentences during the Japanese occupation and imprisonment for 12 years on Green Island, the KMT regime's concentration camp.See:“HUANG Yushan, “A Few Remarks about Yang Kwei”, in: Jietou, Vol. 1, No.1 (1977), pp.70–72. (Jietou, a bi-lingual Chinese and English language journal, was edited by the Chinese-Western Cultural Study Group in Tamshui. Because it featured contributions on Pai Ch’iu and Yang Kui, two writers who had been imprisoned by the regime, it was stopped from appearing subsequent to the publication of its first issue. The study group was dissolved by the political officers based on the Tamkang campus.)
Films and work
In 1982, Huang Yu-shan returned to Taiwan. Her first film, a documentary about the Taiwanese artist Ju Ming, was completed in the same year. Her early works as a filmmaker were mainly documentaries. Several were focused on Taiwanese artists. If it is convincingly held that the later feature films “strongly identify with Taiwan as a place”,Huang, Yu-shan and Wang, Chun-chi, “Post-Taiwan New Cinema Women Directors and Their Films”, in: Linzhen Wang, Chinese Women’s Cinema, Transnational Contexts. New York (Columbia Univ. Press) 2011, p.140. this was already true of her work in the early and mid-1980s. For her, culture and place were inseparable, and it was the specificity of the Taiwanese socio-culture that interested her more and more. A significant example that later on underscored this while expressing her feminist sympathies as well, is her film Women who have changed Taiwan, completed in 1993.
In August 1987, Huang Yu-shan was selected(by whom?) to direct her first feature, Autumn Tempest, which starred the famous Korean actress Kang Su Yeon (姜受延). It brought her a certain measure of fame and also good box office results.In a private written statement to the editor of Art in Society, Huang asserts this financial success of “Autumn Tempest”. She completed Autumn Tempest in 1988, working at the time as a director for the Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC), and a second feature film, Twin Bracelets, in 1989 as a director for the Metropolitan Film Corporation (a company associated with the Shaw Brothers’ Film Corporation). This helped her to establish her career as a film director. At the time, the CMPC had already begun to play an important role in the creation of the New Taiwan Cinema. YHuang u-shan's films belong to what became known as the Second New Wave.
It was the atmosphere of New York, and contact with people from the film-makers cooperative that encouraged Huang Yu-shan to become an independent film maker, rather than to rely permanently on the state-controlled Central Motion Picture Corporation. The financial success of Autumn Tempest enabled her to found the B & W Film Studio in 1988 with a group of supporters and thus, she began to do more feature films as well as a number of remarkable documentaries.See « Huang Yu-shan. Filmography. (A Selection) », in: Art in Society (), No. 12, 2011, This site gives detailed information on the founding of the studio. – Linzhen Wang also refers to the “Black and White Film Studio managed by Huang Yu-shan ” but does not give the year it was founded. See: Linzhen Wang, “Chinese Woman’s Cinema”, in: Yingzhen Zhang, opus cit. (2012), p. 340