NEW YORK, NY.- Chinese Artists on the Edge brings together five landmark films that reveal the fertile exchange between contemporary art and Chinese cinema from the late 1980s through the turn of the twenty-first century. Most of these works were long unavailable or rarely screened, only recently returning to public view through restoration and archival preservation efforts.





The program includes two films by Sixth Generation figurehead Zhang Yuan: his Beijing Film Academy student short White Lines (1988, 白线), a playful experiment starring neorealist painter Liu Xiaodong, and his seminal Beijing Bastards (1993, 北京杂种), an electrifying portrait of the capital's burgeoning rock music scene, revived through a recent digitization of the original 35mm print.

Zhang's films play alongside a city symphony devoted to one of China's other great metropolises: Reverie on Old Shanghai (1993, 海上旧梦), the recently restored debut feature by the renowned late painter Chen Yifei, which translates the nostalgic visual world of his paintings into a lucid, dreamlike cinema. The program also includes The Paper (2000, 纸), filmmaker and photographer Ding Jiancheng's visually inventive adaptation of a short story by Su Tong (whose fiction inspired Raise the Red Lantern), and The Crack (2002, 缝), avant-garde artist Li Wake's semi-autobiographical fusion of scar literature, performance art, and psychosexual desire.

Together, these five films chart an alternative history of Chinese cinema, one shaped by artists working across disciplines and at the edges of convention. They reveal a remarkable body of work largely absent from conventional histories of Chinese cinema. Drawing on music, painting, literature, performance art, and experimental cinema, Chinese Artists on the Edge invites audiences to encounter a generation of artists who expanded the possibilities of the moving image while reshaping the visual imagination of modern China. Rather than treating cinema as a self-contained medium, these artists approached it as a site of exchange between artistic practices, working at the edges of the disciplines and institutions that sought to define them. —Guest curator Sam C. Mac