AYA TAKANO The Art Truck Runs acrylic on canvas 111.8 x 145.5 cm. (44 x 57 ¼ in.) Painted in 2006

Patti Smith

“Another reason I decided to make Xiao Wu is that in 1997 I was getting ready to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy and after four years of watching Chinese films, I still hadn’t seen a single one that had anything to do with the Chinese reality that I knew. After the Fifth Generation’s initial success, their artistic works started to undergo a lot of changes. One of these big changes came with Chen Kaige, who once said, ‘I increasingly feel that film should be used as a vehicle to describe legend.’ I, however, could not disagree more. Sure film can describe legend, but where is it written that film can’t depict other things as well? Unfortunately, most of the Fifth Generation directors all followed this trajectory… But there was a very clear disconnect between these films and the current Chinese reality that we are living in. There is something about this phenomenon that left me feeling very unsatisfied, and it was partially out of this frustration that I decided to make films. I told my collaborators at the time that I wanted to express the here and now, and that has been the aim of our films ever since.” — Jia Zhangke (2002)

http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm

Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri on the set of The Handmaiden (2016) dir. Park Chan-wook

Press photo for Criminal Woman: Killing Melody (Zenka Onna: Koroshi-Bushi, 前科おんな 殺し節), 1973, directed by Atsushi Mihori (三堀篤) and starring Reiko Ike (池玲子), Miki Sugimoto (杉本美樹), Yumiko Katayama (片山由美子), Chiyoko Kazama (風間千代子) and Masami Soda (宗田政美).