#week 158

This week we are excited to feature the talented writer that is @peanutbutterjelly-pie I hope you enjoy all the amazing fics we have for you this week!

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Saturday Fiction (兰心大剧院). dir Lou Ye (娄烨). 2019.

Lou Ye is a Chinese screenwriter-director based in Shanghai, China. Educated at the Beijing Film Academy, Lou has received international acclaim. for works such as Suzhou River (2003) and Summer Palace (2006). Touching on topics of Chinese identity and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Lou’s work has been deemed controversy, with his first film Weekend Lover banned in its first two years of conception and the release of his film Summer Palace resulting in a five-year ban. Lou’s work is associated with the Sixth Generation film movement in China, known for its use of amateur filmmaking aesthetics and a more “individualistic, anti-romantic life view” with “attention to contemporary urban life, especially as affected by disorientation [and] rebellion”.

Saturday Fiction is a period drama set on Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1941. The movie centers around a famous film actress and spy Jean Yu on the search for her ex-husband (who is held by Japanese authorities) - as she features in the play “Saturday Fiction”. 

We want to express our appreciation to @peanutbutterjelly-pie for all the amazing fanfics we got to share this week!

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Thank you for keeping up with us and supporting our amazing creators and see you next week. Have an amazing weekend and stay well!

Selection from A Sprig of Plum Blossom (一剪梅) by Li Qingzhao (李清照). Song dynasty. Translated by KS Vincent Poon in 2015. 

Li Qingzhao (李清照) is considered one of the greatest female poets in Chinese history. Born into a northern Song family of scholar-officials, Li Qingzhao was part of the small percentage of women at that time who received an education. 

Only around a hundred of Li’s poems remain, and most are in the Ci (詞) style. Her poems can be divided into two categories; her earlier works are similar to love poems, and her later works mostly voice her patriotism and anger about the Jurchen invasion, which forced her to flee from her home of the captial city Kaifeng. A Sprig of Plum Blossom is one of Li’s earlier works, and expresses the sorrows of being separated from one she loves. 

Rock and Insects. Ju Lian (居廉). Ink and color on silk, circular fan leaves, mounted. 1896.

Part of the Lingnan School of Chinese painters in the late Qing Dynasty, Ju Lian (1828-1904) was a painter native to Panyu (番禺), now a district of Guangzhou. He would later come to mentor the brothers Gao Jianfu and Gao Qifeng, two artists who popularized the theme of incorporating modern, eclectic elements of Western painting into their traditional subjects — a theme that would later become a signature of the Lingnan School.

Litchi Girl (荔枝姑娘). Mao Chenyu (毛晨雨). Multi-media. 2018.

Mao Chenyu is an artist, documentary filmmaker, researcher and rice farmer born in Hunan and based in Shanghai, China. Trained in the study of inorganic non-metallic materials, Mao founds and runs Paddy Film Farm, a grassroots independent film studio and producer of organic rice and strong liquor. As such, he has spent over a decade producing “ethnographically inflected documentary work” in a village outside of Yueyang in Hunan. Mao has participated in multiple solo exhibitions and group exhibitions since 2015, and their films have won awards in the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and Yunnan Multiculture Visual Festival.

Litchi Girl is Mao’s first solo exhibition and concerns the “contradictions between white and black spaces”. Mao uses green to resist both white and black discourses, mimicking the green screen technique of cinematic production. Viewers of the exhibition are left searching for the absent Litchi Girl throughout the exhibition, as the only footnote appears in the video Memory that Self Vanishes with 2/3 Speed of Light, which mentions that “In 1967 ‘Litchi Girl’ escaped a labor camp guarded by men, and jumped into the river. Several days later her body was found at the river mouth near Dongting Lake, her breasts already swollen”.