Taipei Stories
The Films of Edward Yang

As one of the central representatives of Taiwan New Cinema, Edward Yang is inextricably linked to the aesthetic renewal of Taiwanese cinema that began in the 1980s. His films reflect the specifically Taiwanese experience of exile, authoritarianism and liberalisation as well as the discrepancy between Confucian tradition and Western-oriented modernity. Yang is a filmmaker of the big city and Taipei is the canvas on which he creates his epic, convoluted and often fractured narratives. The formal power and modernity of his films have made Taiwan one of the most exciting places in world cinema. Yang's works continue to exert a great influence on other filmmakers to this day.
Edward Yang was born on 6 November 1947 in Shanghai, but grew up in Taipei, where his parents emigrated to at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Despite his early interest in comics and films, Yang studied electrical engineering, first in Taiwan and later in the USA. Following his passion, Yang then began studying film in Los Angeles at the renowned University of Southern California. However, he dropped out after the first semester, discouraged because he felt the programme was too mainstream. From then on, Yang worked in Seattle in a research laboratory in the IT industry.
His encounter with Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God reignited Yang's enthusiasm for cinema. He studied European and international film classics on his own and developed ideas and production concepts for his films. After returning to Taiwan in 1980, Yang wrote the screenplay for the independently financed historical film The Winter of 1905, directed by Yu Wei-Cheng, and directed the television two-parter Floating Weeds for the first time. The omnibus film In Our Time is made in collaboration with three other up-and-coming directors and heralds the renewal of Taiwanese cinema, which begins in the wake of political liberalisation following the death of the authoritarian ruling Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. From then on, Taiwanese films were no longer characterised by the conservative values that the ruling party wanted to glorify. Instead, unadorned, true-to-life observations of everyday life and precise studies of Taiwan's history, present and social structure were possible for the first time. In precisely composed images, Edward Yang tells of the reality of Taiwan and life in the rapidly changing metropolis of Taipei until his death in 2007. (Jendrik Walendy)
The retrospective Taipei Stories - The Films of Edward Yang, curated by Jendrik Walendy, is funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds and the Ministry of Culture Taiwan as part of the Spotlight Taiwan project. Co-operation partners are the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute and Kailidoscope Pictures.