Railway Guerrilla Stories Retold in China
Remake after remake concerning the role played by China’s northwestern guerrilla fighters during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) show a cinematic tradition that is still going strong in the 70 years since its inception: in this article, Staff Writer Bingbing Shi reviews Railway Heroes (2021), a remake of Zhao Ming’s 1956 classic, Railway Guerrilla, as well as the evolution of the Chinese ‘resistance genre’ as a whole.
Blank Scrolls: Emptiness in East Asian Art & Philosophy
Staff Writer for East Asia, Hannah Kang Wolter, explores the technique of negative space in Chinese art and the corresponding notion of emptiness in East Asian philosophy. Her medium for doing so - a comparison of the 2008 blockbuster film, Kung Fu Panda, and Huang Gongwang’s traditional Chinese landscape paintings from the 14th century.
The Treatment of Fact in Saturday Fiction
Staff Writer for East Asia, Bingbing Shi, writes about the blurring of fact and fiction in Lou Ye’s Saturday Fiction (2019), starring Gong Li. Set in Shanghai during the war, Lou Ye’s espionage thriller is proving to be both popular and controversial in China.