Time Out Heroes Beijing - Film & Art

To celebrate 40 years of Time Out worldwide, we invited 40 of our heroes to a party. We gave film and art heroes champagne, told them to be themselves and sat back as they did their thing. This is what happened.

Firebrand
Fang Li

Fang Li’s real job actually has nothing to do with the movies. In 2000, he set up independent production company Laurel Films as a subsidiary of his existing earth sciences company in order to help young directors realise their dreams. He saw promise in Lou Ye, Wang Chao and Li Yu (see below right), three helmers who have since received critical acclaim for their work – and several bans.

After Fang and Lou’s first film Summer Palace was screened at Cannes without government approval, the team were blocked for five years. A strong believer in the films he champions, when Li Yu’s Lost in Beijing was pulled from Mainland cinemas earlier this year and banned again, Fang vowed to fight on.

Fang’s hero: Deng Xiaoping. When that man turned 80 he still had the vigour and attitude of a 20 year old. No one is as wise as he was – without Deng Xiaoping there would be no China today.  

Huayi brother
Wang Zhongjun

Beijinger Wang Zhongjun’s Huayi Brothers Media Group, which he founded with his brother Zhonglei in 1994, has arguably done more than any other company for Chinese film. Despite problems with piracy and low cinema attendances, the group has becomeChina’s largest private film company and plans to list its shares on the Chinese stock exchange.

While the group has a distinctly commercial bent, a large part of the brothers’ success has been a resolute commitment to quality, producing hits like Chen Kaige’s The Banquet, Feng Xiaogang’s The Assembly and The Forbidden Kingdom with Jet Li and Jackie Chan. Wang and his brother run their company like an old-style Hollywood studio, controlling everything from the script to the screen.

Wang’s hero: I really admire [milk entrepreneur] Niu Gengsheng, who established this incredible modern corporation in a desolate part of Inner Mongolia.

Still going strong
Dashan

Ever since he performed a comedy skit to a TV audience of 550 million at the New Year’s Gala in 1988, Dashan (non-Chinese name: Mark Rowswell) has been among the most famous foreigners in China (him and David Beckham are the two your taxi driver will probably have heard of).

Anyone who has tried learning Chinese here will have heard his name brought up as the example of a foreigner who can speak perfect Chinese – he has even mastered the Chinese xiangsheng comedy, or cross-talk. But while his prolific appearances in films (he has won acting awards), on CCTV9 and on advertising hoardings have attracted some Dashan-bashers, we like him.

He says: ‘People seem to think that I’m famous for just speaking Chinese, but there are thousands of people who speak better Chinese than I do. If all I had going for me was fluency in Mandarin, I would never have been able to put this unique career together.’ We say: Long live Dashan.   

Dashan’s hero: I don’t put much stock by heroes, but what those early East-meets-West pioneers like Matteo Ricci and Giuseppe Castiglione did was pretty cool.

Feisty femme
Li Yu  

Talented female directors are in short supply in Beijing, so former newsreader Li Yu’s talent is conspicuous to begin with. The fact that she has made two of the Mainland’s most controversial films to date marks her out as nothing short of a revelation. Her first film, Fish and Elephant, was embraced by alternative audiences as the first lesbian themed film on the Mainland.

Her second, Dam Street, was heavy on sexual poilics and the most recent, Lost in Beijing – a frank and brutal depiction of the modern day capital – was pulled from Chinese cinemas after three weeks for its explicit content.

Li’s heroes: Heroes are those who challenge themselves to the limit, like the athletes competing in the Paralympic Games. Some of them lost legs but can still swim as fast as non disabled swimmers. It’s so impressive.

Modern film’s founding father
Chen Kaige

Beijing-born Chen Kaige is one of China’s most cherished filmmakers. The phrase most used to describe him, ‘Fifth Generation director’, doesn’t quite do justice to the fact that his debut film Yellow Earth was the first ‘modern’ film to come out of China.
Nor the fact that his work – which often recalls the difficult days he experienced during the Cultural Revolution – has managed to bring China alive for foreign audiences as well as those at home. His latest release, due out next month, is a biopic of the Peking Opera singer Mei Lanfang with Zhang Ziyi.

Chen’s hero: I think we live in a time without heroes now; we need heroes less and less. I’m too old to have a hero anyway. I can’t say things like ‘my mother’ any more.

The East is red hot
Zhang Ziyi

Probably China’s most famous female film star, Beijing-born Zhang Ziyi is the epitome of porcelain-skinned Oriental beauty. But we don’t just like Zhang because she can act and looks great in Imperial gowns – we like the Crouching Tiger, Hero and Memoirs of a Geisha star because she seems like a nice girl who cares about her work.

She was the youngest ever person to sit on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, having picked up her perfect English by listening to Eminem tunes, and once ran away from the Beijing Dance Academy because she hated the catty competitiveness of the other girls. Look out for her singing in Mei Lanfang, the Chen Kaige-directed film released next month.
Zhang’s hero: Bus drivers and construction workers… just normal people.

Mr 798
Huang Rui

If the phenomenon of the 798 Art District is personified by anyone, it’s artist Huang Rui. In 2002, Huang, who had been a leader of the avant garde ‘Stars’ movement in the late 1970s with Ai Weiwei, moved his home and studio into what was then a sprawling collection of decommissioned military factories with just a few art spaces (and Robert Bernell’s Timezone 8 Café).

That summer, he set up the 798 Space gallery, which would become the spiritual hub of the district and the catalyst for its rapid growth in the last six years. Huang has since designed seven major spaces in the area, organises the annual Dashanzi Art Festival, and has become 798’s de facto spokesperson.

Huang’s hero: You Luoke, who wrote a number of books and essays criticising the Cultural Revolution, and who was executed in 1970, aged 27.

Our favourite art teacher
Chen Danqing

Chen Danqing is a hero on two counts. First, he was the painter whose paintings of Tibetans in the early 1980s signalled the rebirth of painting as a creative art rather than propaganda (ironic, given that painting had freed him from Cultural Revolution exile). Then, as a teacher at Tsinghua, he became a passionate supporter of talented young artists and a powerful voice in the debate over Chinese art education reform.

Chen’s hero: Recently, I liked the boy who appeared with Yao Ming at the Olympics opening ceremony. He looked pure and natural, whereas the girl who sang looked fake, as if she’d been taught by adults. Nowadays, we just need honest people.

Smooth talker
Yang Rui

If there’s a good place to get a grasp of the Chinese view on the world, it’s Yang Rui’s ‘Dialogue’ programme on CCTV9, a political affairs programme that covers everything from China’s relationship with Japan to North Korean disarmament. While Yang accepts the show is putting forward a Chinese world view, he says it does so in the spirit of objectivity.

‘Most of my colleagues have a strong feeling that China is not always covered very accurately, especially by those outside China with an ideological viewpoint,’ he says. ‘We want to correct that in the spirit of objectivity.’ Yang studied journalism at Cardiff University, one of the top two journalism courses in the UK, and as well as being highly well-informed is a strong believer in  proper news values.

Yang’s hero: Anyone who shows integrity, vision and leadership.