The 2nd event of “Taiwan in Dialogue” lecture/dialogue series will unveil director King Hu’s wuxia cinema stories through the lens of Chung Ling, who is the screenwriter of Legend of the Mountain, one of director King Hu’s classic works. Following the widely praised first event, “Reading The Story of the Stone with Pai Hsien-Yung and Susan Chan Egan,” this event will be live at 6:00 pm PDT on April 14, 2021. The prestigious writer and scholar Chung Ling was married to King Hu in 1977. Since then, she had participated in the production of several of his major works. She is invited in dialogue with Michael Berry, Director of UCLA Center for Chinese Studies (CCS), to discuss director King Hu’s film aesthetics integrated with traditional Chinese culture spirit. Entitled “Return to the Mountain: In Conversation with Chung Ling,” this event will be held through Zoom while livestreaming on CCS’s YouTube channel and Facebook. All are welcome to register online: https://www.international.ucla.edu/ccs/event/15011.
King Hu was an iconic Chinese wuxia film director whose early work, Come Drink with Me, became a pioneering classic of the Chinese wuxia film genre. In 1975, his work, A Touch of Zen, won the Technical Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and has earned international recognition. His works embraced various experimenting modes of storytelling influenced by Buddhism, Taoism, and Peking Opera, redefining the aesthetic model for wuxia cinema. His films were proved to be landmark works in the history of Chinese-language film. In 1977, director King Hu traveled to South Korea to shoot Legend of the Mountain (1979) and Raining in the Mountain (1979), with which the former became the winner of Best Director and Best Art Direction awards at the Golden Horse. Chung Ling, who produced both films and wrote the screenplay for Legend of the Mountain, will reflect on these two monumental films and King Hu’s distinguished film genre.
Chung Ling is a writer, scholar, translator, and screenwriter. She was Dean of Liberal Arts at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan; the founding Master of Cheng Yu Tung College in the University of Macau; Dean of Arts, chair professor, and Associate Vice President at Hong Kong Baptist University. She is the founder of the Dream of the Red Chamber Award, an important literary prize for contemporary Chinese fiction. She is the author of numerous books in Chinese, which range from prose to poetry and from literary criticism to short stories.
Initiated in 2013 by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture, the Spotlight Taiwan Project seeks to establish long-term relationships with global professional art and culture organizations and leading universities to promote Taiwan’s culture to the international community. This year, Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles partners with UCLA CCS to launch, “Taiwan in Dialogue” lecture/dialogue series, which encompass eight online events from February to November. Leading practitioners from a variety of Taiwan’s creative areas, including film, literature, theater, and art, will be invited to deliberate on the contemporary Taiwan culture. For further information about the Series, please follow CCS’s website www.international.ucla.edu/ccs/home, Facebook www.facebook.com/uclaccs, and YouTube www.youtube.com/user/UCLAccs/featured.