This year, I returned to a Beijing I hardly recognized. It was not the capital I first glimpsed as a child in the 1980s, when groups of men in thin jackets stood smoking in the cold, and tides of cyclists seemed ready to carry me...
The film ‘Nikah,’ set in China’s Uyghur region in 2017, spans the months between two weddings. It follows Dilber, a young woman approaching a crossroads amid the Chinese government’s surveilling and detaining of members of her community. As even...
The scholar and journalist Kejia Wu is the author of A Modern History of China’s Art Market, a...
This book will be denounced in Beijing. Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow is a novel based on the life of Sun Weishi, an adopted daughter of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, whose brilliant mind and intensive study in Moscow...
Although Beijing and Hollywood inhabit political and cultural universes that have little in common, they are similar in one important respect: both have expended vast amounts of energy, time, and capital confecting imaginary universes. The...
As I read 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, I felt as if I’d finally come upon the chronicle of modern China for which I’d been waiting since I first began studying this elusive country six decades ago. What makes this memoir so absorbing is that...
In the run-up to the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic on October 1, China’s television regulator has mandated that all television channels only air patriotic shows. The ban might be short-lived, but it has kept the news in the headlines...
As we commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of China’s 1989 democracy movement, it is hard to imagine students and intellectuals playing a similar role today. In China’s highly marketized and politically controlled society, the space for...
A central issue many of the Hong Kong people in my portraits are wrestling with is how to define an identity and being challenged in that pursuit by cultural, social, or political pressures. There is a lot of frustration and anger over the recent...
For many, Buddhism is “a religion of peace” and its adaptation for political purposes, even to inspire violence, feels flat-out wrong. That makes the exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art, “Faith and Empire: Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism...
Liu Xia, widow of Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 and died while in Chinese custody in 2017, has opened up to the public for the first time since she began a life of exile in Germany nearly a year ago. On May 4, in a dialogue...
In the 2000s, New York-based artist Lisa Ross traveled to the city of Turpan in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and photographed local people on the beds that they keep in their fields. The portraits in that series are currently on...
In February 2017, the United States and China began renegotiating the five-year film pact that had limited the annual number of foreign film exports to China to 34 and the share of revenue payable to foreign-rights holders to 25 percent of gross...
If the stories in this edition of Depth of Field share a common thread—apart from their distinguished photographic storytelling—it’s their interest in the flux and churn of life in China in 2019, where nothing seems fixed and pressure of constant...
Christopher Robin, which is already in theaters in the U.S., is the second Disney movie to be rejected in China this year, following A Wrinkle in Time. Another source told THR that Christopher Robin ...
In Beijing, the AFP reports that authorities have slated the neighborhood surrounding Ai's studio for redevelopment. According to the AP, Beijing has destroyed "large swaths of the suburbs over the past year in a building safety campaign."
The “Finnish Nightmares” comic series documents the social challenges faced by Matti, a mild-mannered stick figure who abhors small talk. The series has been trending on Chinese social media, and it even spawned a new word for social awkwardness...
In 1902, Liang Qichao, a reformist intellectual of the late Qing dynasty, wrote a futuristic story called “A Chronicle of the Future of New China.” In the unfinished manuscript, he depicts Shanghai hosting the World Fair in 1962...
Wanda Studios Qingdao is the centerpiece of billionaire Wang Jianlin’s plan to court Hollywood, but it hasn’t attracted many big-budget productions.
China’s Communist Party made moves last month to solidify and formalize its (already substantial) control over the country’s media. China’s main state-run broadcasters are to be consolidated into a massive new “Voice of China” under the...
In this issue of Depth of Field, we take a ride on one of China’s slowest trains, meet the workers who cut the ice for Harbin’s winter festival, and follow two mentally disabled “sent-down youth” on a rare trip home to visit their families. Also...
The seemingly sharp fall in attendance prompted Western media outlets to write a series of articles that suggested Chinese moviegoers objected to Black Panther because of its all-black leading cast. “A torture for the eyes: Chinese moviegoers...
In 2011, when a rural prep school in Maine invited New York-based director Miao Wang to screen her first film, Beijing Taxi, she was surprised to find so many Chinese students enrolled at the archetypal New England establishment. Not Chinese-...
At nearly $900 million worldwide and counting, Marvel’s latest is a certified historic hit, but Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster faces a final challenge to “conventional wisdom” in the world's second-largest film market.
A tousled-haired young man in a third-tier Chinese city is desperate to fix the botched plastic surgery done on his fiancée’s face. At knifepoint, he steals a satchel of one million yuan from a local gangster, setting off a chain-...
China’s censors have a new target in a widespread clamp-down on popular culture: the country’s nascent hip-hop scene, which resonated with Chinese youth last year on hugely popular television show “Rap of China.”
The film moved Su Shaojun, the developer overseeing the project, so much that when he became a developer 15 years later, he proposed building a resort and theme park featuring a replica.
“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” brought in an estimated $28.7 million in its opening weekend in China, coming in below its two predecessors in the world’s fastest-growing market.
China will launch a cultural centre to promote Chinese culture in Jordan and to enhance ties between the two countries, Chinese Ambassador to Jordan Pan Weifang said Monday.
One of China’s most influential artists is forty-eight-year-old Qiu Zhijie. A native of southern China’s Fujian province, Qiu studied art in the eastern city of Hangzhou before moving to Beijing in 1994 to pursue a career as a...
Shen Yun seems like a kitsch dance troupe. But Beijing sees it as the propaganda wing of the Falun Gong movement, and a threat to their rule – and hounds the dancers from city to city, trying to sabotage their shows.
Disney has picked Chinese actor Liu Yifei to play Mulan in an upcoming film, following accusations against Hollywood of ‘whitewashing.’
Coco, Pixar’s latest animated movie, beat two superhero films to top the US box office over Thanksgiving weekend. It could also become one of Pixar’s top-grossing films in China—a country where the studio has struggled to win over audiences.
On the evening of May 20, 1989, in response to weeks of mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government placed Beijing under martial law. The following morning, in Hong Kong, far to the south, Wen Wei Po, the main Communist-...
Xue Yiwei, who has been hailed as China’s “most charismatic literary stylist,” is virtually unknown among English-language readers.
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Chinese writers grappled with the traumas of the Mao period, seeking to make sense of their suffering. As in the imperial era, most had been servants of the state, loyalists who might criticize...
A section of the “This Is Africa” exhibit at the Hubei Provincial Museum in Wuhan included side-by-side photographs of animals and people displaying similar expressions. One pair included a young boy and a howling chimpanzee, each photographed...
Ai shot 900 hours of footage and conducted 600 interviews over the course of a year, and edited the film over six months.
A disappointing North American debut has placed added pressure on the major Asian territories where the film has yet to open, led by the massive China market.
The Oscar nominations coming from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China have not attracted much buzz internationally, but each region’s submission touches on issues in that capture the ambitions, desires, and insecurities of its people. Taken as a trio,...
Strange to say, although China has 1.4 billion people, it has only one artist, Ai Weiwei. Or so you’d think if you followed the Western news media. “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum wants to...
Michael Xufu Huang is hard to miss. In March of this year, the Chinese art collector turned heads at a Guggenheim party by showing up in a white leather jumpsuit. A week later, he swept through the VIP opening of Art Basel in Hong Kong in a...
One of China’s most popular directors, Feng Xiaogang, was determined to triumph at the box office with the release of his new film “Youth” during the weeklong National Day holiday. But then Mr. Feng’s premiere was abruptly canceled.
The signature work at “Art and China After 1989,” a highly anticipated show that takes over the Guggenheim on Oct. 6, is a simple table with a see-through dome shaped like the back of a tortoise. On the tabletop hundreds of insects and reptiles...
“Streams and Mountains Without End: Landscape Traditions of China,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, features a collection reinstallation spiced with a few loans. But the Met’s China holdings are so broad and deep that some of the pictures here...
China is ranked second only to Italy in terms of number of world heritage sites. But it's come at a cost.
The World War II rescue tale “Dunkirk” dominated the box office in China last week, building on its international success.
The Han Clothing Movement, a youth-based grassroots nationalist movement built around China’s majority Han ethnic group, has emerged over the past 15 years in urban China. It imagines the numerically and culturally dominant Han—nearly 92% of...
David Tang, the founder of Shanghai Tang, a global chain of flashy emporiums of Chinese-inspired clothing, accessories and home furnishings, and a prominent writer and raconteur in Hong Kong and Britain, died on Tuesday in London. He was 63.
Chinese censorship has come a long way. During his rule in the second century B.C.E., the First Emperor of a unified China, Ying Zheng, famously quashed the intellectual diversity of his day by ‘burning the books and burying the scholars’. He not...
