Chinese Artists on the Edge brings together five landmark films that reveal the fertile exchange between contemporary art and Chinese cinema from the late 1980s through the turn of the twenty-first century.

Beijing Bastards (北京杂种)
Zhang Yuan, China, 1993, 88 min.
In Chinese with English subtitles.

Few films capture the texture of early-1990s Beijing as vividly as Beijing Bastards. Blending documentary immediacy with improvised fiction, Zhang Yuan’s sophomore feature film immerses viewers in the city’s emerging rock music scene, and features two defining figures of Chinese rock music—Cui Jian and Dou Wei. Grainy, restless, and alive to the rhythms of performance, the film helped establish a new cinematic vocabulary for a generation of Chinese filmmakers.
—Sam C. Mac

Preceded by:

White Lines (白线)
Zhang Yuan, China, 1988, 6 min.
In Chinese with English subtitles.

Made while he was a student at the Beijing Film Academy, Zhang Yuan’s White Lines offers a glimpse into the creative milieu that would shape a generation of Chinese contemporary art. Starring painters Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong—who would later appear together as a brooding couple in Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Days (1993)—the film begins as a simple studio exercise before gradually slipping into performance, dance, and playful improvisation. Moving from apartment interior to rooftop, canvas to city skyline, it already reveals a young Zhang Yuan’s fascination with the porous boundary between work and play, realism and performance. —Sam C. Mac

A limited amount of complimentary tickets will be available to NYC college students with ID at the box office on the day of the screening.