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.

The Paper (纸)
Ding Jiancheng, China, 1993, 62 min.
In Chinese with English subtitles.

Followed by a Q&A with Ding Jiancheng.

Adapted from a short story by Su Tong, one of China’s foremost contemporary novelists whose fiction inspired Raise the Red Lantern, Ding Jiancheng’s The Paper is one of the most visually distinctive Chinese films of its era. Centered on an elderly maker of paper effigies and the young boy drawn into his world, the film treats paper as both subject and method, drifting between literature and cinema, dream and reality, color and monochrome. The result is a film in a constant state of transformation, rooted in craft, materiality, and storytelling. Long believed to survive only in a single 35mm release print, the film was digitized by the Asian Film Archive in 2021, making this remarkable debut feature newly accessible to audiences. —Sam C. Mac

Digital restoration courtesy of Asian Film Archive.

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.