Chinatopia
VIEW EVENT DETAILSDocumentary Screening and Post-Screening Discussion with Director Evans Chan; Professor Mette Hjort, Chair Professor, Department of Visual Studies, Lingnan University, and Professor Longxi Zhang, Chair Professor, Department of Chinese and History, City University of Hong Kong
Drinks Reception at 6.30pm
Screening at 7.15pm
Discussion at 8.30pm
“[a scholar] of great intelligence and courage…Kang Youwei (1858–1927) saw himself as a new sage capable of saving the Chinese people….Evans Chan’s Datong: The Great Society is a film on Kang, his family, and fellow reformers. The Swedish angle is indeed an interesting and unusual way to bring Kang back to life.”
- Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China
CHINATOPIA 《新世紀的康有為》(2014/Evans Chan/Hong Kong/Taiwan/USA/ 73 min; Documentary in English and Chinese with English and Chinese subtitles) Kang Youwei (1858-1927) was China's pioneering dissident and constitutional reformer, who prophesized gay marriage, strove to unbind women’s feet and wrote modern China’s first major utopian tract – an acknowledged influence on Mao Zedong. While previously known mainly for spearheading the Hundred Days Reform (1889), a modernization drive crushed by Empress Dowager Cixi, Kang Youwei comes alive in Chinatopia mostly through his16 years of exile, which included an idyllic four-year sojourn in Sweden. Kang’s cosmopolitanism and his Asian American activism astound – an anti-American boycott he orchestrated in 1905-06 to beat back the Chinese Exclusion Acts resulted in two meetings with a conciliatory Theodore Roosevelt. Chinatopia is an abridged version of Evans Chan’s two-part documentaries, acclaimed by critics and historians, Two or Three Things about Kang Youwei 《康有為二三事》(2013) and Datong: The Great Society《大同:康有為在瑞典》(2011), which was named 2011 Movie-of-the- Year by mainland China’s progressive Southern Metropolitan Daily for “returning fuller memories and humanity” to Chinese history. The 2015 Hong Kong Arts Festival commissioned Chan to write the libretto for its upcoming chamber opera, Datong: The Chinese Utopia, based on Chan’s Kang films. The production will be premiered at Hong Kong City Hall March 20-22, 2015.
Post screening discussion -- emphasizing on Kang’s years of exile in Sweden and China’s growing interest in the Nordic region – features Professor Mette Hjort, Professor Longxi Zhang, and director Evans Chan.
Evans Chan was hailed by Michael Berry as “one of the most singularly innovative and diverse figures in the Chinese cultural world.” A critic and filmmaker, Chan has had his award-winning films -- such as Journey to Beijing (1998), and Sorceress of the New Piano (2004) -- shown at the Berlin, Rotterdam, London, Moscow, Vancouver, and San Francisco festivals. Time Out Hong Kong named Chan’s directorial debut, To Liv(e) (1991), as one of the "100 Greatest Hong Kong Films.
Mette Hjort is Chair Professor of Visual Studies at Lingnan University, where she also serves as Associate Vice President (Academic Quality Assurance & Internationalization). She is a Founding Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities, an Affiliate Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, and an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Modern European Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Mette has published a number of monographs and edited volumes focusing on film, including, most recently, The Education of the Filmmaker in Africa, the Middle East and the Americas and The Education of the Filmmaker in Europe, Australia, and Asia (both by Palgrave Macmillan).
Longxi Zhang, MA from Peking University and Ph. D. from Harvard, is currently Chair Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the City University of Hong Kong. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (2009) and Academia Europaea (2013). He has published more than 20 books and numerous articles, and his books in English include The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (Duke, 1992); Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, 1998); Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Cornell, 2005); Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (Toronto, 2007); and From Comparison to World Literature (SUNY, 2015).
Supported by
Centre for Cinema Studies, Lingnan University
Consulate General of Sweden in Hong Kong