Undercurrents
Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong
Hok-Sze Leung 2008, Chapter 3, p. 65-67.
Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong, Helen Hok-Sze Leung, 2008
When Stanley Kwan received an invitation from the British Film Institute in 1996 to make a film for the commemorative series “The Century of Cinema,” he set out to make a well-researched and informative documentary about the general history of Chinese cinema. As he immersed himself in the film archive in Shanghai, however, a queer turn of events steered the project in an entirely different direction. Kwan was struck by two phenomena in Chinese cinema that have wielded enormous influence on his life and career: a strong undercurrent of homoeroticism and a long tradition of non-normative gender expressions. As Kwan became more and more absorbed in these issues, he abandoned his original vision. Yin ± Yang: Gender in Chinese Cinema (Stanley Kwan, 1996), a cinematic essay that combines film history with Kwan’s personal reflections on gender and sexuality, emerged from these side-tracked efforts. The film has often been characterized as Kwan’s first public declaration of his identity as a gay man: the film critic Sek Kei, for instance, calls it a “frank and direct expression of his homo-sexuality.” Yet, this narrative of gay desire is also complicated at every turn by continual – if not always coherent – musings on issues of gender variance. The Chinese title, Nansheng nuxiang, literally “boy with a girl’s face,” refers to a type of “face” within the ancient “face reading” tradition (xiangxue) that portends prosperity. Indeed, this “face” of the girl-boy – the transgender face – leaves an indelible imprint on the winding narrative of the film, which meanders from Kwan’s ambivalent relation with his father, his early obsession with the hyper-masculinized figures of action stars Bruce Lee and Wang Yu, and his later penchant for making “women’s films” to the various forms of cross-dressing and cross-gender embodiments that he traces in Chinese cinema. Continue reading…
