Huang Yu-shan

But she was courageous enough to discuss Lu Xun (魯迅|s鲁迅|) (still a forbidden writer) with young authors and to write an article about the novelist Yang Kui (楊 逵, 1905–1985), a forerunner of Nativist writers like Chen Yinzhen, and a man whose commitment to social justice had resulted in a dozen short prison sentences during the Japanese occupation and imprisonment for 12 years on Green Island, the KMT regime's concentration camp.

Yushan Huang's feature film The Strait Story as well as the documentary The Petrel Returns are focused on this artist, Ching-cheng Huang (黃清埕; 1912–1943).

After completing high school, she studied literature at Chengchi University in Mucha, Taipei.

Among her larger family she counts an important Taiwanese sculptor of the 1930s.

Huang Yu-shan (born 1954) is a Taiwanese filmmaker.

She has made significant contributions to Chinese cinema in the areas of aesthetics and cultural history.

Her focus is the woman's viewpoint, and frequently challenges the status quo in what has been a male-dominated society.

Although originally from Penghu Island, situated in the Taiwan Straits, Huang Yu-shan grew up in Kaohsiung, South Taiwan.

Her family later moved to Taipei.

Her father was a successful calligrapher who sold his works in Kaohsiung for many years.

Huang Yu-shan's early awareness of the beauty of this Art May have influenced her own creative development.

In the mid-1970s she worked for Yishu Gia (Artist Magazine) in Taipei, interviewing many painters, but also other artistically significant personalities on this island, such as the novelist and founder of the Cloud Gate Dance Theater, Lin Hwai-min, and the pioneer film director, Lee Hsing.

The late 1970s were a time for debates but also of protest in Taiwan.

Students organized big song events in the Taipei New Park, inviting folk singers considered subversive by the regime.

Music cassettes with forbidden songs were distributed on campus.

The protests on behalf of the regionalist and socially committed Nativist Literature, that was condemned by the pro-government media, was under way.

In ca. 1977–79, Huang Yu-shan took an interest in the works of Eisenstein, Alain Resnais, Werner Herzog, Kenji Mizoguchi etc. She counted a number of cinéastes, such as Chien-yeh Huang (a film critic) and Ivan Wang, the editor of the film journal Yinxiang and founder of the Taipei Film Museum (today, the National Film Archives or Film Library) among her friends.

And she belonged to a circle that organized private screenings of films such as Kurosawa's Red Beard, then forbidden by the censors of the Kuomintang dictatorship.

She also saw works by Rainer Maria Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, F. W. Murnau, Hellmuth Costard, Werner Nekes, Dore O.., Werner Schroeter and others at the German Cultural Center in Taipei.

At the time, the center had just begun to depart from its routine of simply showing ‘Guten Tag’ movies for learners of the German language, thanks to the encouragement of a friend of Werner Nekes, the German poet and film critic Andreas Weiland who was teaching German and English literature at Tamkang University.

These screenings attracted a number of cinéastes in Taipei and may have encouraged independent filmmakers.

After she had worked as script writer for three movies of the film director Lee Hsing (李行) in 1977–1979, she went to study film-making at the University of Iowa and later, transferred to New York.

In 1978, Huang Yu-shan began reading Pudovkin, Vertov, Eisenstein, André Bazin, Dudley Andrew and others whose writings she obtained in English.

In this period which preceded her departure to the U.S. in 1979, Huang Yu-shan quietly participated in relevant debates.

In view of her South Taiwanese roots, it is clear that Huang Yu-shan objectively shared a closeness to the regionalist culture with the blind old singer of protest songs, Chen Da, with the four Tamsui-based political activists Lee Shuang-tze (李雙澤 pinyin: Li Shuāngzé, a young composer of songs considered subversive by the KMT government), Lee Yuan-Chen (李元貞; the founder of Women Awakening), Liang Jingfeng (梁景峰) (who published under the pseudonym Liang Demin in the pro-democracy journal Summer Tide that was suppressed in 1979), and Wang Jinping (scholar and activist) (王津平).

And – subjectively – even more with Annette Lu (呂秀蓮 Lu Hsiu-lien pinyin: Lǚ Xiùlián – another pioneer of the women's lib movement in Taiwan), with the progressive Chengchi University teacher and later political activist Wang Tuoh (王拓) and with the Hakka author Chao-cheng Chung (鍾肇政) whose novel Chatianshan zhi ge later on became the basis of one of her feature films.

But she herself seems to have shied away from the protest movement.

She preferred discussions with pro-democracy dissidents inside the governing party.

If it is convincingly held that the later feature films “strongly identify with Taiwan as a place”, this was already true of her work in the early and mid-1980s.

For her, culture and place were inseparable, and it was the specificity of the Taiwanese socio-culture that interested her more and more.

In 1982 she graduated from New York University, having obtained an M.A. in Cinema Studies.

In 1982, Huang Yu-shan returned to Taiwan.

Her first film, a documentary about the Taiwanese artist Ju Ming, was completed in the same year.

Her early works as a filmmaker were mainly documentaries.

Several were focused on Taiwanese artists.

In August 1987, Huang Yu-shan was selected(by whom?) to direct her first feature, Autumn Tempest, which starred the famous Korean actress Kang Su Yeon (姜受延).

It brought her a certain measure of fame and also good box office results.

She completed Autumn Tempest in 1988, working at the time as a director for the Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC), and a second feature film, Twin Bracelets, in 1989 as a director for the Metropolitan Film Corporation (a company associated with the Shaw Brothers’ Film Corporation).

This helped her to establish her career as a film director.

A significant example that later on underscored this while expressing her feminist sympathies as well, is her film Women who have changed Taiwan, completed in 1993.