Women's Cinema from Taiwan: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives

This international workshop aims to spotlight women’s work in Taiwanese cinema, exploring topics such as female authorship, the female gaze, women’s networks, feminist media, and women’s contributions to the production of both independent and mainstream cinemas. While the emphasis is on new and recent films by women, the workshop will also hark back to earlier films to explore questions of canonization and the writing of film history. Moreover, the workshop will touch on the issues of female labor and female representation in male directors’ works. A major goal of the workshop is to examine overlooked voices, figures, pioneers, organizations, and collaborations. Another objective is to analyze Taiwanese women’s cinema from local, regional, and transnational perspectives, shedding light on the entanglements between local and global media cultures. 

Organisation

This workshop is convened by Professor Tze-lan Sang, Chair of Taiwan Studies at Leiden University and IIAS. It forms part of the Chair of Taiwan Studies programme, which is supported by the Department of Cross-Strait Education of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China (Taiwan), the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), and the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

Professor Tze-lan Sang is a Programme Director at Michigan State University (USA) with a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

Registration

This workshop is in-person and free of charge. To register, please fill out the form in the column on the right of this page.

Programme

Speakers and presentations

Session 1: Female Authorship and Taiwanese Documentary I

Session chair: Ling Zhang, IIAS, The Netherlands

Thinking Women in Ho Chao-ti’s Sock’n Roll

Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, Oberlin College, United States

Few directors tell stories about middle-aged female laborers from Taiwan, but Ho Chao-ti is a notable exception. In her 2013 documentary Sock’n Roll, Ho captures both the public struggles and private pain of ordinary working women belonging to the “squeezed generation,” caught between caring for aging parents and supporting school-aged children. These women represent a “neglected middle,” where personal aspirations are often displaced by the demands of survival. Many are unseen and unheard; they are low-wage, unskilled workers rendered invisible in society and expendable in the labor force. Ho challenges audiences to consider: How do women who face constant pressure endure? What are they thinking? What are their fears and dreams? This paper examines Ho’s portrayal of Hsu Yueh-Chun, a woman whose life is unraveled by a series of personal losses. Her story exposes a gendered power structure within an exploitative, unjust system in which “only money talks.” I argue that Ho’s insightful and creative treatment of this rarely studied subject positions her as a Foucauldian public intellectual—one with “conscience, consciousness, and eloquence”—who crafts a “proper discourse” to reveal “particular truths” and expose “political relationships where they were unsuspected.”

Dr Hsiu-Chuang Deppman is professor of Chinese and cinema studies at Oberlin College. Her research interests include the history of cinema, film adaptation, documentary, media studies, comparative literature, and modern Chinese fiction. Author of Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010) and Close-ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021), she has also published on various aspects of Chinese film, literature, and media in academic journals.

Breathing Cinema: Sinophone Women’s Personal Cinema

Kiki Tianqi Yu, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom

This presentation aims to draw attention to contemporary women’s personal cinema in the Sinophone contexts. I will consider personal cinema in various audio-visual forms, including first person documentary, essay film, diaries, and travelogue, etc. made by women of Chinese ethnicity across varying geo-social-cultural spaces. These films provoke me to reconsider filmmakers’ physical relationship with their personal camera, and the phenomenological aspect of the personal cinema, expanding my earlier discussion in ‘My’ Self on Camera (2019) and the special issue on women’s first person documentary from East Asia (2020). I ask: is it possible that cinema can breathe? Can cinema invite the viewers to breathe with the image flow? Can cinema offer a meditative space for self-gathering? In this presentation, I particularly pay attention to two films made in the transnational contexts, mainland Chinese filmmaker Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s Jet Lag (2022) and Taiwanese filmmaker Wu Fan’s Xixi (2024). I argue that their films, among some others, create a space for viewers, especially women, to take a breath and be themselves from the suffocating socio-political, gendered, and physical restrictions. I argue that their films could be seen as ‘breathing cinema’, a cinema that embraces a phenomenological 'feeling' and 'breathing' with the filmmaker, creating bodily resonance. These women’s ‘breathing cinema’ manifests the female gaze with what Soloway calls a ‘feeling camera’, foregrounds a loose narrative and an aesthetic of flowing, often when external conditions make it difficult for individuals to maintain control. I will discuss how these films create an aesthetics of essaying, feeling and breathing, that allow the audience to ‘breathe’ with them, through their affective materiality, 'feeling camera’ and flowing cinematic rhyme.

Dr Kiki Tianqi Yu is Senior Lecturer in Film at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on Daoism and cinema, documentary and essay film, women’s cinema. She is the author of ‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China (2019), the co-editor of China’s iGeneration (2014), and Essay Filmmaking and Narrative Techniques (2025). Her films include China’s van Goghs (2016), The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019), and she curated ‘The Spirit of Mountains and Water’ (2023), 'Dancing with Water' (2024).

Session 2: Female Authorship and Taiwanese Documentary II

Session chair: Sarah Niazi, IIAS, The Netherlands

Women and Homeland on the Move: Jasmine Lee’s Trans-Pacific Documentary Melodrama

Zhen Zhang, New York University, United States

Jasmine Ching-hui Lee’s new documentary Come Back, My Child premiered at San Deigo Asian Film Festival in November 2023, her first work in a decade since her highly acclaimed Money and Honey (2012). The main themes and settings of the two films appear vastly different, with the former focusing on the care workers in Taiwan and their homeland in the Philippines, and the latter on an elder Taiwanese immigrant in New York and her loving dedication to aiding mainland Chinese inmates serving long sentences in American correctional facilities. Yet the impetus and method that inform both projects stem in Lee’s long-standing interest in the relationship between “women and homeland,” also a series of short and long documentaries made over two decades. The last two feature length films have more visibly expanded the temporal and geographic reach of Lee’s work, engaging in a longitudinal ethnographic method on a transnational scale. This presentation will try to bridge the two films in terms of their shared attention to and admiration for women (especially mothers) who move across oceans and reinvent themselves while caring for other marginalized groups such as nursing home inmates in Taipei and undocumented workers lost in the racially biased judicial system in USA. Religious faith and the use of the epistolary form and sentimental music are consistently central to Lee’s documentary maternal melodrama. Beyond an intertextual take on the two “sister” films, I will also touch on the production and exhibition aspects to shed some light on the complexities of Lee’s feminist documentary practice.

Dr Zhen Zhang is Professor and Director of the Asian Film and Media Initiative at the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her publications include An Amorous History of the Silvers Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896-1937, The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century, DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations After Independent Film, Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema. She is the lead editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (2024). She has also curated programs for various institutions and festivals including the Women Make Waves International Film Festival in Taipei.

Hu Tai-li’s Ethnographic Films

Tze-lan Sang, Chair of Taiwan Studies at Leiden University and IIAS, the Netherlands

Among Taiwanese women documentary filmmakers, Hu Tai-li (1950-2022) stood out for her distinguished academic career in anthropology and the significant number of ethnographic films she directed and produced over four decades. Although she was primarily known for her documentation of indigenous and ethnic cultures in Taiwan, I contend that she was also a trailblazer in the way she approached the issue of documentary ethics, in her experiments with film form, and in her creation of a vibrant first-person voice by embedding her own life experiences in her documentaries about others. In this presentation, I will analyze examples from her films and writings to illuminate her contributions to documentary filmmaking and her interventions into public discourses in Taiwan.

Dr Tze-lan Deborah Sang is Professor of Chinese Literature and Media Studies at Michigan State University. Her research fields are gender and sexuality, modern Chinese literature and film, and urban studies. Among her major publications are The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries (Routledge, 2012). Her current research interests revolve around Sinophone women’s cinema, seeking to analyze them in local, regional, and global contexts. Author of essays and book chapters on the documentary works of Taiwanese women directors such as Wuna Wu, Chen-ti Kuo, Hui-chen Huang, and Hu Tai-li, she is currently completing a book on Taiwanese female documentarians as public intellectuals and innovative artists.

Session 3: Female Labor and Female Representation

Session chair: Anne Sytske Keijser, Leiden University, The Netherlands

The Search for Identity: Family, Loneliness, and LGBTQ+ Themes in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮)

Jens Damm, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany

This paper explores the themes of family, loneliness, and LGBTQ+ identities in the films of Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮), a Malaysian-born Taiwanese director known for his unique cinematic style. Tsai's work often depicts fractured families and urban alienation, reflecting the profound loneliness that societal shifts impose on traditional structures. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's theories of cinema, particularly the concepts of the body and the time-image, the analysis examines how Tsai's narrative techniques intersect with these themes through his innovative use of non-professional actors and exploration of everyday bodily experiences. The representation of queer desire is analysed through surreal situations that emphasize the physicality of the body and the dislocation of desire. The study then focuses on the performances of three prominent female actors: Yang Kuei-mei (楊貴媚), Chen Shiang-chyi (陳湘琪), and Lu Yi-ching (陸弈靜). Through close analysis of their roles in key films—including ‘Rebels of the Neon God’ (青少年哪吒), ‘Vive L'Amour’ (愛情萬歲), ‘The Hole’ (洞), ‘What Time Is It There?’ (你那邊幾點), and ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’ (不散)—the paper demonstrates how these actors embody the complexities of family dynamics and loneliness within Taiwan's evolving society. Their performances, situated within Tsai's minimalist storytelling approach, provide crucial insight into the director's exploration of contemporary urban alienation and identity formation.

Dr Jens Damm is an Associate Fellow at the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan (ERCCT) at Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen. His research interests include new media, gender, and LGBTQ studies in Taiwan and beyond. From February 2025, he will serve as the Visiting Chair of Taiwan Studies at Leiden University for one term.

Women in Taiwanese-language Cinema, 1950s–1970s

Ming-yeh Rawnsley, University of London, United Kingdom

This presentation examines the portrayal of female characters in the Taiwanese-language cinema (taiyupian) produced between the 1950s and the 1970s. I survey the Taiwanese-language film titles referenced in the first English-language anthology dedicated to the study of taiyupian, entitled Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered (eds Chris Berry, Wafa Ghermani, Corrado Neri and Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley, 2024). I opt for four stereotypical representations for discussion: (1) girl next door, (2) homemaker, (3) career lady, and (4) vamp. However, the boundaries of these categories are fluid as ‘girls next door’ may later in the storyline become a ‘homemaker’, or a ‘career lady’, or a ‘vamp’. Moreover, while taiyupian tends to regard ‘girl next door’ and ‘homemaker’ with generally higher esteem, their attitude towards ‘career lady’ and ‘vamp’ appears more ambiguous than simplistic or negative. This may lead us to consider how traditional Taiwanese society of the 1950s–1970s was conservative and patriarchal, but it has also been willing to tolerate gender nonconformity. This preliminary observation may offer researchers a basis for comparing the representation of women in Taiwan cinema past and present. It also provides a foundation for understanding better the place of, and approaches to, gender in Taiwan’s social structure.

Dr Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley is Research Associate, Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS University of London. She is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Taiwan Studies and has published widely in both English and Chinese on cinema, media and democratisation in Taiwan. Her most recent book is Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered (eds with Berry, Ghermani and Neri, 2024). She also leads a new short book series (co-edited with Gary Rawnsley) titled ‘Anthem Impact in Asian Media, Cinema, and Communications’.

Transness and Mixed-Race Performance in As We Like It (2021)

Alexa Alice Youbin, George Washington University, United States

During the global pandemic of Covid-19 when toxic notions of purity informed public health policies and anti-Asian racism, Hung-I Chen and Muni Wei released As We Like It (Jie da huan xi, 2021), an all-female film adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599). The romantic comedy deconstructs prejudiced assumptions of identitarian purity. Founder of Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group in Taiwan, Wei is a seasoned director who regularly engages with Western classics. Among several noteworthy themes in the film are its exploration of transgender practices and mixed-race identities, as evidenced by Franco-Taiwanese mixed race actress Camile Chalons’ cross-gender and bilingual performance of Celia. Along with two openly trans actresses’ backpassing acts, the all-female cast takes on cross-gender roles to talk back to “the patriarchy who would not allow female actors on stage” (closing credits). In Shakespeare’s times, women were prohibited from performing on the public stage. As We Like It, as its title suggests, is a counter dose to the all-male performance tradition. Set in a futuristic Internet-free neighborhood in Taipei, where courier delivery of hand- written love letters is the norm and where bonding through palmistry, instead of online dating, reigns supreme. The film does away with such binary gender accessories as moustaches or wigs. It presents characters of all genders—played by actors identifying as women—matter-of-factly without apology or additional justification. A fine example of women’s cinema from Taiwan, the film is a trans-historical and cross-cultural dialogue.

Dr Alexa Alice Joubin co-directs the Taiwan Education and Research Program and Digital Humanities Institute at George Washington University where she is Professor of English, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures. She is the inaugural recipient of the bell hooks Legacy Award and the recipient of Modern Language Association's Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. Her current research focuses on trans/feminist, queer, and mixed-race performances across cultures.

Roundtable: Transnational and Comparative Approaches to Taiwanese Women’s Cinema

Roundtable moderator: Tze-lan Sang