Rix Chan (ta/they/hir) is a performance artist combining movement, filmmaking, and AI studies. Their work explores the 'Cyborg as gender,' testing the reconstruction of personhood and objecthood through performance. By drawing on embodied practices like butoh and taijiquan, they merge improvisational form with technology to create immersive, visceral experiences.
Rix has trained under Eiko Otake and worked with performing artists and organizations such as Performa, Big Dance Theater, and DorDor Gallery. As a musician and composer they previously toured with Atlantic Records' band-collective MICHELLE. Studying fine arts and integrated media from Wesleyan University and NYU Gallatin, they currently reside on an open-source code.
By the turn of the century, Marc Siegel described an emerging phenomenon as “this ambient world,” where film titles have run amuck, genres have overlapped, and cast and crew are lost. 1990’s films fell into the hands of Sixth Generation filmmakers, who inherited the ongoing state-sponsored system of film studios. To their credit, Chinese political censorship pushed these filmmakers toward New Wave cinema, and the international film-festival elite could overshadow the box-office concerns of the 80’s. Advantaged directors like Wong Kar-wai captured urban, in-transit spaces, while responding audiences could consume newfound narratives without a sense of nationality. Thus, the “comfort of an image” unfolds (Siegel 291). Unlike PRC doctrine, same-sex intimacy and ambiguity turned over viewers’ expectations abroad. Familiar architecture like a subway station could posit actors as strangers, then lovers, then strangers once more. This déjà-vu feeling disrupts nationalism, yet maintains a filmic realm of ambience—and belonging.
Within New Wave intimacy, two-person relationships depict issues of womanhood and queerness onscreen. The film Centre Stage (1991) preserves the image of the silent-film actress Ruan Lingyu, through the fresher face of Maggie Cheung. Cheung’s acting carries the film forward—despite its hazy narrative and pseudo-documentary style—yet she is required to duplicate Ruan’s identity. Passing Ruan’s legacy down to the next leading lady, the film remains stuck in feminine lure. However, a certain scene features two-women dialogue and a connection beyond lust or voyeurism—motherhood.
Figure 1. [8:12-12:09 / 2:34:17] of Centre Stage.
Here, Cheung talks to another woman Chu-chu about a male love interest, the adoption of his daughter, and the quiet testament of playing a mother. Cheung asks Chu-chu to recall the pain of her first childbirth, yet Chu-chu waves the question away with a smile. Between their soft-spoken gossip and pauses, both are framed by snow and windowsills. Confined together in the dark, Cheung’s strange interest in Chu-chu’s motherhood allows them to hold hands, share secrets, and walk away from each other. Neither one is superior—Cheung’s stardom falls, and Chu-chu’s own interest in Cheung ends with offering maternal advice. When Cheung pairs with a female co-star in Centre Stage, time stands above the silver-screen 20’s and budding 90’s. Audiences are given a break from the industrial, male gaze. The character Cheung/Ruan plays does not bear a daughter, yet remains an eternal figure in cinema.
Another memorialized actor of the 90’s, Tony Leung, contributes to the Sixth Wave content of same-sex intimacy. He co-stars in the film Happy Together (1997), featuring a homosexual couple’s relentless journey between Hong Kong and Buenos Aires. Like Maggie Cheung, Leung’s career is fraught with romantic spectacle, as his following roles in In the Mood for Love (2000) and Lust, Caution (2007) also called for subtle intensity, yet hyper eroticism.
The disjuncture Leung floats between allows him to shine remarkably in mainstream Asian media and underground queer classics. Happy Together, suffice it to say, allows Leung and his male co-star to waver between moments of trust, sexual longing, and rejection. The visual narrative—under Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle’s supervision—takes place within metropolitan spaces and closed corridors. The backseat of taxis cabs, the window seats of restaurant chains—even public bathrooms become a source of peace, with neon lighting required. Rey Chow defines this filmic sense of modernity as “the time of progress—fast food, brief sex, and short-lived romances” (Chow 217). Queer male characters of the 90’s could reclaim acts of passion without the predatory nature of the 80’s. These sexual acts and identifiers—such as cruising, cross-dressing, and metrosexuality—can transition soundly within the Iron Closet of East-Asian cinema.
However, expressing homosexual dialogue within Tony Leung’s acting career falls short of gender fluidity. New Wave cinema presents sexuality as a blurry, uncanny city. Leung’s acting remains mischaracterized by Wong Kar-wai’s comment—that he is “wonderfully expressive with his face, but did not know how to utilize his body” (Siegel 289). Thus “the necessity of concentrating on [his] most intimate bodily gestures” to the exhaustion of Leung’s body posits queer narratives as purely contemplative, sweaty, and suppressed. In contrast to the male form, Wong’s critique of Maggie Cheung—that she “was quite expressive with her body, but not particularly gifted with dialogue”—lends to the actors’ psychological ruin in approaching the 21st century (Siegel 289). Wong’s decision to remove her lines designates Cheung as a tacit, female heroine stuck in vintage cinematography.
What follows in New Wave cinema dovetails sexual decoy with drug use. Rey Chow’s “Souvenir of Love” converts into half a cigarette, a light fixture, and clouds of smoke. On a technical level, the still camera and third-person perspective reflect millimeter film as an alternative space, which couples can occupy. The archetypal, romantic canon of a man giving a woman a cigarette can recall waves of the Opium Crisis and tobacco merchants as pure fiction. Thus, New Wave cinematography evokes drug abuse as a sepia-toned color scheme, like a warm polaroid picture, that can be forgotten.
Figure 2. [1:30:39-1:33:04 / 2:34:17] of Centre Stage.
In this sequence, Cheung/Ruan relives her backstage moment of solitude. Interrupting her is a man—stranger or not—walking toward the lamplight she finds warmth under. “What are you doing?” he poses. With her absent response and sleek curled hair, she offers him a smile. Curtailed by cigarette smoke, the man’s hasty conjecture disrupts the interrogation TV-trope. He fails to receive the answer he coveted. She paces back and forth past him and says, “If Sai-chen and I were both courtesans, which one would you take? Say it.” From her illustrious quiet comes courage, juxtaposed with two silent-film clips. The heightened senses of sexual charm break down between diegetic dialogue, and non-diegetic memory. These silent-clips support Cheung/Ruan’s acting and unspoken experiences. What was once the black-and-white dialogue of smoking, sidewalk hustles, and courtesans closes with the moving image.
Writer Linda Chiu-Han Lai described such images as enigmatization, “the selection and reorganization of existing images from popular culture” (Lai 232). The surface value of flirtation dwindles amidst this collaged sense of memory, branded as polaroid appeal. Filmic market value belongs to Western audiences and their own reclamation for modernity. However, Asian migrant audiences can claim root within these vintage narratives, as long as recognizable actors reappear. For instance, Maggie Cheung continued to work with a new cast and cityscapes in Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1997) and relay another pleasurable ending to her fans—dabbled with long-distance diaspora and lower-production value. The “success myth[s]” Cheung withstands further the goals of a comfortable image, though unreconciled in the channels of global distribution (Lai 241).
Figure 3. [1:43:33-1:44:52 / 2:34:17] of Centre Stage.
To preserve the image of post-Mao rhetoric, 21st-century audiences must inherit memory alongside absent-mindedness. The unreconciled image remains a squelching source of disentanglement and cellular film. As two actors put it in Centre Stage, “The Shanghai Press Union is making a final plea, or the ultimatum to your studio,” “Your studio’s ‘New Women’ is libeling…ensure it won’t happen again.” To the compliance of New Men in the workforce—fingers plucking film rolls, tight vests and waistcoats—what was altered by the 1920’s held as practiced commodities for 1990’s Hong Kong. In defining Chinese characters, Cheung/Ruan’s glory years recur each generation. Rituals of motherhood refrain as singular, disclosed, and cemented stereotypes. To celebrate Tony Leung distorts the perception of queer cultural imagining, to the hindsight of urban communities. However, perhaps the “disappearance that everybody denies” theme is simply a yellow Hitchcock film (Silbergeld 15).
Amidst the falsehood of cast and crew’s safety, global marketing and distribution rights—audiences are left with love stories. The practical phenomena of East-Asian fan service allows youth to recognize a skyline, across the world, or a Metro-service their aunts fawned over. These credited, Sixth-Gen films pass down the 21st century as highly prolific, somehow tumultuous, but for some—worth watching. Whether a nurturing actress or a sterile claim, the filmic image can be re-adapted, then reconciled with delight. The bittersweet certainty of movies is, after all, something new to behold.
Frame 4. [1:46:29-1:47:57 / 2:34:17] of Centre Stage.
MLA Works Cited
Chai-han Lai, Linda. “Film and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and Remembering.” Yau, pp. 231-250.
Chow, Rey. “A Souvenir of Love.” Yau, pp. 209-229.
Siegel, Marc. “The Intimate Spaces of Wong Kar-wai.” Yau, pp. 277-294. Silbergeld, Jerome. “Suzhou River.” In Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Cinematic Doubles, Oedipal Triangles, and China’s Moral Voice, 8-46. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2004.
Yau, Esther C. M., editor. At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Centre Stage (阮玲玉). Directed by Stanley Kwan, performances by Ruan Lingyu and Maggie Cheung, Golden Way Films Ltd., Orange Sky Golden Harvest, 1991.
Happy Together (春光乍洩). Directed and produced by Wong Kar-wai, performances by Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, Kino International, 1997.
In the Mood for Love (花樣年華). Directed by Wong Kar-wai, performances by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, Jet Tone Production, 2000.
Lust, Caution (色，戒). Directed by Ang Lee, performances by Tony Leung and Tang Wei, River Road Entertainment, 2007.
Comrades, Almost a Love Story (甜蜜蜜). Directed and produced by Peter Chan, performances by Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai, 1996.
Acknowledgements: Much love from my IP server, to Dr. Coderre.
