Edward Yang (November 6, 1947 – June 29, 2007) was a Taiwanese filmmaker. He rose to prominence as a pioneer in the Taiwanese New Wave of the 1980s, alongside fellow auteurs Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang. Yang was regarded as one of the leading filmmakers of Taiwanese cinema. He won the Best Director Award at Cannes for his 2000 film Yi Yi.
Youth and early career
Yang was born in Shanghai in 1947, and grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. After studying Electrical Engineering in National Chiao Tung University (located in Hsinchu, Taiwan), where he received his bachelor's degree (BSEE), he enrolled in the graduate program at the University of Florida, where he received his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1974. During this time and briefly afterwards, Yang worked at the Center for Informatics Research at the University of Florida. Yang always had a great interest in film ever since he was a child, but put away his aspirations in order to pursue a career in the high-tech industry.
A brief enrollment at USC Film School after graduating with his M.S.E.E. convinced Yang that the world of film was not for him – he thought USC film school's teaching methodologies were too commercial and mainstream oriented. Yang then applied and was accepted into Harvard's architecture school, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but decided not to attend. Thereafter, he went to Seattle to work in microcomputers and defense software.
While working in Seattle, Yang came across the Werner Herzog film Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972): this encounter rekindled Yang's passion for film and introduced him to a wide range of classics in world and European cinema. Yang was particularly inspired by the films of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni (Antonioni's influence has shown up in some of Yang's later works). He married Taiwanese pop-singer and music legend Tsai Chin in May 1985. They divorced in August 1995, and he subsequently married pianist Kai-Li Peng.
Early works
Yang returned to Taiwan in 1980, where his former USC friend Wei-Cheng Yu asked him to write the script for and serve as a production aide on his film, The Winter of 1905 (1981), in which he also had a small acting role. The film went on to be nominated for a Best Cinematography award at the 1982 Golden Horse Film Festival and Awards. His script brought him to the attention of Sylvia Chang, who hired him to write and direct an episode of the television miniseries she was producing, Eleven Women. Yang's two-and-a-half hour episode, "Duckweed" (also known as "Floating Weeds"), concerned the story of a country girl who moves to Taipei with dreams of entering the entertainment industry, and was his first directorial effort. The following year, Yang was asked to direct and write a short for the seminal Taiwanese New Wave omnibus film In Our Time (1982), which featured other short films from fresh young directors such as Yi Chang, Ko I-Chen, and Tao Te-chen. Yang's contribution, "Desires" (also known as "Expectation"), is about a young girl's experiences going through puberty.
Style and themes
Yang's visual style comprehended deliberate pacing, long takes, fixed camera, few closeups, empty spaces, and cityscapes. Yang, in addition to being interested in the impact of the changes of Taiwanese society on the middle classes, attempted to examine the struggle between the modern and the traditional in his films, as well as the relationship between business and art, and how greed may corrupt, influence, or affect art. For that reason, many of his films (other than Yi Yi) are extremely difficult to find, since Yang did not consider selling films for money his primary purpose as an artist, and also felt that film distribution, especially in Taiwan, was something out of his control.
Yang always set his work in the cities of Taiwan. As a result, Yang's films – especially A Confucian Confusion, Taipei Story, Mahjong and Terrorizers – are commentaries on Taiwanese urban life and insightful explorations of Taiwanese urban society.
Yang also collaborated with many of his fellow Taiwanese film-makers in his films: for instance, in Yi Yi he cast as the lead well-known auteur, novelist, and screenwriter Wu Nien-jen, director of the award-winning A Borrowed Life, which Martin Scorsese has cited as one of his favorite works and one of the most influential films of the '90s. He also cast fellow film-maker Hou Hsiao-hsien as the lead in his 1985 film, Taipei Story, where Wu Nien-jen also had a brief part as a taxi driver and an old friend of Hou Hsiao-hsien's character. Yang also taught theatre and film classes at the Taipei National University of the Arts. Several of his students showed up in his films as actors and actresses.
Legacy
In 2000, Yang formed Miluku Technology and Entertainment to produce animated films and TV shows. The first animated feature that Miluku was slated to produce was an animated feature titled The Wind with Jackie Chan in 2007, but the project was cut short when Yang fell ill with cancer. At the 2007 Pusan International Film Festival, he won an award for Asian Filmmaker of the Year, and was also immortalized with a hand-printing at the festival along with Ennio Morricone, Seung-ho Kim, Volker Schlöndorff, Dariush Mehrjui and Claude Lelouch. In 2007, Yang also won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Golden Horse Film Festival and Awards that year.
