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Director Resurrects Nanjing Massacre
Director Lu Chuan's war epic, City of Life and Death, began to be screened throughout China on April 22. The movie focuses on Japanese troops' invasion of Nanjing, then China's capital, in December 1937, which left more than 300,000 unarmed Chinese soldiers and civilians dead. The 80-million-yuan ($11.72 million) product took Lu four years to complete.
Lu brings back horrors of the Nanjing Massacre by highlighting the resilient spirit of the Chinese people, rather than the weakness and hopelessness of the victims facing aggression of Japanese forces.
"Chinese people were frequently portrayed as weak and helpless victims in the massacre. It's not totally true. There was resistance. That part of history was more or less left out," Lu said in an interview with Xinhua News Agency before the movie's release.
Lu, 38, is a self-funded filmmaker, who graduated from the Beijing Film Academy with a master's degree in directing. His major works, The Missing Gun (2002) and Hoh Xil (2004) are both acclaimed by critics.
Wealth Fund Safe—Investor
Lou Jiwei, head of China's sovereign wealth fund, has assured the public that the value of state funds has been maintained amid strong economic turbulence.
Lou gave a speech on April 18 at the annual conference of the Boao Forum for Asia, a nongovernmental platform for discussing economic issues, in China's southern island province of Hainan. Lou, Board Chairman of the China Investment Corp. (CIC) that manages $200 billion of China's foreign exchange reserves, said that state assets under his supervision would seek more overseas investment as the market rallies. He noted that the economic crisis has made other markets reconsider investment from sovereign wealth funds that was not that volatile.
Lou, 59, had served as vice minister of finance and deputy secretary general of the State Council, China's cabinet, before he assumed the chairmanship of CIC, the world's fourth largest sovereign wealth fund, in 2007.
Mainland Artist Debuts in Taiwan
Fang Lijunhas become the first mainland-based contemporary artist to
hold an art exhibition in Taiwan in decades. The exhibition, Endlessness of Life, which debuted at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum on April 18, is therefore seen as a milestone of cultural exchange across the Taiwan Straits.
Fang, 46, graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1989. The image of a baldheaded youth that first appeared in his paintings in the early 1990s has been a symbol of his cynical realist style.
Fang's paintings often evoke the spiritual contemplation of disillusionment, solitude and rebellion of the individual against the masses in contemporary China. This is done by contrasts between the prominent main figure and dazed conformity of the background, but expressed in a humorous manner.
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