Edward Yang and His Gang

This essay appears in Issue 1 of The Metrograph, our award-winning print publication. Explore more of Issue 1 and newer editions here.

TWO IMAGES OF EDWARD YANG routinely resurface on social media, to the thrill of those newly discovering him. The first is a shot by the photographer Issei Suda for the February 1991 cover of the Japanese magazine The Sun: perched in a director’s chair, Yang wears a glossy electric-blue Seattle Seahawks Starter jacket (fairly ubiquitous in the ’90s) and beams from under tortoise shell sunglasses. The second photo finds him on the set of his mid-century period piece A Brighter Summer Day (1991) in a red T-shirt emblazoned with Häagen-Dazs’s trademark. What looks like a cigarette pack bulges beneath one of his rolled-up sleeves, with a matching red bandanna knotted at his neck and a yellow Sony Walkman at his hip. In both pictures, he wears his signature red San Francisco 49ers snapback hat. If style is a matter of coherence between the aesthete’s soul and his clothes, then we have a satisfying model of wedded animateness in Yang, whose haloed, boyish features—a lopsided grin or a concentrated frown—so playfully suit his chromatic Pop Art uniform. 

When Yang, long crowned the venerable father of Taiwanese New Wave, died from colon cancer in 2007 at the age of 59, he left behind seven features, each noted for its artful realism, sprawling narrative, and measured (though by no means neutral) perspective. At the time of his death, only his bittersweet swan song, Yi Yi (2000), had received US distribution, but in recent years the resolution of issues around his estate and waves of new restorations have led to the increased accessibility of his work. 

But while much has been made of particular elements of Yang’s melancholy profiles of urban isolation—the long takes, the sweeping shots of the cityscape—perhaps less emphasized is the costume design, through which the director vividly stages his key thematic preoccupations (globalization, the breakdown of gender roles, class anxieties). In cinema, as in life, Yang trafficked in American frames of “religious” reference, his films marked by a parade of Western iconography too frequent for a mere accident of background: fluorescent McDonald’s interiors here, a Harvard sweatshirt and a Marilyn Monroe calendar there. But it is the wardrobes of his characters that are the true canvases of this core imperialist entanglement: striving young people infected by the breathless pursuit of upward—which is really to say outward (an exit from their lives, their relationships, their homes, themselves)—mobility. 

Yang understood the sensation. Born in Shanghai in 1947, he relocated to Taiwan with his family when he was two years old. As a young man, he left Taipei—the city of his childhood—for America, where he studied electrical engineering at the University of Florida, endured a “disastrous” term at the University of Southern California’s film school, and seriously considered taking up architecture before finally settling in Seattle to work in computer design. By the time a friend enlisted him to work on a film project back home, Yang had been living stateside for a decade, long enough to inspire the trail of Americana that cuts a winding path through his work. But the Taiwan he returned to in 1980 was not the Taiwan he had known as a boy. In the intervening years, the country had established itself as an economic power with booming exports and lavish foreign investment. For Yang, this sudden affluence wrought all the usual crises—individualism, competitiveness, paranoia—that dominate the sweeping portraits he would conjure of Taipei in his films over the next two decades.

_{Edward Yang on the set of A Confucian Confusion (1994).}

Like Yang himself, his characters generally gravitate toward some manner of uniform, invariably illustrative. In his second feature, Taipei Story (1985), the costumes, designed by Chen Chih-chan, herald dogged divisions in the crumbling partnership of Chin (played by the pop singer Tsai Chin, who would become Yang’s first wife) and her boyfriend, Lung (the fellow New Wave pioneer Hou Hsiao-hsien, Yang’s close friend and collaborator). 

In early scenes, Chin is styled in the androgynous “power dressing” silhouettes of the ’80s—all angles, with oversize blazers, pleated skirts, aviator shades. One can chart her resilience through this series of contoured garments, continually revised to conform to each phase of her spiraling loneliness. With the merger of the construction company where she works, Chin is summarily demoted to a secretarial job. In one memorable shot, just after she learns her career has come to an abrupt halt, she strides into the sunlight draped in a pinstripe blazer with broad shoulders and dark trousers. She is an entirely modern woman, steely and adaptable, and socially she still belongs to the professional classes; Lung, a retired baseball star who now runs a fabric store, finds himself woefully out of place among her friends. 

Lung and Chin squarely embody Taipei’s past and future: Lung, mired in his lost baseball glory, clings to those errant years and traditional expressions of masculinity that only exacerbate his frustrations. He remains characteristically consistent, always in a plain white shirt paired with a tan or gray wool jacket. He is unchanging, stuck. 

As Chin sinks into melancholy, her outfits grow more casual: loose shirts and jeans, heavy jumpers with sweatpants. Lung may coax, at least aesthetically, more romantic dimensions out of her—the white linen suit she wears when they’re looking for apartments, the occasional appearance of a fuzzy pink knit—but as their relationship deteriorates, darker hues overtake her pastel palette. In a later scene, she goes looking for her little sister dressed in a black trench over a red polo jumper, its collar peeking above the lapels. 

Chin not only falls victim to this capricious new economic landscape but eventually falls in with an even younger crowd, teetering on the edge of adolescence. Once embedded in her sister’s rowdy clan, Chin trades her blazers for a sleek bomber (perfect for riding on the back of a motorcycle) and her elegant pumps for a pair of Vans. Her emotional retrograde somehow propels her forward, perhaps because she surrenders to its waves.

Women usually emerge as the most creative models—muses, even—of Yang’s intricate, devoutly observational vision. He saved his reverence and sympathy for them, his restless, shrewd, not always prudent women, and was typically less charitable with his male characters: often moneyed, infantile, incompetent, or else psychologically and emotionally arrested figures, doomed to flounder amid the rising tide of modernity. (One might observe in his films a certain pattern of financially comfortable but otherwise fundamentally lost or miserable men.) 

Yang’s next film, The Terrorizers (1986), features the classic Yang male figures: well-off, pathetic, reliably eclipsed by women too ambitious and too elusive for them. Four central characters render a pensive account of class anxiety and art almost helplessly compelled to imitate life: there is the bored would-be novelist Zhou (Cora Miao), plainly unhappy with her mediocre husband (Lee Li-chun); the teen hustler “White Chick” (Wang An), the biracial daughter of an American soldier; and the voyeuristic photographer (Ma Shao-chun) infatuated with her. 

Yang bestows his characters’ minimalist wardrobes with unexpected symbolism. White Chick, who solicits and steals from men, embraces a distinctly American aesthetic as a modern, “preppy” femme fatale. She forgoes the traditional black lace or otherwise revealing, sensual outfits, opting instead for white polo shirts that would be at home at the country club, white jeans, shapeless white blouses and T-shirts, just as her name forecasts. Cloaked in ostensibly the “wrong” attire typically harnessed to translate sex work onscreen, she upends conventional cinematic codes, unveiling the racialization lodged therein. It’s fitting that, for Yang, this trickster figure, seeding discord plaintively in her wake, appropriates the costume of America’s malignant elite—cold, impersonal, bland (not unlike the girl herself). 

Zhou, the writer who has an affair with a former lover and may or may not witness her embittered husband murdering him (this is also the plot of the book she eventually produces), appears frequently in white herself. The color, then (or, more aptly, its chilling absence), telegraphs women’s self-determination, their capacity to survive—even prosper—in unforgiving conditions, to the shame of the troublesome men in or at the periphery of their lives, clinging perilously to them. It may also be the color of blinkered, white-hot ambition, the achromatic heights of the lonely and classed, who manage, at least superficially, to elude the stain of their bloody transcendence. 

_{A Confucian Confusion (1994)}

Yang inflects these early projects with a determined reserve that gives way to a diffuse, prevailing sense of unease. His characters are often unsettled, trapped in an urban quagmire of materialism that announces the “success” of the nation’s socioeconomic transformations. His fifth feature, the incisive satire A Confucian Confusion (1994), another ensemble, strikes a tonal departure from the somber musings of those first films—though thematically it remains faithful to their organizing principles. Molly (Ni Shu-chun) is the head of a flailing PR agency kept afloat by her wealthy, buffoonish fiancé, Akeem (Wang Bosen); she has little affection for him otherwise and depends emotionally instead on her best friend (and assistant), Chi-chi (Chen Shiang-chyi, a longtime collaborator of Tsai Ming-liang, perhaps the most prominent heir to Taiwan’s New Wave). Some of Yang’s most stylish characters, certainly by today’s standards, populate this film—though in one wry scene, someone mutters, “Who would dress like this in our line of work? No wonder the company is a mess.” 

Molly appears in timeless, simple outfits accented with flamboyant gold jewelry—all chunky rings, stacked bangles, and dangling necklaces. With her chic pixie cut, she has a sense of gender ambiguity about her, whether she’s dressed in an oversize white button-down and light blue jeans or a figure-hugging, high-neck black minidress. Not unlike Chin’s clothes, Molly’s outfits attest to the evolving gender roles ferried in by this new age, ultimately hollow and symbolic apparel that makes her navigation of a male-dominated workplace (and social world, for that matter) no easier. 

For all these visual and, indeed, material subversions, Molly still feels compelled, out of nothing more than familial obligation, to marry Akeem. Although she constantly describes their relationship as “modern,” it is in fact clearly traditional. Chi-chi, meanwhile—for many of the men in the film—is a paragon of classical femininity. She is demure, soft-spoken, and insecure, graced with the doll-like looks (and baby bangs) of a young Audrey Hepburn, whose portrait appears behind her in one scene. Throughout the film Chi-chi wears a dark, long-sleeved, knee-length dress with minimal accessories: understated, modest, and girlish, almost entirely unknown to herself. 

When Cinema Reflects the Times: Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang (1993), directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, contains extended footage of Yang directing A Confucian Confusion. He has paired his indigo jeans with a light denim shirt buttoned over a gray turtleneck, and the tortoise-shell shades are back. It strikes me, a child of the ’90s, as a “dad” outfit, and indeed, Yang appears to have a fittingly soft-spoken, paternal directing style. We see him instructing Ni in a tense scene. “Actually, the volume doesn’t have to be so high,” he explains. “You must show the anxiety some feelings of weakness.” Fitting words from a filmmaker who so intuitively traced the intricacies of emotion, made them legible even under the most extravagant conditions, and had to know that this, too, is the seductive potential of style: the translation of identity, the alchemy of experience.