Chen Kaige

Early life

Chen Kaige was born in Beijing, China into a family of Changle, Fuzhou origin, and grew up with fellow Fifth Generation alumnus Tian Zhuangzhuang as a childhood friend. His father was a well-known director in his own right. In 1969, Chen became a sent-down youth in Xishuangbanna Agricultural Reclamation Bureau before enlisting in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) next year. In 1975, Chen was discharged from the army and returned to Beijing, where he worked as a worker in Beijing Film Printing Factory. In 1978 Chen joined the Beijing Film Academy, where he graduated in 1982.

Career

Upon graduating, Chen was assigned to the Guangxi Film Studio, along with a fellow graduate, Zhang Yimou. The Big Parade (1986) and King of the Children (1987) expanded on his filmic repertoire. In 1987, he was awarded a fellowship by the Asian Cultural Council and served as a visiting scholar at the New York University Film School. Early in 1989, he did further experiment in a music video for the song "Do You Believe in Shame?" by Duran Duran. Later that year, he made Life on a String, a highly esoteric movie which uses mythical allegory and lush scenery to tell the story of a blind sanxian musician and his student. In the same year, he was a member of the jury at the 39th Berlin International Film Festival.

His most famous film in the West, Farewell My Concubine (1993), follows two Beijing opera stars through decades of change in China during the twentieth century. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards and won the Palme d'Or at 1993 Cannes Film Festival and the 1993 International Federation of Film Critics Award. Chen followed up the unprecedented success of Farewell My Concubine with Temptress Moon (1996), another period drama starring Leslie Cheung and Gong Li. Though it was well received by most critics, it did not achieve the accolades that Concubine did, and many were put off by the film's convoluted plot line. Almost as famous is his The Emperor and the Assassin (1999), an epic involving the legendary King of Qin and the reluctant assassin who aims to kill him.

In 2002, Chen made his first, and to-date only, English-language film, Killing Me Softly, a thriller starring Heather Graham and Joseph Fiennes, though it proved to be both a critical and popular disappointment. Together (2002) in the same year, which marked the beginning of his wife Chen Hong as his producer, is an intimate film about a young violinist and his father, showing the desire of young people to grow according to their spiritual guidance. In the short "Ten Minutes, Aging", the finale of the collection "Deep in Flowers," which opened the Cannes Film Festival in France in 2002, Chen selects the theme of urban renewal, a nation-wide program across China at the time characterized by large-scale demolition, and tells the story of the mentally ill "Mr. Feng" moving in a seemingly humorous tone. In 2005, he directed The Promise, an all-star fantasy wuxia picture, which saw Chen shifting to a more commercial mindset, regarded by some as a "radical stylistic turn" from his previous works.

In 2006, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 28th Moscow International Film Festival. In 2008, Chen directed Forever Enthralled, a biopic of Peking opera artist Mei Lanfang, followed by Sacrifice (2010), a re-imagining of the Chinese play The Orphan of Zhao. His 2012 film Caught in the Web, a reflection on internet culture—sometimes interpreted as his response to the parody frenzy surrounding The Promise—was selected as the Chinese entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards, but it did not make the final shortlist. His film Monk Comes Down the Mountain (2015), which may have suffered from editing issues due to the drug scandal involving one of its stars, Jaycee Chan, was a critical failure but achieved commercial success. He then directed Legend of the Demon Cat (2017), a big-budget Chinese-Japanese co-production adapted from the novel of the same name by Japanese fantasy novelist Baku Yumemakura.

Since 2019, Chen directed or produced a series of propaganda films that are sometimes commissioned by the Chinese government, including co-directing The Battle at Lake Changjin (2021), with Tsui Hark and Dante Lam. China's highest-grossing film of all time.

In addition to directing, Chen has acted in several films, including Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987) and his own The Emperor and the Assassin and Together.

Personal life

Chen's first wife was Sun Jialin (孙加林), whom he knew while working at the Beijing Film Factory from 1975 to 1978; they married in 1983 and divorced three years later. His second wife was Hong Huang, daughter of Zhang Hanzhi, a diplomat and English teacher of Mao Zedong. Through his second marriage, Chen obtained a US green card. They separated in 1991 and divorced in 1993. From 1991, Chen lived with Ni Ping, a television personality, in a six-year relationship. In 1996, Chen married actress Chen Hong, who has been his producer since Together (2002). They have two sons, Chen Yu'ang and "Arthur" Chen Feiyu.

Filmography

Television (as director)

Executive producer

Actor

Awards and nominations

International

Domestic

Notes

References

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