Lim Song Hwee
Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Associate Professor of the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, CUHK

Born in Singapore, Professor Lim Song Hwee attended the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at National Taiwan University before receiving his MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge. Before coming to The Chinese University of Hong Kong in January 2014, he taught at the universities of Leeds and Exeter for over ten years, during which time he founded the international peer-reviewed Journal of Chinese Cinemas. His major publications include two single-authored books, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness (2014) and Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (2006), and two co-edited books, The Chinese Cinema Book (2011), Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (2006).

Taiwan new cinema (TNC) as soft power is the subject of Professor Lim Song Hwee's third single-authored monograph. He first explained that according to Joseph Nye in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, soft power is "the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments", which "arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals, and policies" (Nye 2004: x ). In contrast to soft power, hard power refers to military and economic power.

Professor Lim first noted that Taiwan experienced major setbacks in international relations during the 1970s. Since withdrawing from the United Nations and severing diplomatic relations with the US, Taiwan has been isolated within international politics. Lacking the support of strong military and economic power, Taiwan has relied heavily on soft power to develop its international influence. As a result, Professor Lim considers it important to study soft power in Taiwan, and as a medium that can easily transcend borders and spread widely, cinema is an ideal subject for the study of soft power. Professor Lim has analysed TNC as soft power from the aspects of authorship, transnationality and historiography. He has studied what makes TNC attractive to foreigners, what makes such receptive reception possible, and what are the agents, institutions and mechanisms that facilitate this cross-cultural cinephilia. Research objects include directors, films, and cross-cultural processes (including cultural translation) and discourses involved. Professor Lim pointed out that we usually measure the significance of a nation's cinema by its production level and box-office performance; however, Taiwan cinema is an international miracle with a low production level and small box-office intake but a high international reputation. Since 1989, Taiwan cinema has won an average of one award every two years at the three major international film festivals (Cannes, Berlin and Venice). This winning streak is outstanding compared to Hong Kong, China and even other parts of the world.

Professor Lim talked about the author/director as an example of Taiwan's soft power, sharing the examples of three famous directors: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang and Ang Lee. He pointed out that "the careers of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang have taken them to far-flung places where their films are produced by foreign institutions and sometimes feature little or no uses of any Chinese languages". As films directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien are often compared with those by the famous late Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, Hou was invited by the film studio Shochiku to shoot a Japanese film, Café Lumière, as a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ozu in 2003. In 2007, Hou was sponsored by the Musée d'Orsay on its 20th anniversary to shoot Flight of the Red Balloon as homage to Albert Lamorisse, who directed and produced a famous French movie, The Red Balloon, in 1956. Similarly, Tsai Ming-liang was chosen out of a list of 200 directors and commissioned by the Musée du Louvre to shoot a film for its first movie collection. Tsai thus directed Visage in Musée du Louvre in 2009. When the French city of Marseille organised an international film festival in 2014, the festival director, who admired Tsai Ming-liang very much, invited Tsai to present one of his "Walker Series" films at the festival. Tsai accepted the invitation and he was sponsored by the festival to shoot Journey to the West in Marseille, which became the next film in the "Walker Series". Ang Lee is another example. From his first movie Pushing Hands in 1992 to Life of Pi 20 years later, he has become one of the most famous international directors, with great box-office appeal.

Professor Lim pointed out that as TNC transcends its borders to the international world, it also attracts new immigrants into its local movie industry. Director Midi Zhao was born in Myanmar, and went to Taiwan to study when he was sixteen. He has now become a Taiwanese citizen. His 2014 film Ice Poison was selected as the Taiwanese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards. Selecting a Midi Zhao film to represent Taiwan is evidence of Taiwan's welcoming stance towards immigrant directors.

Professor Lim then took Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema as a case study to discuss historiography in TNC. Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema is a 2014 documentary shot by Hsieh Chinlin, who used to be a festival programmer for the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She lives mostly in Europe and Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema documents comments on TNC by overseas directors, film festival programmers and film critics. There have been several documentaries on TNC before, but they only record voices from the local film industry. As Flowers of Taipei documents international voices, it has not attracted much attention in Taiwan and many consider it irrelevant to TNC. Professor Lim used this as an example to discuss the stake of historiographical writing in documenting TNC (who is the legitimate speaker?), the scale of TNC's impact (local or international?), and the scope of the stakeholders (who can be considered stakeholders; for instance, is Ai Weiwei's comment in Flowers of Taipei important to TNC?). Professor Lim divided the commentators in Flowers of Taipei into three groups. Critics from mainland China and Hong Kong tend to reflect on what is lacking in their home environments; for example, critics from mainland China praise the spirit of humanity in TNC, and Hong Kong critics admire the great esprit de corps among Taiwan's film directors. In a different vein, young directors from Southeast Asia talk about the inspiration they received from TNC for their own creative endeavours. A third group of interviewees are Japanese critics, who are conflicted by the (post)colonial dynamic of TNC, which often displays the imprint of Japanese colonialism on Taiwan. Professor Lim also discussed the specific medium of documentary as historiography in terms of indexicality. While the photographic and cinematographic image refers to the actual spaces it records, which can be revisited in reality, writing can only describe such spaces, it cannot depict them directly. Flowers of Taipei includes several interviews conducted in locations that have appeared in TNC films.

At the end of the talk, Professor Lim concluded that, led by local directors, TNC transcends its native borders and raises questions about film historiography. Authorship, transnationality and historiography in TNC form a triangulated relationship. Although transnational films are usually considered to be those that are co-produced by two or more regions or countries, Professor Lim asserted that TNC singularly is a form of transnational cinema. Finally, Professor Lim proposed departing from a lingua-centric model of cinema studies, referring to the case of Hou Hsiao-hsien, who has directed a Japanese film and a French film in addition to Chinese films.

Remarks: The translation of Professor Lim's luncheon talk draws materials from his article "Taiwan New Cinema: Small Nation with Soft Power", in Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 152-169.