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In 1985, two years before the end of Taiwan’s martial law period, the renowned poet and screenwriter Chui Kang-Chien’s The Glamorous Boys of Tang was first screened in Taiwan. The film’s debaucherous plot—rife with homoerotic desire, disturbing killings, death, and orgies accompanied by dissonant sound effects — was not well received against the conservative atmosphere of the time. Now, more than thirty years later, with new funding and film technology, Su Hui-yu has re-created the film to call together the various gendered bodies and subcultures of Taiwan’s diverse society. Su’s version can be seen as a re-shooting, a re-narration of the original 1985 version, or the next leg of its journey.
Watch the radicalism and passion of the project play out in this except made exclusively for NOWNESS ASIA.
A note by Su Hui-yu:
“It was 1985; a sunny day. I, a third-grade boy, stared at a series of posters on the wall of a restaurant. It was a Taiwanese-style fast food joint that offered cheap meals and a place for day laborers to relax. The restaurant was redolent of smoke emanating from cooking oil, which blended with the aromas of different fatty dishes and the scent of men’s sweat on a summer afternoon. Every poster on the wall was a brightly-colored image of flesh, exuding fragrance beyond the edges of the picture frame. Some of them even oozed out the stench of blood.
In these images there were women, men, bodies, horrific massacres, half-exposed breasts, seductive postures, light reflected from sabers, and shadows of swords. Most of these posters were designed in the style of 'gubahtiunn' (literally translated it means 'beef joints' and in this context refers to Taiwanese strip shows), but one of them struck me as being less vulgar, perhaps more imaginative. The poster for 1985’s 'The Glamorous Boys Of Tang' (directed by Chiu Kang Chien) was imprinted into my mind amid this mélange of scents.
Thirty years later, I had the fortune to visit cinematographer Chang Chao-tang. 'The Glamorous Boys Of Tang' returned to my field of vision. This time, I discovered again the gargantuan ambition and playfulness in this extraordinary film: the sexually-ambiguous young men, the overlap between the blood-slaughter realm of Buddhist monks and the liberation of the body, the reversal of gender and power, the anachronism of costumes and fashions.
Under the limitation of time, these ideas remained unfulfilled by the late Chiu Kang Chien (1940–2013). His spirit and his creative courage deserve our further study, so that we can pass our findings on to the next generation.
In this film, I want to locate a spiritual intersection from my childhood, and to let this cinematic work walk a few more miles so that we can move forward on our way to more spectacular imaginations and ideas.”
Translation by Victor Fan