In movies, TV and music, last year was characterized by only a few innovations and too many tragedies. There were some bright moments, for sure, but even these only seemed great against the gloomy background of sad news and pop-culture industries in general decline.
Below, Pop Stop revisits the good, the bad and the ugly stories that kept Chinese pop culture chugging along last year.
1) Taiwan Thunderbolt Fire (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
2) Hong Kong's movie industry kept its stride with the star-studded trilogy Infernal Affairs(
3) On April 1, one of Hong Kong's brightest stars, Leslie Cheung (
4) Another sad event came when Taiwan's own Evel Knievel and adored actor and singer Ke Shou-liang (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
5) Mayday (
6) Taiwan saw the underground release of its first hard-core porno, called Taiwan Plumber (
7) The black metal band Chthonic (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
8) Tsai Ming-liang's (蔡明亮) protegee, Lee Kang-sheng (李康生) came perilously close this fall to parodying his and his mentor's filmmaking style in an advertisement he made for Family Mart (全家便利商店) that featured the cast of Goodbye, Dragon Inn (不散) and The Missing (不見) moping about in the convenience store contemplating their beverage purchases in tiresome longshots.
9) If imitation is the best form of flattery, then Next Magazine (壹週刊) can take some pride in its invented term -- "doing the splits" -- (劈腿), used to describe someone who is two-timing their significant other. It become common usage in all the major Chinese-language papers after exposing Hsu Shao-yang (許紹洋) as the on-the-side lover of Lin Wei-jun (林韋君), who was the girlfriend of pop singer Lin You-wei (林佑威). Subsequently, affairs in all the major media have been referred to as a "splits event"
(
PHOTOS: TAIPEI TIMES
10) And finally, another of Hong Kong's pop legends, Anita Mui (
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
Artifacts found at archeological sites in France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay shoreline show that humans have been crafting tools from whale bones since more than 20,000 years ago, illustrating anew the resourcefulness of prehistoric people. The tools, primarily hunting implements such as projectile points, were fashioned from the bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said. Bones from sperm whales were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, right or bowhead whales — two species indistinguishable with the analytical method used in the study — and blue whales. With seafaring capabilities by humans
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
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