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 (
Feb. 17 to Feb. 23 “Japanese city is bombed,” screamed the banner in bold capital letters spanning the front page of the US daily New Castle News on Feb. 24, 1938. This was big news across the globe, as Japan had not been bombarded since Western forces attacked Shimonoseki in 1864. “Numerous Japanese citizens were killed and injured today when eight Chinese planes bombed Taihoku, capital of Formosa, and other nearby cities in the first Chinese air raid anywhere in the Japanese empire,” the subhead clarified. The target was the Matsuyama Airfield (today’s Songshan Airport in Taipei), which
For decades, Taiwan Railway trains were built and serviced at the Taipei Railway Workshop, originally built on a flat piece of land far from the city center. As the city grew up around it, however, space became limited, flooding became more commonplace and the noise and air pollution from the workshop started to affect more and more people. Between 2011 and 2013, the workshop was moved to Taoyuan and the Taipei location was retired. Work on preserving this cultural asset began immediately and we now have a unique opportunity to see the birth of a museum. The Preparatory Office of National
China has begun recruiting for a planetary defense force after risk assessments determined that an asteroid could conceivably hit Earth in 2032. Job ads posted online by China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) this week, sought young loyal graduates focused on aerospace engineering, international cooperation and asteroid detection. The recruitment drive comes amid increasing focus on an asteroid with a low — but growing — likelihood of hitting earth in seven years. The 2024 YR4 asteroid is at the top of the European and US space agencies’ risk lists, and last week analysts increased their probability
On Jan. 17, Beijing announced that it would allow residents of Shanghai and Fujian Province to visit Taiwan. The two sides are still working out the details. President William Lai (賴清德) has been promoting cross-strait tourism, perhaps to soften the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) attitudes, perhaps as a sop to international and local opinion leaders. Likely the latter, since many observers understand that the twin drivers of cross-strait tourism — the belief that Chinese tourists will bring money into Taiwan, and the belief that tourism will create better relations — are both false. CHINESE TOURISM PIPE DREAM Back in July
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