Five Chinese Culture Vultures You Need to Know
Maggie Cheung
Maggie Cheung in Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love”. Everett Collection.
Raised in England and Hong Kong, Maggie Cheung, who got her start after winning the Miss Hong Kong Pageant at age 18, has starred in more than 70 films. She’s certainly versatile, playing opposite Jackie Chan in action films and starring in the dreamy films of Wong Kar-wai. In China, she is a mega celebrity (she once had to hide out in her apartment for weeks to avoid the paparazzi that were parked outside) but in the West, she’s probably best known for her role as a heroine addict trying to kick her habit in Clean. She won the best actress prize at the Cannes film festival but despite the international accolades, Cheung decided to retire from the screen and focus on composing music and painting.
Ai Wei Wei
Corbis
He’s been called everything from the modern day Duchamp to the world’s most dangerous artist, but the tireless 57 year-old artist is certainly a most prolific talent. Wei Wei has been under a travel ban for almost two years for his open criticism of the Chinese government, but that hasn’t stopped the activist artist from producing some of the most compelling works of our time. Wei Wei has expressed himself in almost every medium from photography (he’s taken images of himself giving the finger to iconic, cultural monuments like the White House and the Eiffel Tower) to sculpture (he filled the Tate Museum in London with millions of hand crafted porcelain sunflower seeds) to installation (a recent site specific project in Alcatraz raised issues about human rights). While he is limited in his travel, he shrewdly uses social media to communicate with the public and engage with his fellow artists.
Cai Guo Qiang
Getty Images
Like Wei Wei, Qiang’s work is politically charged. The 58 year-old who finds inspiration in everything from feng shui to Chinese medicine to dragons to roller coasters, is perhaps best known for his gunpowder series. What started out as using the powder as a material in his drawings and paintings, became the impetus for huge pyrotechnic events across the globe, including the opening and closing of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Though his explosive events are ambitious and loud (some have unassuming viewers have thought they were real explosions), there is something quite poetic about it all.
Faye Wong
AP Images
Singer, songwriter and actress Faye Wong has been described as “if Beyonce, Madonna and Lady Gaga were all rolled into into, they still wouldn’t be a popular as Wong is in Asia.” The Cantopop performer’s love life has been as rollicking as Elizabeth Taylor’s (marriages, divorces, rekindled love affairs with men 10 years her junior) but in public, she is quite reserved. Although her style on stage has been quite unconventional at times— think dreadlocks, painted tears — she’s become a favorite of Celine’s Phoebe Philo, the queen of cool minimalism. She’s modeled for the house’s ad campaign and sat front row at shows in Paris.
Chen Man
Broncolor
Chen Man is the East’s most famous photographer at the moment, having shot for Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar and Marie Claire editions in China, created campaigns for Gucci, Motorola and Adidas, and staged international exhibitions of her photos as well as her art work. Finding inspiration in everything from Japanese comic books to video games to Communist propaganda, Mans’ images are simultaneously weird and familiar, both innocent and slightly vulgar. The 35 year-old artist likes to explore the diversity of Chinese women whether it’s doing up models like cyborgs to explore the country’s nascent plastic surgery industry or showcasing the more natural beauty of Tibetan women in all their traditional dress. With her wide ranging visuals skills, it makes sense that she’s been dubbed the Mario Testino of China.
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