Film Series – A Touch of Wang Hongwei

A classmate of director Jia Zhangke at the Beijing Film Academy, Wang Hongwei would become one of the mainstays of Jia’s cinema from their student days onward—an archaeologist sifting through the debris of a vanished Fengjie in Still Life, an abusive massage parlor customer in A Touch of Sin, the lead in Jia’s 1997 breakthrough Xiao Wu (Pickpocket)… Sometimes considered Jia’s onscreen “alter ego” and a part of his recurring “troupe” of actors that also includes Zhao Tao and Han Sanming, Wang’s performances—for Jia, as well as filmmakers like Johnny Ma and Zhang Lü—are distinguished by focused intensity and a total lack of actorly affect. As Jean-Pierre Léaud was to the French New Wave, so Wang is to the Sixth Generation of Mainland Chinese cinema, an actor whose every appearance is freighted with symbolic significance, as well as an artist of significant ingenuity and resourcefulness, long overdue a spotlighting tribute of his own—as he gets here, to accompany Metrograph’s runs of The Shadowless Tower, in which he stars, and Art College 1994, in which Wang voices a character.