Yu-shan Huang

Huang Yu-shan
Huang Yushan at the film festival in Sundance, Colorado, U.S.A.
Born	1954 (age 62–63) Penghu Island, Taiwan
Nationality	Taiwanese
Occupation	Film director, art critic, short story writer, film critic, university teacher

Huang Yu-shan (Chinese: 黃玉珊; pinyin: Huang Yushan; born 1954) is a Taiwanese filmmaker. She has made significant contributions to Chinese cinema in the areas of aesthetics and cultural history. Her focus is the woman's viewpoint, and frequently challenges the status quo in what has been a male-dominated society.

Although originally from Penghu Island, situated in the Taiwan Straits, Huang Yu-shan grew up in Kaohsiung, South Taiwan. Her family later moved to Taipei. Her father was a successful calligrapher who sold his works in Kaohsiung for many years. Huang Yu-shan’s early awareness of the beauty of this art may have influenced her own creative development. Among her larger family she counts an important Taiwanese sculptor of the 1930s. Yushan Huang’s feature film The Strait Story as well as the documentary The Petrel Returns are focused on this artist, Ching-cheng Huang (黃清埕; 1912–1943).

After completing high school, she studied literature at Chengchi University in Mucha, Taipei. In the mid-1970s she worked for Yishu Gia (Artist Magazine) in Taipei, interviewing many painters, but also other artistically significant personalities on this island, such as the novelist and founder of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, Lin Huai-min, and the pioneer film director, Lee Hsing. In ca. 1977–79, Huang Yu-shan took an interest in the works of Eisenstein, Alain Resnais, Werner Herzog, Kenji Mizoguchi etc. She counted a number of cinéastes, such as Chien-yeh Huang (a film critic) and Ivan Wang, the editor of the film journal Yinxiang and founder of the Taipei Film Museum (today, the National Film Archives or Film Library) among her friends. And she belonged to a circle that organized private screenings of films such as Kurosawa’s Red Beard, then forbidden by the censors of the Guomindang dictatorship. She also saw works by Rainer Maria Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, F. W. Murnau, Hellmuth Costard, Werner Nekes, Dore O., Werner Schroeter and others at the German Cultural Center in Taipei. At the time, the center had just begun to depart from its routine of simply showing ‘Guten Tag’ movies for learners of the German language, thanks to the encouragement of a friend of Werner Nekes, the German poet and film critic Andreas Weiland who was teaching German and English literature at Tamkang University. These screenings attracted a number of cinéastes in Taipei and may have encouraged independent filmmakers.