Designer Taipei: Fashioning the city and plotting romance in post-2008 Taiwanese cinema
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London
- Room
- BG01
About this event
In this talk, Christopher Brown examines designer aesthetics in post-2008 cinematic depictions of Taipei, drawing on research from his recent monograph Mapping Taiwanese Cinema 2008-20: Environments, Poetics, Practice (2024).
The talk will consider a wide range of films, such as Chen Hung-I’s film Design 7 Love (2014), which experiments self-reflexively with what it means to design, and others including Love (2012), Zone Pro Site (2013), The Mad King of Taipei (2017), 52Hz I Love You (2017), and The Story of the Stone (2018), which may not feature design as a subject, but arguably share with Chen’s film an impulse to construct Taipei as a designer city.
This is undertaken by the creative decoration of the city’s environments using multicoloured palettes, while the narrative recurrence of boutique stores points to dynamics of city-fashioning. More fundamentally, Brown willargue that design is about the plotting of the future, with both narrative and design shown to be motivated by desire. In particular, Taipei’s green and repurposed spaces, reimagined in line with a designer vision, set the characters on the path to conflict resolution and romance.
Photo credit: Yunni Jiang via Unsplash
Meet the speaker
Dr Christopher Brown
Christopher Brown is a researcher and filmmaker. He is a Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking at the University of Sussex, where he currently heads the department of Creative & Critical Practice. As a researcher, Chris has written on contemporary Taiwanese film, practice-based research, and American cinema.
His monograph Mapping Taiwanese Cinema, 2008-20: Environments, Poetics, Practice was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2024. As a filmmaker, Chris has written and directed several short films that have screened internationally, with Remission (2015) available to rent on platforms such as BFI Player.
