Destiny in motion (pictures)
In 1986, Tim Yip, who at that time was working as a photographer for a Hong Kong film magazine, after being recommended by Tsui Hark, got a job as art designer for John Woo's film A Better Tomorrow, thus launching a relationship with film that has been solid and rewarding ever since. The following year, for Stanley Kwan's film Rouge, he recreated the extravagant, self-indulgent nonstop-party ambience of 1930s Hong Kong, and began to develop a deep interest in the culture and arts of the past.
That was a golden age for Hong Kong moviemaking, with over 300 productions screened each year. Faced with an uninterrupted flow of offers, Yip decided he would turn down purely commercially oriented films, saying they were "not refined enough" and "no fun."
In 1992, through the film Temptation of a Monk, he met Wu Hsing-kuo, a Peking Opera actor from Taiwan and founder of the Contemporary Legend Theater. The two hit it off right away, and Yip promptly packed his bags and, with two assistants in tow, moved into the small apartment (maybe 70 square meters) owned by Wu and his wife (the dancer and choreographer Lin Hsiu-wei), rubbing elbows with their family of four night and day for three months.
Asked to do costumes for Contemporary Legend's adaptation of the classical Greek tragedy Medea, Yip, who had never before done operatic costume design, was completely uninhibited and let his muse soar free. He decided to dress up Peking Opera diva Wei Hai-ming with a European Renaissance style hoop skirt, Chinese-style sleeves so wide that when swept open they covered the whole stage, extravagantly embellished aristocratic Chinese headgear, and an elaborately painted face for her leading role as a vicious yet tragic woman who is so set on revenge against her husband that she kills her own son.
"Taiwan was really fun back then! A bunch of lunatics like Wu Hsing-kuo could go without sleep, go without eating, completely immersed in Peking Opera." Thinking back to those days, Yip uses the term "collective madness" to describe the idealistic and richly creative decade of the 1990s.
In his mind's eye, Taiwan in those days-fresh out of martial law and enjoying real freedom for the first time in four decades-had an atmosphere deeply imbued with culture, with huge talents as common as clouds in the sky. In film there were directors Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, in the performance arts the Cloud Gate Theater under Lin Hwai-min was just hitting its stride, and all you had to do was open a newspaper to find literary pages invigorated by writers and critics like Pai Hsien-yung, Li Ao, and Po Yang. Simply standing in the Eslite Bookstore flipping through the latest issues of newspapers and magazines from around the world gave him a sense of satisfaction that he had never had in the cultural wasteland of Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, "lunatic" Wu Hsing-kuo was similarly amazed at the passion for creativity of this man from Hong Kong. Virtually every piece of cloth, every decorative object, was collected by Yip personally, suitcase in hand, from the Yongle fabric market. Wu says of him, "He spent every last penny of his own on books, not even having enough in his pockets for a cup of coffee." What Wu most admired was that "he never stopped trying to improve himself and striving for perfection. No matter what the medium or stage, he pulled out all the stops, and, dragging a cartload of books behind him, never ceased to elaborate and defend his own viewpoint."
The first performance of Medea in 1993 created a sensation with its stunning visuals. From there Yip went on to seven years of involvement in live performances in Taiwan, doing stage design and/or costumes for an honor roll of Taiwan's leading theater and dance companies.
Sharing his views on designing costumes in an Oriental style, Yip has written: "In ancient times, China was a center of high style, with its fashions reflecting its imperial power," but because of cultural transmission and absurd mistakes in historical discourse, the aesthetics of the Tang Dynasty are often taken to be the same as those of traditional Japan. Yip explains that the Tang focused on visual sensuality; the human body was liberated and half-exposed. They enjoyed a kind of self-confidence and luxuriousness with respect to beauty. In contrast, Japan's traditional culture was centered on a more reserved definition of beauty. Women were tightly bound inside clothing, with an etiquette of restraint that was informed by a male-dominated social structure. "The two peoples in fact were just manifesting their different spiritual cultures," argues the richly informed Yip, who has developed a whole "fabric archeology."
Among his many credits, for the production of Miroirs de Vie by the Legend Lin Dance Theater he contrived a multi-layered costume for the role of Mazu that ended up weighing 40 kilograms. He was also invited to the opera house in Graz, Austria, for a production of Rashomon directed by Lin Hwai-min, for which Yip blended the forms and styles of Peking Opera and Japanese Kabuki. After all those years of mutual interaction and shared experiences of doing the artistically revolutionary, Yip says with obvious satisfaction: "You could say that there's nobody in Taiwan's cultural community that I didn't get to know personally!"
However, by the time he finished Lear Was Here in cooperation with Wu Hsing-kuo in 2000, Yip was bemoaning the poor quality of the "stage environment" in Taiwan: the market was too small, there weren't enough specialists being trained, and there weren't enough high-quality pieces to perform. "How can people be expected to produce dream theater with such a shortage of resources? It does nothing but suck all the energy out of you!" Therefore he said goodbye to live theater, which had enthralled him for so many years, and returned to film after his long hiatus, making Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with Ang Lee.
This marked the start of a fad for "the aura of the Orient," combining the retro with the avant-garde, that swept the world. More particularly, after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon there was great enthusiasm in the Chinese-language movie industry for large-scale period dramas, resulting in epic films with huge budgets, grandiose sets, and art teams of as many as 300 people. (Examples of this genre include The Promise, The Banquet, and Red Cliff). For all of these, filmmakers demanded Tim Yip by name, and would not settle for anyone else. This is how he was in position to construct his powerfully beautiful and elaborate "Oriental imagery."
Photography and drawing were Tim Yip's first two eyes on the world. He feels that photography is not so much a matter of creativity as it is an exploration of the relationship between the external and internal realms. The photos here are all his.