Edward Yang: Using the Coldest Logic of an Engineer to Capture the Warmest Loneliness of the Human Heart

30-second overview: Edward Yang (1947–2007) worked as a submarine software engineer in the U.S. for seven years, abandoning everything in his early thirties to return to Taiwan and study filmmaking. He used an engineer’s precise, hand-drawn storyboarding and the coldest camera angles to dissect the confusion of Taipei’s middle class, producing masterpieces like A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi that are now ranked among the greatest films of all time, and becoming the first Taiwanese to win Best Director at Cannes. But this "coldness" came at a cost—scolding actors on set until they faced the wall, and drifting from Hou Hsiao-hsien from close collaborators to distant acquaintances—resulting in Yi Yi remaining unscreened in Taiwanese cinemas for seventeen years of his life. He never filmed other people’s stories; he filmed the side of ourselves we refuse to look at.

1980s early, a tall man walked into Taipei’s Central Motion Picture Corporation wearing a T-shirt printed with three names: Herzog, Bresson, Yang¹. The first two were Herzog and Bresson—German and French directors, respectively, names that cannot be bypassed in world cinema history. The third was himself. At the time, he had not yet directed a single feature film.

This is the image remembered by screenwriter Wu Nien-jen: Edward Yang, fresh to the CMP, carried an unyielding, defiant air². He placed his own name behind two masters.

He was in his early thirties that year. Four years earlier, he was still in Seattle writing navigation software for U.S. Navy submarines³.

A T-shirt Printing His Name Beside the Masters

He was not formally trained in film. This must be stated first, as it is the key to understanding everything else.

Born in Shanghai in November 1947, Yang moved to Taiwan with his family in 1949 and grew up in Taipei⁴. His father worked at a bank in Shanghai before coming to the island, a detail Yang himself recounted⁵. He graduated from Jian Guo High School in 1965, earned a degree in Control Engineering from National Chiao Tung University in 1969, and then pursued a master’s in electrical engineering at the University of Florida⁶. A standard path for academic elites, the route taken by the brightest students of that era.

After earning his master’s, he actually enrolled in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He entered in 1973 and left in 1974. He gave two versions of the reason. To a Mirror Media interviewer, he called it a "diploma mill," noting that poor students couldn’t afford film stock, "so how could you make films, let alone study!"⁷. In another interview, his account was more honest and brutal: "I realized I simply lacked the talent, the essential qualities needed for the film industry, so I dropped out."⁸

He returned to the engineer’s track. Seattle, Washington University Applied Physics Laboratory, designing navigation software for U.S. Navy submarines. He stayed for seven years⁹. It was a good job: stable, respectable, utilizing all his training. In his spare time, he shot short films on 16mm film with fellow enthusiasts¹⁰. His brother, two years his senior, took him to watch film festivals at the university¹¹. A rational man living a rational life.

The turning point occurred inside a cinema. He watched Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a film about a group of Spanish conquistadors descending into madness in the Amazon rainforest. Walking out of the theater, he felt he was "already another person"¹². Years later, he repeatedly recounted this: Herzog used the most concise imagery to precisely express feelings from the depths of the soul, and demonstrated that a single person’s will could complete a film¹³.

For an engineer, this was a message about feasibility. Film does not require Hollywood’s massive machinery; it can be sustained by a single person’s logic, much like writing code.

In 1981, he returned to Taiwan¹⁴.

He gave up his Seattle job, his visa, a clearly visible life path. What did he return to do? Study filmmaking. A man who calculated risk to the extreme made a decision that maximized it.

📝 Curator’s Note
We usually frame the "engineer turned artist" narrative as a romantic awakening: a dry technician finally finding their soul. But Yang’s case is precisely the opposite. What truly gave him the courage to gamble was an engineering revelation: Herzog proved to him that a film could be completed by one person. He did not abandon rationality to chase a dream; he used rationality to calculate the dream’s feasibility. He was an engineer his entire life, merely swapping the problem he needed to solve from submarines to the human heart.

The Blackboard at 69 Ji Nan Road

Upon returning to Taiwan, Yang found an industry in the process of loosening.

In the early 1980s, Taiwan’s box office was dominated by Hong Kong films and Qiong Yao-style melodramas, with local production stuck in formulaic loops. Inside the CMP, two young planners named Hsiao Yen and Wu Nien-jen sought to bring in new directors to shoot something different¹⁵. In 1982, The Story of a Small Town, featuring four new directors each contributing one segment, was released. The directors were Tao Te-chen, Yang, Ke I-cheng, and Chang Yi, with the four segments corresponding to childhood through adulthood¹⁶. Yang’s segment was titled "Expectation," following a young girl’s secret crush on a college student renting a room in her home. The Taiwan New Cinema movement is generally dated from this film.

He quickly demonstrated a difference from the rest. The Sea Has a Day (1983) was his first feature film, starring Sylvia Chang and Hu Yin-meng, with cinematography handled by Christopher Doyle, who was making his debut as a film cinematographer. This decision sparked angry reactions from the CMP’s internal cinematographers. He withstood the pressure and insisted on using him¹⁷¹⁸. The runtime was nearly three hours, far exceeding the standards of the time. This was not a man who knew how to compromise.

The New Cinema was not a one-person endeavor. It had a physical anchor: 69 Ji Nan Road, Section 2, Yang’s childhood home, a Japanese-style old dormitory allocated by his father’s employer. A group of figures later written into Taiwan’s film history frequently gathered there¹⁹. On November 6, 1986, Yang’s birthday party was held at this address²⁰. Inside the house stood a blackboard, covered with everyone’s thoughts on film and the tentative names for their future company²¹.

The conversations from that night matured into a document over two months later. On January 24, 1987, a manifesto drafted by Chan Hung-chih and signed by fifty film practitioners was published simultaneously in Wenxing, the China Times Humanistic Supplement, and Hong Kong’s Film Biweekly²². It was divided into three sections: our views on film, our anxieties about the environment, and our hopes for change. This document, later known as the "Taiwan Film Manifesto," represented a collective voice from the New Cinema movement against the entire system²³.

The manifesto’s ideals were never realized, met instead by a systemic backlash; the New Cinema as a movement also drew to a close shortly thereafter²⁴. And Yang, standing among this group, was temperamentally destined to be a difficult ally.

Kuling Street Built in Pingtung

To understand exactly where Yang’s "coldness" lies, one must look at the four-hour film he spent five years making.

At 10 p.m. on June 15, 1961, near Kuling Street in Taipei, a sixteen-year-old boy named Mao Wu stabbed a girl of the same age, Liu Min, seven times with a scout knife. She died on the spot²⁵. Mao Wu was a student in the second year of junior high, class C. Two months prior, he had been expelled from school after a switchblade was found in his backpack²⁶. The case’s verdict bounced back and forth for nearly two years: from fifteen years, remanded for retrial to seven years, to a final ten-year sentence in February 1963. Because the perpetrator was a minor, the death penalty was legally impossible²⁷.

This case was close to Yang. He entered Jian Guo High School’s junior high night division in 1959, transferred to the day division the following year, and entered the senior high division in 1962²⁸. He attended the same school as Mao Wu, just a different cohort. Years later, he told British film critic Tony Rayns that he knew many people close to that boy, which allowed him to research the case’s details thoroughly²⁹.

But A Brighter Summer Day never intended to reenact that murder, nor was it nostalgic. What truly captivated Yang was the environment itself. He told Rayns that he quickly realized the point was not just what happened to the two teenagers²⁹. He wanted to film the very air of the era that could kill a boy. Taipei in 1961: Mainland Chinese families crowded into narrow houses, the shadow of White Terror weighed on every adult, and teenagers clumsily carved out positions for themselves in the chaos through gang affiliations and martial arts nicknames. The flashlight swinging in the dark in Xiao Si’s hand illuminated the unease of an entire generation.

His narrative philosophy is also stated most clearly in this film. He told Rayns: "My philosophy of storytelling is that it’s not interesting when a bad guy kills someone or a good guy does good things; it’s interesting when a good guy does bad things, or vice versa."³⁰ This sentence could almost explain all his films: he never gives you a character you can simply love or hate.

✦ "It’s interesting when a good guy does bad things, or vice versa."

The film’s production method was itself an engineer’s work. Five years in pre-production³¹, 110 shooting days³². The book street in the film was not shot on Kuling Street. Yang spotted the roundabout near Changchun Park, close to the Pingtung County Governor’s Residence, through a car window on his way home from set, and decided to reconstruct 1960s Taipei there³³. Most strikingly were the actors: he told BFI directly that "75 percent of the cast and over 60 percent of the crew had never worked on a film before."³⁴ To achieve this, he held acting training classes, grinding a group of amateurs into a cast capable of carrying a four-hour epic.

Edward Yang on the set of The Sea Has a Day in 1983. This was his first feature film, with a runtime of nearly three hours, far exceeding the standards of the time.

Thirteen in a Pitch-Black Room

Among the amateurs was a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy named Chang Chen³⁵.

He later became an international film star, but during the shooting of A Brighter Summer Day, he said of himself, "I completely didn’t know what filming a movie was, completely zero, completely blank!"³⁶ How did Yang extract the expressions he wanted from a blank slate? Chang Chen recalled one scene: Yang locked him in a pitch-black room, scolded him until he was speechless, made him face the wall for half an hour, then suddenly pulled him out of the room and dragged him in front of the camera to shoot. He wanted that naturally revealed expression of fear. "This is a very shocking memory for me," Chang Chen said³⁷.

This is the other side of Yang on set. Actor Deng Anning remembered that tense atmosphere: the set was dead silent, then suddenly a massive "F*** you!" Everyone jumped. He cursed, turned around, and walked out³⁸. Screenwriter Hsiao Yen put it more directly: Yang almost changed actors midway through every film, because if a character made him feel it was wrong, the scene was wasted³⁹.

A person who values logic over feeling easily becomes a tyrant on set. His "coldness" truly hurt people.

But the same Deng Anning also remembered that after acting under such high pressure, Yang would walk over and pat him: "Deng Zi, great acting!"⁴⁰ During Yu Wei-yan’s mother’s terminal cancer period, Yang drove him to and from the hospital and the set every day⁴¹. Actor Chen Xiang-chi’s account perhaps comes closest to the truth. Yang’s way of mentoring was "high-density interaction in daily life." He often kept everyone close, discussing scripts, watching films, listening to music, attending exhibitions, reading, and commenting on current events together⁴².

A person who was not good at communication and even stuttered when speaking used the clumsiest, most exhausting method: living his entire life as a classroom. Chen Xiang-chi, Chen Yi-wen, Wang Wei-ming, Yang Shun-ching, Hong Hong—these Taiwanese filmmakers who later stood on their own were all cultivated this way. Years later, at a forum, Chen Xiang-chi compared their credentials as having attended an extra "Yang School"⁴³.

📝 Curator’s Note
The term "Yang School" sounds warm, but it actually conceals a contradiction. How could a man recognized as poor at communication and quick-tempered become a teacher to an entire generation of filmmakers? The answer may be: precisely because he could not mentor in ordinary ways, he could only use the most extreme methods to keep actors close, force out authenticity through high pressure, and then affirm them in the most direct way. He scolded and praised with equal lack of restraint. It was a clumsiness so extreme that it became an extraordinary effort, unrelated to gentleness. His high standards for film hurt people first, then remade them.

Taipei Hotel: A Personal High and a National Low

If we only look at international honors, Yang’s path was beautifully ascending, film by film.

The Terrorizers won Best Feature Film at the Golden Horse Awards in 1986, and the following year took the Silver Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland⁴⁴. A Brighter Summer Day received twelve Golden Horse nominations in 1991, winning Best Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay, and also took the Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival⁴⁵. This trajectory led to 2000’s Yi Yi, for which he won Best Director at Cannes, becoming the first Taiwanese director to receive this award⁴⁶.

But on the other side of the honor lay his lucid, almost despairing view of Taiwan’s film environment.

In early June 2000, Yang returned to Taiwan with the Cannes trophy and hosted an awards tea party at the Taipei Hotel. A reporter from Taiwan Panorama was present and recorded his words: "This is a personal high point in my film career, but psychologically it is very sad, because it is also the lowest point for Taiwan’s film industry. Film workers have worked until their hair turned white. I hope the young people entering the film industry will not have their passion erased by Taiwan’s environment."⁴⁷

A personal high point, Taiwan film’s lowest point. This sentence was both his pride and his sorrow, and it planted the seed for the next seventeen years of the most baffling event for Taiwanese audiences.

The opposing voices were always present, and never baseless. Art critic Chen Tai-sung criticized his films as bearing an "arts-and-letters tone" that was intolerable, with dialogue like maxims, "a series of 'truth confessions'."⁴⁸ Writer Chiang Hsun gave A Confucian Confusion the review "bordering on superficial" at that year’s judging panel⁴⁹. Even Hong Hong, who had a minor role in the film, felt those long philosophical monologues were "very dry and boring," inferior to Woody Allen’s effortless wit⁵⁰. In 1994, when A Confucian Confusion entered official Cannes competition, the British film critic circle was baffled. Even Time Out itself admitted the film "left most of the drowsy British journalists at Cannes scratching their heads."⁵¹

These criticisms actually all point to the same place: he was too cold, too fond of reasoning, too much like a person standing outside the crowd wielding a scalpel. And this is precisely the cost of the method he chose. When you decide to dissect emotion in the most rational way, you must bear the accusation of "standing outside the situation." His coldness came at a price.

Edward Yang on the set of A Confucian Confusion in 1993. This film, criticized for its "arts-and-letters tone" and "superficiality," is precisely his masterpiece pushing rationality to the extreme.

A Film That Had to Prove It Was a Taiwanese Film

Yi Yi was Yang’s last completed film, and the sum of all his contradictions.

The film follows a Taipei middle-class family: NJ (played by Wu Nien-jen, the name being an abbreviation of his real name), his wife Minmin (played by Sylvia Chang), daughter Tingting, and the little boy Yangyang, who carries a camera around photographing the backs of adults’ heads⁵². It was a Japan-funded production: produced by the "1+2 Production Committee" with Pony Canyon’s involvement, Yang’s own Atom Films, and producer Masaya Kawai⁵³.

Its global reception was astonishingly high. Premiered at Cannes on May 14, 2000⁵⁴. Ranked eighth in BBC’s 2016 list of the 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, Yi Yi placed eighth⁵⁵. Tied for 90th in BFI’s Sight & Sound 2022 list of the Greatest Films of All Time⁵⁶. Ranked 40th in The New York Times’ 2025 list of the 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century⁵⁷. It entered the Criterion Collection⁵⁸.

Then came the baffling event: this film, which won Yang the Cannes Best Director award and was hailed worldwide as a masterpiece, was never screened in Taiwanese cinemas during his lifetime⁵⁹. Taiwanese audiences had to wait until 2017, ten years after his death, to see it in a theater for the first time⁶⁰.

This event is easily written as a romantic story: the master, in a huff, refused to let his hometown see the film. But the truth is far more complex. It was the result of overlapping obstacles.

At the bottom layer was copyright. The rights to Yi Yi were held by the Japanese producer. When asked about this at the 2001 Hong Kong Film Festival, Yang’s answer was calm and technical: "It has not been released in Taiwan because no one came to handle distribution. The film rights are with the Japanese producer, and distribution fees were too expensive."⁶¹ No accusations, just an explanation of an administrative hassle. One layer up was the News Bureau’s classification: because the producing company was Japanese, the film was classified as a non-national film, ineligible for Taiwan subsidies, making even travel expenses for film festivals problematic⁶². These technical exclusions stacked up, finally crushing a person’s willingness to continue pushing. Curator Wang Jun-jie later relayed that Yang felt Taiwanese audiences did not know how to appreciate his work⁶³. Objective obstacles and subjective disillusionment interlocked, creating seventeen years of silence.

This absurdity continued after his death. In 2017, for the distributor to screen Yi Yi in Taiwan, they first had to "prove that the main actors’ nationality was the Republic of China," struggling with officialdom for a while before obtaining a rating certificate. The final official record contained a self-contradictory statement: the producing company is Japanese, but the country of origin is the Republic of China⁶⁴. A film about Taipei, acted by Taiwanese, had to exert such effort to prove it was a Taiwanese film.

The Yi Yi 25th Anniversary 4K Restoration Trailer (Janus Films Official). The film Taiwanese audiences waited seventeen years to see in theaters returned to the Cannes Classics section as a restored print in 2025.

Within his seven-and-a-half works lies the spiritual history of Taiwan over forty years post-war. From the repression of the martial law era, to the alienation of the city after lifting martial law, to the spiritual void of the middle class under economic boom. Taipei from 1980 to 2000 under his lens became the most honest visual archive of Taiwan’s modernization. He always filmed Mandarin-speaking urban middle-class life; his lens never extended to factories, fields, or the Taiwan where people spoke Taiwanese. This was his choice, and also his boundary.

Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien: The Gravity of Two Mountains

When discussing the Taiwan New Cinema, another name cannot be bypassed: Hou Hsiao-hsien. The relationship between these two men is itself a story of complementarity and distance.

How did they meet? Hou’s account was understated: "Nothing special, just that we met. He returned, and we chatted about films and got along well."⁶⁵ Zhu Tianwen remembered that honeymoon period, saying the two were like what Tsai Chin described, "as if two people were in love," spending every day together. It was their best time⁶⁶. In 1985, Yang shot Peach Blossom Land. Hou not only starred in it but also provided funding. What to do when the money ran out? Hou’s exact words: "What if the money is spent? Just owe the mother-in-law's money."⁶⁷

Peach Blossom Land played in Taipei for only four days before being pulled⁶⁸. Hou recalled this with open-mindedness: the shooting finished, Yang married Tsai Chin because of this film, and he remained highly motivated. "Next, how well and how powerfully The Terrorizers was shot."⁶⁹

But the gravity between the two mountains later turned into distance. The only time Hou directly addressed the reason for their distance, he said: "It’s quite tragic. After they finished filming, they got married, and in the end, it just fizzled out. So actually, Hou and I later became a bit distant because of Tsai Chin."⁷⁰ As for more details, he left only one sentence: "The matter is hard to explain clearly, and it’s hard for you to understand even if I do."⁷¹

These two sentences together are more honest than any dramatic breakup. He acknowledged the fuse, yet refused to explain the full picture. Yang’s marriage to Tsai Chin, which lasted ten years before ending in 1995⁷², is a fact within this context of distance, but it should not be the center of anyone’s story. The two people who were once closest ended up separated by a distance neither could clearly explain—that is all.

Drawing Comics Until the Moment Before Coma

To conclude Yang’s story, we must return to that boy at the very beginning.

His first love in this life was actually comics, predating film. He himself said that besides film, his other love was comics, Japanese-style, with complex narratives⁷³. During his Jian Guo High School years, he "serialized" his own WWII comics in class⁷⁴. Those original manuscripts survive today: crumpled creases, blue ballpoint pen underlines with pencil lines, panels filled with ruins and soldiers shooting silently⁷⁵. When he founded his film company, he named it "Atom Films," commemorating Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy⁷⁶.

Edward Yang's hand-drawn WWII comic manuscript from his youth. From the class serialization to the unfinished animation of his later years, comics were his first love in this life, and also his last.

Thus, in his later years, the thing Yang wanted to do with everything he had circled back to animation, back to the enlarged version of his childhood’s first love. The film was called Wind. He partnered with Jackie Chan, who served as martial arts director, co-producer, and invested his own likeness rights⁷⁷. The story was set in Kaifeng during the Northern Song Dynasty, drawing from Along the River During the Qingming Festival and Dongjing Meng Hua Lu⁷⁸. He demanded the animation be "one continuous shot," using the most engineer-like obsession to challenge animation’s most difficult technical feat⁷⁹. The budget was approximately 25 million U.S. dollars, but only nine to ten minutes were ultimately completed⁸⁰. When the partners learned of his illness, they terminated the project. The company subsequently fell into financial disputes and was liquidated⁸¹. The engineering project was too massive to sustain⁸².

In 2000, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. For the following seven years, he concealed his condition, refused visitors, and replied to all inquiries with a single "I'm fine"⁸³. Cancer cells metastasized to his brain, spine, and ribs. He underwent brain surgery three times⁸⁴.

On June 29, 2007, Yang died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, at age 59⁸⁵. Before passing, he took painkillers, his consciousness already unclear, yet he still held a paintbrush, drawing a storyboard for an unfinished animation. The film was called Little Friend, telling the story of a child and a dog, filled with affection and paternal love. He emailed the storyboard to his old friend Chang Yi, then fell into a coma⁸⁶.

The boy who serialized comics in his Jian Guo High School class, until the very last moment, remained that boy.

That December, the Golden Horse Awards posthumously awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chang Chen⁸⁷. The world had already crowned him; this time, Taiwan itself reclaimed him. In 2023, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum hosted the world’s first complete Edward Yang retrospective, titled "A One and A Two: Edward Yang"⁸⁸. His widow, Peng Kaili, insisted the exhibition must be held in Taipei. The keyword she set for the exhibition was "warmth"⁸⁹.

The 2023 Taipei Fine Arts Museum "A One and A Two: Edward Yang" Retrospective. The first complete global retrospective of his work, using warmth to close the file on the man accused of being too cold.

A man criticized as too cold, too rational, standing outside the situation, was finally closed out by those closest to him with the word "warmth." This is hardly a reversal—he was indeed cold, and he did hurt people. But that coldness was always in service of one warmest thing.

Seven and a Half: A Spiritual History of Post-War Taiwan

Yang completed only seven and a half feature films in his lifetime (The Story of a Small Town was a four-director collaboration, counting as half). The quantity is small, but almost every film is a slice of Taiwan’s modernization.

Source: National Film and Audiovisual Center, Golden Horse Awards, BFI

In Yi Yi, the most widely circulated line is: "After the invention of cinema, human life has been extended at least three times over."⁹⁰ These words were spoken by a film character, not Yang himself, but they were later quoted by countless Taiwanese cinephiles as his footnote. They could almost describe what Yang did for Taiwan: through film, he preserved for us several times more of the lives we ourselves never clearly saw.

I Film It for You to See

At the end of Yi Yi, the little boy Yangyang, who always carried a camera to photograph the backs of adults’ heads⁹¹, stands at his grandmother’s funeral reading a letter. The reason he photographs the backs of heads is because he discovered that adults cannot see their own backs—so he films the unseen side and shows it to them.

At the end of the letter, Yangyang speaks to his newborn, nameless little cousin: he feels that he, too, is old.

A child saying "I'm old too" carries the weight of Yang’s entire life as a self-explanation. He was that Yangyang with the camera. He gave up a stable engineer’s life in Seattle, returned to Taiwan, and used the coldest, most engineering-like methods to film, one by one, the back of our own heads that we cannot see, and show it to us.

He never filmed other people. He filmed us.

Using the coldest logic of an engineer to capture the warmest loneliness of the human heart—that is the pair of eyes Edward Yang left for Taiwan, and for the world.

Further Reading: Taiwan Cinema (Yang was one of the two standard-bearers of the Taiwan New Cinema; here is the map of the entire movement he belonged to), Hou Hsiao-hsien (The other mountain named alongside Yang, the one who drifted from close collaborator to distant acquaintance), Ang Lee (Who also brought Taiwan cinema to the world stage, but via a completely different path), Tsai Ming-liang (After the Taiwan New Cinema, another way of dissecting urban loneliness), Kuling Street (The real street where the knife fell, the origin point of a four-hour epic).

Image Credits

• Main Image / The Sea Has a Day Set (1983): Central Motion Picture Corporation, Golden Harvest Motion Pictures Co., Ltd. (Hong Kong), The Sea Has a Day production still, 1983. Provided by Peng Kaili, on loan to the National Film and Audiovisual Center. Source from TFAM "A One and A Two: Edward Yang" exhibition public image (tfam.museum), Fair use editorial commentary.
• WWII Comic Manuscript (circa 1965-1970): Edward Yang’s hand-drawn WWII comic manuscript from his youth. Provided by Peng Kaili, on loan to the National Film and Audiovisual Center. Source same as above TFAM exhibition press kit, Fair use editorial commentary.
• A Confucian Confusion Set (1993): Atom Films, A Confucian Confusion production still, 1993. Provided by Peng Kaili, on loan to the National Film and Audiovisual Center (TFAM official site also marks circa 1994, this adopts the press kit’s 1993). Source same as above, Fair use editorial commentary.

References