i’ve got the blues

(25 May 2018, Broadway Cinematheque screening, limited release)

The 42nd Hong Kong International Film Festival blurb describes director Angie Chen’s 2017 documentary on Hong Kong painter Yank Wong Yan-kwai as “a high-octane cat-and-mouse game between filmmaker and subject: one tries to capture; the other evades.” I couldn’t possibly sum it up better. This is a fascinating glimpse into the lives and personalities of both documenter and documented. To paraphrase Angie Chen describing her relationship with Yank Wong, by film’s end I felt as if I’d known both the artist and the director for years, even though I can’t really say I know them.

Angie Chen, who received her BA and MA degrees from the University of Iowa, is also the director of One Tree Three Lives, her 2012 award-winning documentary about Nieh Hualing, wife of Paul Engle and co-founder of the International Writing Program at the university. The two films are nothing alike, however. Based on what I saw in i’ve got the blues and my own interactions with Hualing while completing my MFA at the university, I would say this has a great deal to do with the very different personalities of the two films’ subjects. Wong’s decisions about how he would and would not play along with Chen necessarily shape the film, cutting off paths the story might have taken and forcing the filmmaker down others. The finalized work is undoubtedly a collaboration, the result of Chen and Wong’s push-pull dynamic.

One significant discussion between filmmaker and artist in i’ve got the blues deals with an artist’s motives for creating. Chen points out that films, unlike paintings, are quite expensive to make and must therefore be approached as a mass medium, taking audience into account. If only three or four people are willing to watch a film, it doesn’t work. Wong, who is not just a painter, but also a writer, blues musician, and one-time filmmaker, argues passionately against this point of view, asserting that the only thing that really matters is the work itself, which is not work if one is doing it for its own sake. Money should never be a primary consideration. Chen’s dogged persistence in seeing the project through, however, is tempered by her willingness to risk capturing her own emotional exposure on film as she responds to Wong’s repeated refusals to compromise. This being so, and given the film’s successful outcome, it would seem Chen has more than proved the merit of both points of view.

Watching this documentary was an almost overwhelming experience. It was dizzying, exhausting, and unpredictable, much like the artist it sought to capture. You could feel Chen’s frustration but also deep affection for Wong, their incessant wrangling resulting in a film that ultimately says much more about the processes we use to create than any straightforward revelation of facts about an artist’s life possibly could.