Wen-Jie Qin

Documentary filmmaker and religion scholar Wen-Jie Qin was born in China and grew up under the rule of Mao Zedong. She studied philosophy at Beijing University but moved to the United States to pursue graduate study after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. Qin received a Fulbright-Hays dissertation fellowship and completed a Ph.D. in Chinese Religions and Filmmaking at Harvard University in 2000. While a fellow at the Harvard Film Study Center, she made a number of award-winning documentaries on issues concerning religion, gender, children, and economic reform in post-Mao China. After returning to her native China in 1995, she recognized the rapid changes that were occurring at all levels of Chinese society and decided to document what she saw in her films. In recent years she has completed documentaries on Chinese Buddhism in the Netherlands for the Buddhist Broadcasting Foundation and on immigration for VPRO Television, all aired on Dutch national channels.Her credits include FULL CIRCLE, THE SPROUTS OF CAPITALISM IN CHINIA, TO THE LAND OF BLISS, WE ARE NOT BEGGARS, and WOMAN BEING. (08/12)

Woman Being
A film by Wen-Jie Qin, 1997, 20 min., Color
In a critical examination of changing concepts of beauty and sexuality in modern China, WOMAN BEING illustrates how a flood of Western pop culture is...