"A Conversation with Yangchuk Tso: Negotiating Ethnicity, Gender and Language Rights in Contemporary Tibetan Pop Music and Cinema"
Brown Bag Lecture
Speaker: Yangchuk Tso, Actress and contemporary singer-songwriter
Moderated by: Gray Tuttle, Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Event Summary: Yangchuk Tso is best known for her collaboration with the critically acclaimed Tibetan auteur Pema Tseden on his 2016 film “Tharlo”, which won best adapted screenplay at the 2016 Taipei Golden Horse awards. In addition to being the leading actress of the Tibetan New Wave, she is one of the best known Tibetan contemporary singers and has recently began to shoot her own ethnographic documentaries. We are at a critical juncture in the history of Tibetan media and cultural production, as Tibetan arthouse films take prizes at Venice biennale, Tibetan pop music and television dramas and even reality shows are fixtures on PRC state media channels.
This intimate event will see Yangchuk Tso reflect on her experience navigating these two worlds in Tibetan film and music in the PRC, and then engaged in a conversation about her own film practice by Eveline Washul (Columbia University) and Riga Shakya (Columbia University), followed by a Q&A session. The evening will provide the Columbia community a rare opportunity to hear first-hand reflections on pop music and filmmaking on the Tibetan plateau and ethnic minority film practice and the politics of representation in contemporary China.
Speaker biography: Yangchuk Tso is an award winning Tibetan actress and contemporary singer-songwriter based in Beijing and Xining. Best known for her leading role in Pema Tseden’s 2016 “Tharlo” (which was shown at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art), she has appeared in numerous films and television dramas. She is a graduate of the Central Academy of Drama’s directing program and is currently working on an ethnographic documentary film on a nunnery in Amdo, Eastern Tibet
