1) Ms. Chiang was born in Beijing and attended the Beijing Dance Academy, yet she started her acting training in Hong Kong at the Shaw Brothers studio, and hit her big time in Taiwan's film industry. She was the only movie/stage artist who traversed the three Chinese political entities – PRC, British colonial Hong Kong, and Taiwan – during the Cold War. Now living between New York and Sweden, she uniquely personifies the global Chinese. Kang's career, starting from China's ancient regime and flourishing for a decade in the Chinese diaspora, actually represents the origin of this global Chinese history.

2) Ms. Chiang is a pioneering Chinese modern dancer/choreographer, transplanting the bare-foot dance inaugurated by Isadora Duncan onto Chinese soil. Kang Youwei was the historic figure who liberated Chinese women from foot-biding, thus making modern dance in China possible. One might say Ms. Chiang is in her way one of Kang You-wei's spiritual daughters – a woman who benefits from and excels in one of his most important legacies

3) Ms. Chiang, just like Kang Youwei, has found (and owned) her beloved island in Sweden. They have both, for very different reasons, fallen in love with Sweden, despite their quintessential Chinese identity. Both of them are profoundly affected by the poignant meaning of, and search for, “home.” Datong, the Confucian utopia, is about establishing a home for all…

About CHIANG CHING 江青, the Narrator：

An actress-turned-theatre-artist, CHIANG CHING is an internationally renowned choreographer and stage director who lives between Stockholm and New York. In the 1960's and 1970's, she made close to 30 films in Hong Kong and Taiwan, before switching to a dance career in New York, where, in 1973, she founded her own Chiang Ching Dance Company, the first Chinese modern dance company overseas.
Born in Beijing, raised in Shanghai, Chiang Ching enrolled at the Beijing Dance Academy at the age of ten. Six years later, while visiting her family in Hong Kong, she received an assignment to choreograph for a costumed drama, Seven Fairies (1963), for the Shaw Brothers Studio. And the film's director Li Han-hsiang decided to cast her in the lead role. But then Li had a split with the Shaw Brothers and brought his project to Taiwan to kick off his own film company. Seven Fairies became a big hit in Taiwan, and the Li Han-hsiang-Chiang Ching team followed up with a string of hit films, including Hsi Shih: The Beauty of Beauties (1965), at the time the biggest-budget Chinese language movie ever made. In 1967, Chiang won the Best Actress Award at the Taiwan Golden Horse Film Festival for her riveting performance in Many Enchanting Nights (1966).

In 1970, Chiang left the Taiwan/Hong Kong film industry at the height of her popularity to pursue a dance career in New York. Between 1982-1984, she became the founding artistic director of Hong Kong Dance Company. Since 1985, Ms Chiang has been free-lancing as a choreographer and stage director in Asia, Europe and the US. Her extensive and diverse stage credits include A Midsummer Night's Dream, Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice, Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron, Mahler's The Song of the Earth, and her own solo dance drama, Variations on a Poetess' Lament, with a text by the Nobelist Gao Xingjian, and at venues such as London's Old Vic, Vienna People's Opera, Bern's Coiffeur Opera, Berlin's International Culture Center, Sweden's Dramaten, and New York's Guggenheim Museum. She was the choreographer and artistic director for Franco Zeffirelli's production of Turandot at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1987, and subsequently directed her own production of it at Folkoperan, Sweden and the Gdansk Opera, Poland. In 2008, she brought Tea: A Mirror of Soul, the Tan Dun opera she initially staged at the Stockholm Concert Hall, to the Grand National Theatre in Beijing, during the Olympics.

Chiang has written two books -- Of Times, Events, and Ruminations Past (1991) and Snippets from the Theatre World (2010) -- and has also taught dance at UC-Berkeley, Hunter College, the Beijing Dance Academy, and the Swedish Dance Academy.

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