27-29 October 2019 

Sihang Warehouse Battle Memorial Museum, China Securities Museum,

Shanghai, China

Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives celebrated the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage by holding themed screenings on 27th and 29th October. This year we pay special attention to a filmmaker Wan-go Weng who has been unsung in the history of film. Our researcher will introduce Mr Weng’s life story and his achievement along with his three short documentary films: A Town by the Yangtze, Chinese Shadow Play and Painting a Chinese Figure.

Wan-go Weng, formerly known as Xingqing Weng, was born in Shanghai in 1918 with his ancestral home in Changshu. He is a great-great-grandson of Weng Tonghe (1830-1904), Chinese Confucian scholar and imperial tutor during the Qing dynasty. He was admitted to Shanghai Jiaotong University at the age of 18, went to Purdue University in the United States at the age of 20, and obtained a master's degree in mechanical and electrical engineering at the age of 22. In the same year, he entered the Department of Fine Arts at University of Wisconsin to learn painting. Since then he has been engaged in painting, photography and filmmaking.

For more than half a century, Mr. Wan-ge Weng has been dedicated in the anti-Japanese war, the promotion of Chinese culture and art, and the cultural communication between Chinese and American. The narration of "The Battle of China" in the famous anti-war series "Why We Fight" was written by Mr. Weng. In 1946, he and Situ Huimin, Zheng Yongzhi and others founded a Chinese film company in the United States, specializing in filming Chinese-themed educational films and documentaries, and successively filming "The Story of Chinese Art " and "East in the West" (Chinese students studying in the United States) and dozens of works, preserving a lot of precious Chinese historical moving images for future generations.