Career
After graduating from the directing department of the Beijing Central Drama Academy in 1992, he went on to direct many documentaries and music videos for Music Television. He served as assistant director to Zhang Yimou and Lü Yue on their films To Live and Mr. Zhao, respectively. His first feature was A Beautiful New World (Meili Xin Shijie, 1998), a romantic comedy about a peasant who wins an apartment in Shanghai in a lottery. He considers his work an exploration of changing Chinese social conventions.
