Career
He is an influential figure of Taiwan"s New Wave cinema movement of the 1980s. After graduating foreign languages department at Soochow University, he moved to United States of America, where he received Master of Arts in Film from Columbia College in California. While in America, he managed to create two well-received short films.
In the early 80s he came back to Taiwan.
In 1983 he was invited to direct one of the segments in an omnibus film The Sandwich Manitoba His episode is entitled The Taste of Apple (蘋果的滋味).
The two other parts were directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien and Zeng Chuang-hsiang. This movie, together with another anthology film - In Our Time (1982), is considered a landmark in the emergence of the so-called Taiwanese New Wave.
Among his other films, the most significant are Ah Fei (1984), Super Citizen Ko (1995) and Connection by Fate (1998).
Wan Jen focuses mainly on issues concerning the Taiwanese society - both historical and current ones.
