Ku Shen Chai, an artist in his early 30s, still lives with his mother, but he is suddenly shaken by the arrival of Yang Hui-ching, a mysterious princess on the run. Yang brings Ku into her circle of protectors, including a nameless monk whose spiritual guidance transforms him into a valiant fighter.
Caught between two entirely different women, an artist finds himself in conflict between the spiritual and the sensual, and at the same time lost creatively in the cultural clash between East and West. Based on Ho Fan’s 1966 experimental short Assignment, Part One, Lost depicts the artistic and carnal obsession of the modern creative mind. A departure from mainstream Cantonese and Mandarin films with European and Japanese new wave influences, it is shot with the colours of the 1960s and Lishan, Taiwan as backdrop. Sun Po-ling, an artist in her own right, co-directed and invested in the film, acting also as producer and make-up artist. She took the film to premiere in Cannes in 1970 and then screened it in Germany and the United States, while her ambition to release it locally in the foreign films theatre circuits did not materialise. Lost for half a century, this pioneering independent feature in the 1960s resurfaced in a print found in Taiwan by Reel to Reel Institute (Hong Kong).
