정치적으로 어지러웠던 명나라 말기, 벼슬에 뜻이 없는 선비 고성제는 초야에 묻혀 다른 이들의 초상화를 그려 주며 살고 있다. 그는 어느 날 우연히 폐가에 살고 있는 양낭자를 만나고 아름다운 그녀를 사랑하게 된다. 양낭자는 과거 충신의 후손으로 아버지가 역적으로 몰려 죽은 뒤에 가족들을 몰살하려는 조정의 무사들을 피해 도망 다니고 있는 중이다. 고성제는 양낭자 일행과 합류한 뒤 병법에서 응용한 여러 가지 계략을 세워 이들을 돕게 된다.
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).
