Yonfan or Yang Fan (Manshih Yonfan; born 1947 in Wuhan, China) is a Taiwanese film director and photographer.

Biography

He was born in Wuhan, Hubei, Republic of China. As the Yang family emigrated from mainland China, Yonfan spent his childhood first in Hong Kong and then in Taiwan. He returned to Hong Kong as a young man to work as a photographer, but left for the United States in 1968 to study film. After a couple of years travelling through the United States, France and Britain, he returned to Hong Kong in 1973, and became a famous photographer noted for his celebrity portraits.

In 1984, he made his box office debut as a director with A Certain Romance. Two years later, Yonfan adapted the much-loved romantic novel The Story of Rose by Yi Shu. Starring an up-and-coming Maggie Cheung, the passionate Lost Romance was a huge commercial success starring a young Chow Yun-fat.

After In Between (1993), Yonfan started to steer away from the mainstream market and began to introduced characters from the marginalised section of the society. With 1998 came another milestone, Bishonen, best known for its romantic cinematography and explicit portrayal of homosexual onscreen passion. Inspired by a real-life scandal in which a Hong Kong playboy was found to possess more than a thousand nude photographs of local police officers, this melodramatic tale of redemption polarized film critics in Hong Kong, but was very well received at film festivals around the globe. It also launched the acting career of heartthrob Daniel Wu.