Steve Cheng Wai-Man

Steve Cheng Wai-Man (Chinese: 鄭偉文, simplified 郑伟文; born 1963 in Hong Kong) is a veteran Hong Kong director with a career spanning more than four decades. Within this vertical he is the co-director of The Untamed (陈情令, 2019), credited on all fifty episodes and on the twenty-episode Special Edition alongside Chan Ka-Lam.

Four decades, three broadcasters

His Chinese-language Wikipedia entry gives a much fuller account of his early career than any English source. He joined TVB in 1983 as an assistant director, working on series including Police Cadet ’85 (新紮師兄續集), The Feud of Two Brothers (流氓大亨) and Wong Tai Sin (黃大仙) through the mid-1980s. In 1989 he moved to Asia Television as a director, and in 1996 he was promoted to producer, his first drama in that role being 《等着你回來》.

In 1995 the director Benny Chan invited him to co-direct 《旺角的天空》. His breakthrough came in 1997 with the 《抄墓碑》 segment of the horror anthology 《陰陽路》, known in English as Troublesome Night. He went on to direct more than a dozen films, most of them horror and thrillers, alongside crime pictures and material made for an adult audience. That period includes Bio-Cops (2000), Sleeping with the Dead (2002, which he also wrote), Killer 2 (2003), City of SARS (2003) and Lethal Angels (2007). Most of it falls outside what this site covers.

He left ATV in 2001 to concentrate on film, returned in 2004 as a production manager, was promoted to assistant production director in 2005, and left again in 2007, after which he has worked across mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore.

Mainland costume drama

From 2005 his work is dominated by long-form Chinese television, at scales nothing else in this catalogue approaches: The Dragon Heroes (2005, 44 episodes, which he also created), Scarlet Heart (2011, 80 episodes), The Imperial Doctress (2016, 50 episodes), Legend of Heavenly Tear: Phoenix Warriors (2017, 56 episodes), Secret of the Three Kingdoms (2018, 54 episodes), The Legends (2019, 56 episodes), No Boundary (2021), Thousand Years For You (2022, 36 episodes), Wonderland of Love (2023, 40 episodes) and Divine Destiny (2023, 36 episodes). 2019 alone carried 126 episodes across three productions.

BLGLFlix editorial view. Here is a fact about The Untamed that almost never appears in coverage of it. The most successful danmei adaptation ever made was directed by two Hong Kong veterans, this man and Chan Ka-Lam, and neither is a BL director. He was carrying scripts as an assistant director at TVB in 1983, thirty-six years before The Untamed, and spent the 1990s making horror films. Our own read is that this explains something real about why the series works as television rather than only as a fandom object. The mainland costume epic was built substantially on Hong Kong craft, imported by people who had already spent two decades making things fast, on schedule and at length, and a fifty-episode xianxia is far closer in method to a 1990s Hong Kong studio production than to anything in Thai or Japanese BL. It also means that when people call The Untamed a landmark of queer television, they are describing a side effect. Two commercial directors were handed a novel adaptation and made it well. That is not a criticism; it is how most influential things actually get made.