Chen Jialin

Chan Ka-Lam (Chinese: 陳家霖, simplified 陈家霖; also romanised Chen Jialin; born 26 October 1974 in Hong Kong) is a Hong Kong television director working almost entirely in mainland Chinese costume drama. He directed all fifty episodes of The Untamed (陈情令, 2019), the most widely exported danmei adaptation ever made, and the twenty-episode Special Edition recut of it.

His earliest record is an on-screen appearance in the Hong Kong film To Get Away With Murder (1991). As a director he emerges in 2006 with the forty-nine episode Heroic Legend of the Chin Dynasty, followed by Sweet Summer Love (2013) and the twenty-eight episode fantasy Novoland: The Castle in the Sky (2016).

2019 is an extraordinary year on any measure. He is credited as director on five separate productions released that year: The Plough Department of Song Dynasty (36 episodes), The Untamed (50 episodes), The Legend of Yong Le Emperor (58 episodes), The Untamed: Special Edition (20 episodes) and Please Love Me (24 episodes). That is 188 episodes carrying his name in one calendar year.

He has continued at scale since: Dance of the Phoenix (2020, 30 episodes), Fall in Love with a Scientist (2021), then three series in 2023, Beauty of Resilience (36 episodes), Castle in the Time (38 episodes) and The Last Immortal (40 episodes), and Serendipity (2025, 40 episodes).

The Untamed is adapted from a danmei novel and carries, on its own record, the keywords danmei, bromance, LGBT, wuxia and xianxia. On screen the central relationship between its two leads is presented as sworn brotherhood. It became a global phenomenon regardless, and remains the entry point through which a very large share of the international audience first encountered Chinese queer-adjacent drama at all.

BLGLFlix editorial view. Two things worth holding together. The first is scale, which is easy to underestimate from outside. The Untamed runs fifty episodes. Thai BL runs twelve. Japanese BL anime runs eight. These are not variations on a format, they are different industries, and a director capable of shipping 188 episodes in a year is working under production conditions nobody else in this catalogue faces. The second is that he is not a BL director and has never claimed to be. The Untamed is one of thirteen series on his record, sitting between a Song dynasty procedural and a Ming emperor biography, all of them costume drama for the same market. Read alongside the page for MR.D on this site, the shape of Chinese-language queer output becomes clear: at one end a fifty-episode Tencent epic in which the romance is rendered as brotherhood and the director is a mainstream costume specialist, at the other end four-episode short-form BL from a person who publishes under an initialism and attaches no face to the work. Same language, six years apart, and almost nothing in common. Our own read is that anyone generalising about “Chinese BL” from either end alone will be wrong about the other.