Yi-Ling Wang

Wang Yi-ling (Chinese: 王逸鈴), also credited as Ling Wang, is a Taiwanese director, writer, editor and producer. She directed all twelve episodes of Fragrance of the First Flower (第一次遇見花香的那刻, 2021), one of the most quietly influential works of girls’ love made anywhere, and she directs, produces and heads story on The Lives We Lease (人生只租不賣, 2026, 13 episodes).

She came up through Taiwanese independent short film, and on her own work she does nearly every job herself. She directed, wrote and edited Towards the Sun (迎向邊疆公路, 2016), about a man living in his truck after losing his home to foreclosure and the Vietnamese woman who joins him. She directed, wrote and edited Midnight Tod (午夜陶德, 2017), a boys’ love short. She wrote and directed Do Not Go Gentle in Taipei (台北過手無暝無日, 2021) and wrote and directed Fish Pond (幻象人, 2022).

Alongside her own films she worked as assistant director on other people’s: No Talent No Future (2017), The Cicada (知了, 2017) and Token (代幣, 2021).

Fragrance of the First Flower is the work that changed the scale of what she does. Its premise is unusual to the point of being almost unique in the category: Yi-Ming, a married woman living alone with her son while her husband works out of town, reconnects at a wedding with Ting-Ting, a girl she was intimate with in high school. The series moves between the two timeframes. Its recorded genre keywords include girls’ love, lesbian relationship, coming of age, high school crush, time skip and mother-son relationship, which is an odd and revealing combination.

BLGLFlix editorial view. We argued on another page in this catalogue that queer stories about women, particularly in Korea, keep getting set in elite schools because the setting licenses intensity without ever having to name it, and that the cost is that these stories stay stuck at the age of seventeen. Fragrance of the First Flower is the counter-example, and it is worth understanding as one. It does not avoid the high school; it goes there and then comes back, and the material it is actually interested in is what happened in the twenty years between. A married woman with a child, a life that has already been chosen, and the person she did not choose sitting across a wedding table. That is a story you cannot tell with teenagers, and almost nobody in this field tells it. Our own read is that this is where the category’s real growth is available, and that a director who came up shooting shorts about foreclosure and dead brothers was always more likely to find it than one trained inside a studio’s romance department. Note also who directed it. Nearly every director on this site is a man; the two exceptions we have written up, her and Saratswadee Wongsomphet, both work in GL.