Also showing: Li Han-hsiang

In one scene from Li Han-hsiang's lavish costume drama Golden Lotus - an adaptation of the classic novel The Plum in the Golden Vase - the adulterous Pan Jinlian (played by Hu Chin) is staked out naked by her husband in their garden. The equally promiscuous Ximen Qing (Peter Yang Chun) has a bowl of plums in his hands - but he's not planning on eating them. He orders a timid maid to watch their kinky sex session.

Li ensures that most of this is heard, rather than seen, by placing props such as tree trunks to partially block the view. Even so, considering that Golden Lotus (right) was made in 1974 - a time when showing too much female flesh on the screen was frowned on - it's risque, ground-breaking stuff.

And yet, of the genres that the versatile Li was proficient at - such as huang mei diao musicals and palace epics - erotica (or fengyue films) was probably the least recognised by critics. You won't, for instance, find them mentioned in The New York Times movie database alongside Li's classics such as The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959), The Magnificent Concubine (1962), The Love Eterne (1963), Empress Dowager (1975) and The Burning of the Imperial Palace (1983).

In an article about Li's fengyue films in Li Han-hsiang, Storyteller (published as part of an exhibition of the same title at the Hong Kong Film Archive), filmmaker and gender studies lecturer Yau Ching writes that his erotica had often been brushed off as not worth discussing. According to Yau, critics at the time attributed Li's 'bad taste' soft-porn films to coercion from his patron, Shaw Brothers Studios owner Run Run Shaw. Or because he came under box-office pressure. Or because he simply sold out.

Assessments of his erotica are more generous nowadays, with Yau describing Li as 'the trail- blazer of fengyue films'. The films are, 'arguably, one of the most important contributions he made to Hong Kong cinema history'.

Winnie Fu Wai-yee, the Hong Kong Film Archive programmer who curated the Li Han-hsiang, Storyteller exhibition, agrees. Li's erotica was 'very bold' for the time, she says, but highly artistic. 'He loved his female characters and would spend a huge amount of time studying them,' Fu says. 'He maintained his artistic integrity and treated his actresses with respect. Body doubles were used for the nude scenes.'