Aging & Wisdom Quote by Zhang Yimou

A director doesn’t write a line like this to sound wise; he writes it to sound alarmed. Zhang Yimou’s “Time has changed and now is the age of spending” lands like a blunt cut from one era of China to another: from scarcity and collective discipline to malls, luxury brands, and the soft power of desire. It’s not just an observation about consumer habits. It’s a diagnosis of what now organizes daily life and moral imagination.

The phrasing matters. “Time has changed” is passive, almost fatalistic, as if history itself has flipped the set dressing while ordinary people try to keep acting. Then “the age of spending” arrives as a new regime, with its own rules and its own language. Spending isn’t framed as pleasure or freedom; it’s framed as an epoch. That’s the subtext: consumerism isn’t a lifestyle choice, it’s a structure you live inside, shaping status, identity, even what counts as success.

Zhang’s filmography has long tracked China’s transformations through bodies, color, spectacle, and constraint. Coming of age during the Cultural Revolution and later becoming a defining visual architect of post-reform China (including the 2008 Beijing Olympics), he’s unusually positioned: both chronicler and participant in the national story. The line reads as self-aware commentary from someone who has watched art, politics, and commerce braid together. In an “age of spending,” even beauty risks becoming a commodity, and even culture can start to feel like a product launch.