Lou Ye (b. Shanghai, 1965) is a member of the so-called “Sixth Generation” of Chinese directors, who graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1989. They are also known as the “urban generation” because of their turn away from the Fifth Generation’s tendency to historical allegories told through tales set in the exotics borderlands of China, and their focus on contemporary everyday life. Most of Lou’s films do indeed have a contemporary or at least recent urban setting – *Blind Massage* was adapted from the novel Massage by Bi Feiyu, which won the Mao Dun Literary Prize in 2008, and takes place in Nanjing around the beginning of the twnety-first century.However, Lou’s hallmark is his fascination with the point where illicit passions overcome rationality. This tendency has been apparent since his first film, *Weekend Lovers* (周末情人), made in 1993 but banned for two years because of its focus on sexual content. In *Blind Massage*, two new arrivals disrupt the routine. Wang is an old friend of the two clinic directors, and he turns up with his fiancée, Xiao Kong. Xiao Ma is a younger man who becomes obsessed with Xiao Kong. As in many of Lou’s films, the passions that are unleashed destroy the carefully constructed and modulated world of civilized rationality. But it is unclear whether, as conventional conservative morality would require, this is seen as a disaster, or as a price worth paying for the experience of overwhelming passion.*Blind Massage* has been Lou Ye’s most well-accepted film in the mainstream world of Chinese-language cinema so far. In the past, his fascination with transgressive topics got him into trouble with the authorities. His 2002 breakthrough film, *Suzhou River* (苏州河) is about a videographer who becomes obsessed with a woman who performs as a mermaid in nightclubs. After he screened it without permission from the Chinese Film Bureau in the Rotterdam International Film Festival, where it won the Tiger Award, a two-year ban on filmmaking followed for Lou. When he did the same thing at Cannes with *Summer Palace* (颐和园, 2006) a film that touched on the taboo of the 1989 student demonstrations in Tiananmen and became China’s first film to feature full-frontal nudity, he incurred a five-year ban. In contrast, *Blind Massage* not only passed the censors in China and won two Golden Roosters in the People’s Republic, but also went on to sweep the board with six prizes at the 2014 Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan, considered the equivalent of the Oscars for Chinese-language cinema.