Yulin Kuang has signed on to pen “Jade Palace” for New Line, Deadline confirms. The comedy tells the story of an Asian American woman who returns to New Jersey to help her father manage the family restaurant “she has spent her life running away from.”
A participant of the Sony Pictures Television Diverse Directors Program, Kuang has written and directed a number of shorts including “Belinda” and “If Women Ruled the World.” She recently created and served as showrunner on CW Seed’s “I Ship It,” a comedy about roommates who form a band. The pair make music inspired by fan culture. Her YouTube channel, Yulin is Working, has received over 2.4 million views.
“You pretty much see my filmmaking background when you look at YouTube,” Kuang has said. “I didn’t go to film school. I went to Carnegie Mellon, which is a great school for theater and for computer science. I figured out while I was there that I wanted to be making movies, because I was writing all these screenplays and handing them off to other people to direct, and they kept fucking them up.”
The multi-hyphenate explained, “I write aspirationally. All of my characters are versions of my former selves that are way better than I ever was. So, with [my YouTube series] ‘Tiny Feminists,’ I just wanted to play in that world a little bit and write about these young women who are challenging the patriarchy and challenging the world,” she said “Maybe they don’t know better, because they haven’t seen the ways the world may be pitted against them. They’re going to try harder and they’re going to work faster and they’re going to actually change the world, I hope.”
