By the time she was 22, Tian Yuan had been a lesbian, a hooker and a love struck schoolgirl. On screen, that is. This quirky native of Wuhan made her name in arthouse film circles and with Asian lesbians for her role in Hong Kong movie Butterfly (2004) where she played Yip, a guitar-playing waif who seduces harried schoolteacher Flavia (Josie Ho).

"If you look at my fans most them are girls, and boy-like girls," she says, smiling. "Maybe 60 percent of my fans are gay women."

It's not surprising. Not only did Butterfly break the mould by allowing its Sapphic heroines to live happily ever after, but Tian does the cute schoolgirl "thing" to a tee; melding her girly prettiness with a moody, introspective streak. At our interview, she sports chipped black nail polish, teenage bling with a smart black top and beige skirt. She is half goth, half sweet innocent.

"My fans say they appreciate the movie because it gives them hope," she says. "Butterfly is a very potent film; other lesbian movies in China are miserable, they are bitter, they are about how people reject lesbians… many lesbians in China have no hope, and that is a very terrible thing."

Sadly, Tian herself is straight. So how did she do her research for Butterfly?

"The hardest thing about doing the movie was finding that feeling of what it is to love another woman," she says. "So I went on a lot of lesbian bulletin boards, I did a lot of Internet research on lesbian sites, and posted lots of questions. I also have some lesbian friends. Of course after the movie I got more and more."

How about the sex scenes? In Butterfly, Tian and Ho share a couple of hot sex scenes, one in a bathtub. Tian giggles when I ask her if it was hard filming those shots.

"You know, sex scenes in movies are quite different from in real life," she says. "There are a lot of people around you - the sound men, the lighting men. So it's not intimate, it's just public. It's just working. It's not real."

But this young student - she's majoring in English at Beijing Language and Culture University - is not without talent. She won Best New Artist at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2004 for Butterfly, her first film. Since then she has starred in almost a dozen movies, including Wang Chao's Luxury Car, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes last year, with Variety saying Tian "more than holds her own" as a karaoke prostitute.

And her talents don't end with acting. By the time she was 17, Tian had released an album with her Indie Rock band, Hopscotch, to some fair reviews and published her first novel, Zebra Woods, later translated into French.

"At 16 I didn't know I could do anything, and then everything changed," she says. "It went out of control."

At 16, a friend in high school asked her to join Hopscotch. "I was quite lonely, and so when someone wanted me to join the band, I felt so excited." A year or so later, in Hong Kong, budding film director Yan Yan Mak, heard the CD and decided Tian was her ideal Yip. And as for her writing, that's all down to David Lynch. The offbeat US film director inspired her dreams, she says. "I dreamt about a ground covered with zebra skins. I couldn't wake up." In two months, aged just 17, she had penned Zebra Woods, a 110,000-character novel about parallel universes.

Tian is planning her fourth film with Yan Yan Mak in the summer. We is a straight love story but Tian says she is still up for playing another lesbian.

"It would give me the chance to know more lesbians," she smiles. And so do I.

This article first appeared in LOTL International and is republished with permission. A free trial of the new publication is now available on http://lotl.fridae.com along with a reader survey for feedback. Those who complete the survey go into the draw to win one of 10 free subscriptions to LOTL International worth US$30.