Asia Intermedialities Workshop:
New Objects, Themes, and Methods at the Convergence of
East and Southeast Asian Cultural and Media Studies

This essay examines the intermedial process of East-Asian star construction in the backdrop of the convergence of film and Internet. The advent of new media and participatory culture enable ordinary audiences of various cultural backgrounds to readily transpose filmic and publicity materials about famed figures from DVD to fan-site, from movie website to blog, realizing a border-crossing form of star-fan dynamics. The phenomenon is intriguing for considering the case of Takeshi Kaneshiro, a half-Taiwanese, half-Japanese film star whose fame spans across localities and geographies in Asia. Since Chungking Express (1995), Kanshiro engineers his multi-lingual, ethnically vague screen persona that epitomizes a pan-Asian mode of storytelling and market integration. His shows sexy, exotic, mysterious kind of celebrity vigor that fascinates audiences with its novelty while making him inhabit a star space of which he does not seem to belong to. As his personality expands from film to Internet, such “neither here nor there” image, in Eva Tsai’s trope, continues and becomes the focus of online discussions and interactions. How do Internet users approach, negotiate and contend with Kaneshiro’s his culturally ambivalent image? In what manners does such image overlap or counteract with his screen personality? How does the fan-based occurrence inform the interplay between East-Asian and pan-Asian stardom? To respond to the questions, this essay explores Kaneshiro’s “no-where” star presence as re-articulated and reinvented on Internet forums. It suggests his persona occupies an intermedial space in which multiple voices, identities and agendas of users intersect that further obscure the cultural and national ambiguity of the appeal, which was once a salient aspect in star construction. It also argues East-Asian stardom, a term and a phenomenon which has certain emphasis on the geo-spatial and geopolitical connotation now becomes a diverse, fluid and volatile episode in the mediated environment. Thereby, this essay not only expands the parameters of theorizing and approaching stars that oscillate between cinema and cyberspace but also illuminate the possibilities of participatory cultural production processes in the latest times.

Dorothy Wai Sim Lau teaches at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests include Asian cinema, transnational cinema, stardom, fandom, cyberculture, and digital culture. Her publications appear in journals like Journal of Asian Cinema, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, positions: asia media critique, and Continuum as well as in edited volume Lasting Screen Stars: Personas that Endure and Images that Fade (2016). Her first monograph, Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture, published under Edinburgh University Press, will be coming in 2018.

Yao-chi Chen’s documentary Liu Pi-chia (1967) has long been hailed as the first cinéma vérité, or truthful cinema, in the Taiwanese film history. Some have even gone so far to call it the very first “modernist documentary” in the Chinese-speaking world for its non-propagandist rendering of a Nationalist veteran in a settlement village designated for farmers and dam builders. The existential truth of the exiled state, as captured by the film’s nihilist overtone, is believed to challenge the aesthetics of “Healthy Realism” upheld by the Nationalists. The divide between the modernist “truth” and the propagated “reality” was further fortified after the film was banned. As for Chen himself, after being charged for joining a leftwing reading group, he opted for a career in narrative films and was considered “silenced” ever since. In this essay, I seek to revise this putative primal scene of the documentary avant-garde in Taiwan within a broader media ecology during the 1960s and 70s, a period when the Cold War geopolitics, agricultural science, and propaganda mechanism converged to redefine the visual rhetoric of “the real” across different mediums and genres. I will comparatively read Liu Pi-chia with a series of pedagogical documentary films on rice farming of “free China”— directed by Chen but funded by the National Science Foundation of the United States. I suggest that Chen, whose pursuit of social critique through documentary was considered dead in the early 1970s, still managed to invent a hybrid audio-visual rhetoric by grafting the imperative of scientific/ethnographic “truth” onto the sort of emotive gestures and critical thrust in his earlier work Liu Pi-chia. I further situate his singular aesthetics of exactitude within the matrix of postwar journalism, photography, and the changing geopolitical mapping of “China” as an ambivalent cultural-ecological zone during the Cold War era.

Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang is a PhD candidate in Chinese cinema, literature, and print culture at University of California Berkeley. His research interests cover visual and literary culture of late imperial and Republican China, cinema and media from Cold War Taiwan and Hong Kong, theories of materialism, and the intersecting industrial-technological histories of cinema, architecture, and urban infrastructure. His research has been sponsored by The Fulbright Program, Mellon Foundation, and the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. He has served as the editor of Room One Thousand, an interdisciplinary architectural journal of UC Berkeley, and the director of North American Taiwan Studies Association. He has published on Symploke: A Journal for the Intermingling of Literary, Cultural and Theoretical Scholarship, among other journals. He is currently a doctoral fellow at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, where he is completing a dissertation titled “Speculative Statecraft: Logistical Media and the Culture of Chinese Cold War, 1940s-1970s.” In this dissertation, he deals with propaganda cinema, media, and literature from Taiwan and Hong Kong in relation to the design and discourse of military logistics in the context of Cold War.

Four Malay Stories was commissioned in 2006 by Esplanade (Singapore) Visual Art Team under the exhibition titled Labilabu, and it was created in collaboration with curator/artist Khairuddin Hori. Both Ming and Khairuddin had treated the cinematographic films directed by the iconic mid-20th century Singapore/Malaya actor, director and songwriter, P. Ramlee as archival materials which than ‘re-interpret’ and ‘re-evaluate’ by both artists in exploring the multiplicity of relational activities by the different racial and ethnic groups in the Malay archipelago before independence and the forming of the nation-states. My arguments within this paper are twofold. First, I would like to argue against the westernization of Ming Wong’s art practices, which most scholars have argued that it has been developed from western artistic practices and aesthetic. I will argue that Ming Wong has developed his perception of artistic practices within the paradigm of a situated and localized context of Singapore as a vernacular cosmopolitan and creolized island which than transformed into a regime of a Multicultural nation-state by the People Action Party led by a team of Creole Chinese elites such as Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Keng Swee. Secondly, Four Malay Stories reflects the multiple nationalism and its diverse consciousness form by the leftist Chinese as the left-wing Cosmopolitanism, the nationalist Malays that form the Muslim cosmopolitanism and the multicultural and elites cosmopolitanism, which formed by the People Action Party. These multiple nationalist ideologies and consciousness have created static identities that erased the Creole identities that had developed within the Island of Singapore for centuries. Ming Wong and his re-interpretation, re-evaluation and re-enactment of P. Ramlee’s film characters will tells us the multiple power relations that had been intersecting with each other and it is Ming intention to draw all these together in his performance of multiplicity.

Liang Ming Wong graduated from the Master of Cultural Management programme from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2011, and played an active role in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong art scenes for several years prior to his PhD studies. From 2007 – 2010, he was working as Management Assistant Officer at NUS Museum, a museum focus on regional art and culture at the National University of Singapore. At present, he is a PhD candidate at the Department of Cultural and Religious studies, CUHK working on his dissertation on Cosmopolitan Subject in Artistic Practices: The Cases of Southeast Asian Artists from the Malay Archipelago. His Ph.D. research focuses on tracing the worlds of a small, but significant group of Southeast Asian artists who have lived and continue to create works mainly outside of their place of birth origin. Specifically, his research engages with the relation between the diversity of the artists’ creative practices and deals with unique frames of reference towards concepts of: memory, belonging and displacement thereby pertinent to the current discourse on cosmopolitanism and post-colonial debates on transnational artists who are from Southeast Asia.

The focus of attention in the flourishing of Philippine independent movement since 2005 has centered mainly on the narrative feature film. What has been obfuscated is the related flourishing of Philippine documentary, experimental, and short feature films. This essay explores the time and place of documentary films in the Philippine independent cinema movement, exploring ways and means on how the documentary films produced and exhibited relationally engage—in dialog with or critical of—the representations of the cultures of neoliberalism in the Philippines and elsewhere in Southeast and East Asia. These developments in the documentary in the Philippines include the following: the rise of political film documentary collectives, the sustained production of full-length documentary filmmakers, and the prominence of women, regional and diasporic filmmakers.

The subjects of inquiry of Philippine documentary involve subaltern figures and events, oftentimes personal, that in turn offer a map of neoliberalism in the country, and its affects. Film studies and historiography are mobilized to situate the interrogation of the intensification of neoliberalism in the Philippines. The Philippine case can be used in the global mapping of and resistance to neoliberalism.

The essay is both historical in terms of mapping the rise of newer documentary films and filmmakers from 2005 to the present, and the social in the exploration of an alternative film language to represent historical and every day Philippine neoliberal realities. My contention is that the rise of documentary filmmaking in the Philippines and elsewhere involve a narrative of inquiry about the reterritorialization of the national subject in neoliberal time time and space. The documentary time and place allow for overt and latent contestations of neoliberalism.

Rolando B. Tolentino is faculty of University of the Philippines Film Institute and former dean of the UP College of Mass Communication. He is Director of the UP Institute of Creative Writing where he also serves as fellow. He has taught at the Osaka University, National University of Singapore, and University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include Philippine literature, popular culture, cinema and media, interfacing national and transnational issues. He writes and has published books on fiction and creative non-fiction. He is a member of the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino (Filipino Film Critics Group), Altermidya (People’s Alternative Media Network), and Congress of Teachers and Educators for Nationalism and Democracy (CONTEND-UP).

Established in 1987, the Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF, now SGIFF) has been providing filmmakers and cinephiles in Asia with a space to share and experience cinema in the region. SIFF was the first to champion SEA films in the region through programming retrospectives of key filmmakers such as Usmar Ismail (Indonesia) and Ishmael Bernal (The Philippines), while creating a space for SEA filmmakers to showcase emergent works to new audiences.
SIFF also focused on Asian Cinema—its programming slate consistently featured films from East Asia. In 1991, SIFF shifted from a non-competitive film festival to one that had a competitive section that included Asian Feature Films, formalizing its commitment to Asian Cinema. Scholars have addressed SIFF’s niche in SEA film and its role in the international film festival circuit as an early champion of Asian cinema. Discourse regarding SIFF’s SEA perspective vis-à-vis film programming and Asian cinema have also been observed within the film studies community.
This emphasis on Asian cinema was not independent to SIFF. Regional politics in East Asia vis-à-vis festival networks have been discussed in relation to HKIFF as a key site of encounter for Asian and East Asian cinema and its significance as a means to negotiate politics within the Sinosphere. In spite of the political intricacies of the region, there have been no known studies on film festivals and their significance as sites of encounter for transnational media flows between SEA and East Asia, and the film festival space as a means to negotiate regional cultural politics.
Surveying the first decade of the Festival, this paper suggests that SIFF provided the foundational infrastructure for film festivals in Asia to function as a crossroads for inter-Asia cultural exchange between SEA and East Asia. Noting Singapore’s unique economic and political position in ASEAN and East Asia, this paper also proposes that SIFF functioned not just as a space for the presentation of SEA and East Asian films, but as a physical site of negotiation for East Asian and SEA cultural politics through film.

Chrystal Ng is a film and humanities educator in Singapore. She holds a B.Comms and M.Comms from WKWSCI, NTU, specialising in Film Festivals. Her dissertation, Sensorium R(A): The Singapore International Film Festival (1987 – 2000) focused on the impact of Singapore’s cultural policy on the programming history of SIFF. Currently, she is an Adjunct Lecturer for the Puttnam School of Film and Animation at the LASALLE College of the Arts and Nanyang Technological University. She was also the Project Co-ordinator for SGIFF’s Youth Jury and Critics Programme from 2014 to 2017.

Through digital content shared on social media networks in sustaining and continuing currency of the otherwise dated Taiwanese television drama, Meteor Garden (2001) this paper explores durability of Asia’s transnational fandom. Originally adopted from a Japanese manga, the drama series popularized the Japanese concept of “bishonen” or “beautiful boys”, and within a decade saw numerous remakes regionally in East Asia. Beyond the broadcasting stations, what has given this production its currency is the advent of the social media that created the transnational online platforms of virtual fan communities. Collectively, between 2015 and 2017, the authors counted about 72 Twitter 914 Facebook accounts and pages and 482 youtube videos devoted to the television drama and its artistes. Online activities on these sites included a plethora of fan-made literature of photoshopped illustrations, fan fictions and other forms of memorabilia in addition to more reflective recollections. From these user-generated content, one also witness the emergence of an inter-generational transnational fan community from China to Southeast Asia as collective cultural memories are being generated around Meteor Garden. Through the study of the prosumer patterns of these fan communities and the related social media and digital platforms in which they operate, this paper posits the need to examine the more vernacular and organic patterns of distribution in the arena of popular entertainment; one that is capable of de-centering from the industry to form autonomous cultural communities in what will be described in this paper as Cultural Ever-greening.

Liew Kai Khun is an Assistant Professor with the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at the Nanyang Technological Universit. His research covers that of transnational popular cultural flows between East and Southeast Asia Studies. His recent works included the monograph Transnational Memories and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia (2016)

Pei Hua Paige Tan completed her Masters in Mass Communication with the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at the Nanyang Technological University. This topic is based partially on her thesis on the transnational cultural memories of Meteor Garden.

This paper discusses two theatrical performances by Tsai Ming-liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul in terms of the intermedial correlations of cinema and performance, and of the intersections between the aesthetic devices of the Western experimental film and video and the non-Western, Asian cultural traditions. The two filmmakers commonly extend their exploration of the cinematic experience in a live-action or multimedia event, in which the boundaries between cinema and its neighboring art forms are broken down and redrawn. Tsai’s The Monk from Tang Dynasty (2014) brings the aesthetic of slowness, which he repeatedly explored in his Walker series since 2012, to Lee Kang-sheng’s choreography of barely noticeable changes in his movement and gesture that unfold in real time on the stage that evokes both the screen and the canvas. Likewise, Weerasethakul’s Fever Room (2015) investigates the multilayered entanglement of fantasy and reality as manifested in his feature films in the form of projection performance where the boundaries between the screen-based fictional narrative and the phantasmagoric world of the projected light on the stage are collapsed. While demonstrating that both performances creatively translate the traditions of the expanded cinema in the 1960s and 70s (in Tsai’s work, video performances that explore the aesthetics of duration and bodily presence in real time; and in Weerasethakul’s piece, Anthony McCall’s ‘solid light films’ that establish the cinematic projected light as a three-dimensional object), I argue that their attempts at blending cinema with performance aim to negotiate those traditions with the Asian concepts of time and reality: the Buddhist concept of transcendental time is mixed with the contemporary interest in slowness in Tsai’s work; and the Western allusion of the cinematic apparatus to the cave meets with Weerasethakul’s obsession with living with ghosts as part of Thailand’s cultural history.

Jihoon Kim is associate professor of cinema and media studies at Chung-ang University, South Korea. He is the author of Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-media Age (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). His essays on film theory, experimental film and video, art of the moving image, cinema and contemporary art, digital cinema, and experimental documentary have appeared in Screen, Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Millennium Film Journal, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and the anthologies Global Art Cinema: New Histories and Theories (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), among others. Currently He is working on two book projects, each entitled Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media, New Platforms, and the Documentary and Post-vérité Turns: Korean Independent Documentary in the 21st Century respectively.

This presentation treats the documentaries Sunday Beauty Queen (2017) and The Helper (2017) to explore how domestic workers in Hong Kong are represented as forcibly queered, forced by circumstance to operate on the queer time of singledom and non-normative gender roles (including asexuality), rather than the “natural” straight time of maternal roles and unpaid domestic labor for their own family. Popular media, including documentaries, see this queering as a violent act, one at the heart of the domestic worker’s exploitation, and thus attempt to “rescue” this queered figure by reinforcing her heteronormativity – not as Filipina/Indonesian, not as workers, but as mothers above all else. The displays of hyperfemininity at beauty pageants contrasts the asexual matron caretaker living in Hong Kong homes, and seeing the authentic “voice” of domestic workers as merely that of maternal sacrifice contrasts suspicions of domestic workers as sexually deviant, as well as the casual appearance of “butch” tomboy domestic workers as gendered non-normative (who appear instead as transmen).
This presentation reads the figure of the Southeast Asian domestic worker through a queer theoretical current to consider how sexual and gendered norms limit forms of emancipation to granting workers “straight time.” Migrant domestic workers are not merely queered sexually, but queered also as brown women inhabiting roles of affective labor, whose libidinal energies, as Neferti Tadiar puts it, are incorporated into the flow of global capital. Thus the “libido” of the domestic worker is “naturally” meant to focus entirely upon child rearing, a practice that becomes queered when it denies the natural role of unpaid motherhood for one’s “true” family. Recent queer theory from Jose Munoz, Hiram Perez, Eng-Beng Lim, Tan Hoang Hguyen, and others, allow me to trace the migrant domestic worker through imperial discourses considering brownness and binary sexualities (white male/brown boy, top/bottom, East Asian/Southeast Asian).

Christopher B. Patterson (Ph.D., U of Washington) teaches and researches cultural studies, literature, video games, digital humanities, and creative writing, within and across the transpacific. Before arriving at HKBU, he worked as an Assistant Professor in Nanjing, China, and as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His articles have appeared in American Quarterly, Games and Culture, M.E.L.U.S. (Multi-ethnic Literatures of the United States) and the anthologies Global Asian American Popular Cultures (NYU Press) and Queer Sex Work (Routledge). He writes book reviews for Asiatic and M.E.L.U.S., and is on the editorial board for Games and Culture. He hosts the podcast New Books in Asian American Studies, and spent two years as a program director for the Seattle Asian American Film Festival. His fiction, published under his alter ego Kawika Guillermo, has appeared in Feminist Studies, The Hawai’i Pacific Review, Drunken Boat and Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism & Beyond. He writes monthly articles for Drunken Boat and decomP Magazine, where he serves as the Prose Editor.

Putting into productive dialogue theories of intermediality (Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation, Evans’s Transmedia Television, Jenkins’s Convergence Culture) and inter-Asian critical regionalism (Chen’s Asia as Method, Duara’s Asia Redux, Spivak’s Other Asias), this presentation assesses how a post-Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) era of intensified but highly uneven economic, political, and cultural “regionalization” in Asia is reflected not just in the region’s film production and circulation, but also in its cinematic content: namely plot, casting, setting, dialogue, soundtrack, and cinematography. I assess three wildly popular domestic commercial films made in the 2010s from Taiwan, Thailand, and mainland China that thematize exchanges of popular culture and flows of tourism between East and Southeast Asia, illuminating how they are simultaneously the product of and inspiration for transmedia convergences and remediated experiences between travelogue fiction, manga, cinema, television serial drama, sports spectatorship, and tourist-oriented branding. Crossing national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries in various forms (by virtue of their setting in an Asian country outside the director’s home country or their translated dialogue in an Asian language that is not the native tongue of the director or screenwriter), these inter-Asian films self-reflexively critique, yet also reaffirm, hierarchical networks of inter-Asian soft power derived from the historically and culturally specific concerns of the producers and filmmakers. Through attention to the affective audiovisuality of inter-Asian cinema’s intermedial simulacra, I push back against a visually-biased “Asian cinema” paradigm that unwittingly reinforces an East-West bilateralism, arguing instead that the regionalized content of the films more precisely reflects modes of reimagining national cultures from divergent and uneven experiences of pop culture and tourism.

Brian Bernards is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is author of Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature (U of Washington Press, 2015 / National U of Singapore Press, 2016) and coeditor (with Shu-mei Shih and Chien-hsin Tsai) of Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (Columbia U Press, 2013). His articles have also appeared in several journals, including Asian Cinema, Postcolonial Studies, and Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.

Departing from Thomas Lamarre’s account of platformativity as “the infra-individual intra-actions between platform and human, and individual and collective, a kind of performativity via platforms, “this paper seeks to inquire into the overwriting of the kongsi as a media infrastructure. In the 1770s, Dutch colonists in West Borneo encountered Hakka gold miners who had organized for generations in what have come to be referred to as “the kongsi republics.” A series of translinguistic and transhistorical mediations has inscribed these hybrid polities structured on electoral representation with profit-sharing and diplomatic functions. Today, the same term is re-romanized as gongsi (公司), referring banally to the modern private enterprise: the “company.” By retracing the archipelagic routes of the kongsi across three centuries and three languages, this paper details the stakes and contingencies of the naturalization of a hybrid polity as a purely economic organization. In the process, I propose a relay switch for these two forms of enterprise (kongsi as Hakka polity and gongsi as Mandarin enterprise) in the form of the Dutch “compagnie” (or gongbanya). We depart from sinologist and religious historian JJM de Groot’s account of the kongsi’s in his historical record Het Kongsiwezen van Borneo (1885), and trace the term’s surprising inversion as a descriptor of Sinified Dutch oppression in seminal Sundanese playwright Utuy Tatang Sontani’s resistance epic Tambera (1949). We conclude with popular fan-fiction author Lao Mao’s online magnum opus Fengqi Lanfang (Winds over Lanfang) (2010) to note how the kongsi structures inter-Asian imaginaries of mediated sovereignty and claims digital oceans.

David Xu Borgonjon is a writer and curator interested in economic practices as cultural objects. He has written for The New York Times, Rhizome, and the Journal for Chinese Contemporary Art, among others. He curated “Really, Socialism?!” (Momenta Art, 2015), “The Visible Hand” (CUE Art Foundation, 2017), and “In Search of Miss Ruthless” (Para Site, 2017) with Hera Chan. He co-founded Admin, a platform for arts administrators working on new cultural institutions (www.admin.network), and SCREEN (www.onscreentoday.com), a bilingual platform for media art criticism. He is a Critic at Rhode Island School of Design, where he teaches curating. In his Ph.D. at Columbia University, he is writing a media history of Chinese capital in Southeast Asia. www.davidborgonjon.com

Midi Z is an ethnically Chinese, Burmese-born filmmaker, who is now a Taiwanese national. His “Homecoming Trilogy” is a trio of low budget digital features, shot unofficially in Northern Myanmar in the wake of the country’s transition away from military rule. Stylistically and thematically, the trilogy demonstrates the influence of Zhao’s mentor, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, with whom the filmmaker studied in Taipei. This manifests in the use of the long take “slow cinema” style for which Hou is famous, as well as an interest in problems of modernization and urbanization. But the trilogy is also distinct from the Taiwan New Cinema model represented by Hou in key ways. Zhao intersperses Hou’s long takes and still camerawork with handheld shots, tracking shots, and close-ups that are recognised tropes of low budget digital cinema globally. In addition, Zhao’s films focus on stories of drug and people smuggling between Myanmar, Thailand, Taiwan, and the PRC—narratives distinctly lacking from Hou’s cinema.
This paper argues that Zhao’s departures from the Taiwan New Cinema aesthetic reflect how digital filmmaking has blurred the boundaries between “national” cinema practices in East and Southeast Asia. The trilogy is the product of minor transnational networks connecting Taiwan and Southeast Asia that are both made possible in part by the emergence of low cost, high quality digital cameras, and are inherently unstable. The films in turn reflect upon these conditions of production. Zhao’s narratives of smuggling imagine a “grey economy” network of people and commodities that connect Myanmar, Thailand, Taiwan, and the PRC, while exploring the obstacles encountered by human labour and commodities as they enter the peripheral networks that connect these countries. Cinematographically, Zhao borrows and departs from the Taiwan New Cinema aesthetic as a way of exploring, formally, the unstable, blocked networks mapped by the trilogy’s narratives—but which also constitute the film’s condition of production. Ultimately, this pushes us to deterritorialize the “slow cinema” aesthetic so closely associated with the Taiwanese New and post-New Wave cinema, and reconfigure it not as “national cinema,” but as a local response to global conditions that Zhao is reworking with the help of digital technology.

Luke Robinson is Lecturer in Film Studies in the Department of Media and Film, University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and the co-editor of Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). His book chapters and articles on Chinese-language feature film, animation, documentary, and film festivals can be found in DV-made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film, The New Chinese Documentary Movement: For the Public Record, The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics, positions: asia cultures critique, Film Studies, Journal of Children and Media, and Journal of Chinese Cinemas.

In 2007, Namewee, a Malaysia-born singer and filmmaker mostly based in Taiwan, rose to popularity after publishing on YouTube a parody of the Malaysian national anthem, which led to the Malaysian government to prosecute him for his criticism of corruption in the country. Since then, despite more arrest warrants from the government and even death threats from religious groups in Malaysia, Namewee still uses YouTube to showcase his music videos, which are mostly satirical of political, cultural and religious issues in Malaysia and beyond. In July 2017, he released another controversial song called Geebai People – superficially it is an ordinary Mandopop love song depicting melancholic unrequited love; yet it is also a song filled with latent vulgarity, which is rare in Mandopop. In the music video, in every line of the lyrics (which are subtitled in Chinese characters), certain words are highlighted in bold red. Literally, these highlighted words are gibberish, like “chao (noisy), hai (also)” (吵/還) which are actually drawn from back-to-back sentences; yet, Hokkien and Cantonese speakers will intuit subliminal meaning from these phrases: when sung in the tone of the song, these are swear words in Cantonese or Hokkien, like the aforementioned “chao hai,” when understood as Cantonese rather than Mandarin, becomes a Cantonese profanity, “cau hai (stinky cunt)” (臭屄). The vulgarity in the song is, interestingly, ambivalent in a sense that it is embedded with covert multilingualism – it is vulgar but not quite, since the words only sound similar to but are not literally vulgar expressions. This suggests that criticism against its vulgarity could just be blamed on the paranoia of the listener, since it relies on his or her interpretive gesture. In this study, I’ll explore the significance of Namewee’s expression of latent vulgarity through a few questions: Is there a critical significance to these gestures in Namewee’s songs and music videos beyond mere vulgarity itself? What is vulgarity after all? How does it relate to issues like conflicts in multilingualism and freedom of aesthetic and creative expression in Malaysia and the transnational Sinophone space? To address these questions, I first illustrate the trajectory of Namewee’s rise to fame in relation his non-conformist works; then I turn to discuss his use of vulgarity and explore what actually makes his works vulgar. By doing so, I contend that Geebai People demonstrates Namewee’s strategy to find alternative outlets for the censored voice – not only do the platform of YouTube and the transnational site of Taiwan represent his spaces of cultural exits to circulate his contentious works as a Malaysian Chinese artist, his latent insertion of vulgarity in Geebai People represents an alternative mode for challenging different forms of cultural dominance, like Malay-centrism and Mandarin-centrism in Malaysia as well as in the transnational Sinophone space.

Ka Lee Wong is a third year PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in University of Southern California. Her research focus is transnational Chinese languages and cultures, especially issues concerning cultural productions in Chinese dialects like Cantonese and Hokkien.

Although the Chinese terms for “cinema” in its first two decades varied historically and differed by regions and practices, existing historiographies have privileged shadow play (yingxi) as the indigenous conception of cinema by associating it with the theatrical tradition of popular entertainment and selective scenes in film exhibition. This is recently challenged by new scholarship that finds evidence to highlight the photographic association with cinema in the early reception of cinema in China, hence moving away from an ethnic and cultural exoticist notion to a more globally shared understanding of cinematic ontology that anchors its specificity to the photographic medium and the scene of projection.
Yet, between the shadow play ontology that seeks the “theatrical” roots of cinema in China and the photoplay ontology that traces a “pictorial” conception of cinema to embrace the foreignness and technological specificity of cinema, my essay suggests a third approach by pointing out the shadowy status of “picture” and “play” behind these ontologies. In other words, I question the very assumptions of medium that sustain such polar positions in the first place. The dichotomy between theater and photography, indigenous tradition and foreign technology, I argue, revolves around the assumptions of medium as singular and fixed and anchors the specificity of a medium on its material technology. Instead, my essay shifts the inquiry of the medium from fixed materiality to interconnected cultural practices that questions the static notion of a medium and place. This approach seeks to open up the space for a more nuanced understanding of the scene of cinema’s introduction in China by exploring medium and place as systems of environment involving various cultural forces at play.
This inquiry is enabled by a critical rethinking of place that urges me to trace an alternative route and dynamic of transnational traffic beyond the usual attention to the unidirectional traffic between the West/Hollywood and China. I investigate how both the status of “picture” and “play” had transformed profoundly and became increasingly entwined at the historical moments immediately before and after the introduction of cinema to China. I will look at how a particular kind of painting served as the backdrop for photography studio and stage, making photography a mini stage of performance and the play performed pictures. These paintings also travelled regionally and transnationally across China, East and Southeast Asia, and America, making them “motion” pictures before and after cinema. These interconnections between and transformations of photography, painting, and performance invite us to revisit the “theatrical” or “pictorial” ontologies of cinema. They also shaped the very ways by which cinema was conceived and experienced in those early days in and outside China. By looking at the cultural scene around and beyond cinema, I consider how these discursive and cultural practices embedded cinema in a complex system of media that induced their mutual transformations. They also collaborated in creating a new spatial imaginary, or media environment, in and out of China, for both cultural consumptions and political mobilization.

Weihong Bao is associate professor of film and media at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), which received honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize for 2016. She has published widely on silent cinema, transnational film and media theory, historical and contemporary documentary in China, and theory and practice of propaganda in journals such as Camera Obscura, New German Critique, Representations, and The Journal of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. She co-edits The Journal of Chinese Cinemas as well as the book series “Film Theory in Media History” for Amsterdam University Press. Current research topics include the geopolitics of film theory, the historical relationship between film and theater, and cultural constructions of secrecy as media theory and history.

This study reopens the Chinese question in Indonesia that has been dominantly framed by the colonial, ethno-nationalist, and de-Sinicizing assimilationist discourses and practices. The Chinese in all these configurations are stereotyped as a self-interested capitalist subject who facilitates the state and capital only for own benefits. This paper explores the Dutch East Indies / Indonesian cinematic dispositif from the 1940s to 1960s to investigate other possibilities to think about the Chinese question that releases the Chinese from such racist and stereotypical fabulation even temporarily. It examines three different forces of politicization during the 1940s to 1960s, namely, the Japanese mass-mediatic propaganda, the two China polemics, and third world anti-imperialism (or what I call Bandung internationalism). The argument of this paper is two-fold. First, even as the Japanese politicization is anti-Sinitic and Fascist in orientation, its technical education has a far-reaching effect in radicalizing all kinds of political forces in Indonesia regardless of any identity markers (i.e. the Chinese or pribumi). Second, the intensification of that Japanese radicalization for the Chinese is animated by the two Chinas polemic and Bandung internationalism, two forces that are not necessarily discontinuous. The two Chinas polemic coerces the Chinese to be political in terms of their identification, taking place most fervently in the two Chinese newspapers camps along with their cultural productions. Bandung internationalism, though short-lived in Indonesia because of the mass murder of the left, enables the collaboration among the anticolonial nations in Asia and Africa, of which China is a part, and compels Bachtiar Siagian, a rigorous thinker in the field of theater/cinema, to remediate China in his vestigial writings as a site where new perspectives on life and personalities can emerge. This argument, the paper speculates, might have a transformational impact on the Chinese stereotype in Indonesia if Bachtiar and his comrades’ endeavors were not cut short by the state repression.

Thiti Jamkajornkeiat is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California-Berkeley in South and Southeast Asian Studies with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory. His current dissertation project is an intellectual history of Marxist thought in Indonesia from 1940s-1960s, investigating the forms and modes of critique emerging from a range of thinkers in this period with a particular focus on the questions of third worldism, internationalism, peripherality, and a critique of dogmatism. His general interests include third worldism, Bandung internationalism, postcoloniality, inter-Asian comparison, and global critical theory. His recent publication on Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia appears in Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia. (tj.zedrick@gmail.com)

The lost history of the first, tragically short-lived National Film Archive of the Philippines (NFAP, 1981-1986) is entangled in the fate of several other cultural and political initiatives undertaken by the Marcos dictatorship, some of which survive and many others which did not. What was the place of the film archive in the cultural policies of the Marcos regime? How was the archive articulated with the aspirations, excesses, and abuses of the dictatorship? The paper retraces the impact of the regime’s densely reticulated web of film on the NFAP, setting the Film Archive alongside two other cultural institutions and edifices with which its fate was entangled: the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Manila Film Center. Exploring the ironic legacy of the Marcos dictatorship’s film policies and institutions, this paper focuses on two enduring problems bequeathed by the Marcos era film archive to the present day: first, the issue of presidential appointments; and second, the issue of anarchival temporality, which forms the flip side of the dictatorship’s frenetic pursuit of perpetuity.

Bliss Cua Lim is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal Critique (Duke University Press, 2009; Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2011). She is a member of the Editorial Collective of the journal Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, published by Duke University Press and serves on the Advisory Board of Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media and Society published by the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. Her second book manuscript, currently in progress, is on the challenges of archival film preservation facing Philippine cinema.

Song Hwee Lim is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (2006) and Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness (2014). He is also founding editor of Journal of Chinese Cinemas.

This paper studies the Japanese television drama Boku tachi no Sensō “Our War” (2006) and the animated drama Kimi no Na wa “Your Name” (2016) to study the coevalness of two protagonists who switch bodies so that each becomes the other. In “Our War,” a lazy millennial Kenta who works part-time while living with his parents changes bodies with Goichi, a student at an Imperial navy training course preparing for a suicide attack during World War II. Similarly in “Your Name,” a female protagonist Mitsuha who lives in a slow-paced rural Hida region of Japan changes bodies with a boy named Taki who lives in the fast-paced city of Tokyo.
I study the body-switching bamen, a Japanese term that may be translated as a “scene” or a “situation” in these two films. The men (面) in bamen refers to a mask, which is often used in Asian theater where it “calls attention to the often ambiguous play between self and other involved in its alchemical procedures” (Emigh 1996: xviii). By studying how the bamen reveals the dreamlike and other-worldly dimension of intermediality or “the mental space that may be best described as in-between realities” (Chapple and Kattenbelt 2006: 11), I ask how body-switching problematizes the conventional roles ascribed to family members and how the bamen in these films reify self-reflexive moments that also show a family-in-transition in contemporary Japan.

Yuka Hasegawa received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Her dissertation studied the civic co-production of Creative City programs and events in Yokohama city, Japan, through which she became part of the city’s globalization as an American educated Japanese citizen. Her research interest covers globalization of Japanese cities, East Asian regionalization, Japanese policy of cultural affairs, representations of WWII in Japanese popular visual media, pedagogical practices in multicultural classrooms, civil society, and the self. She is currently a part-time lecturer at the International Christian University and the University of Maryland University College Asia.