Jocelyn Yi-Hsuan Lai
No one would deny that Korean popular culture has taken a central place in twenty-first- century Asian show business. Within the last two decades, the Korean media industry has successfully created many pan-Asian sensations, and been assiduously exporting its cultural products, including TV programs, film, music, talents and many other consumption goods. Furthermore, Korean stars have become the most desirable assets in contemporary East Asian media cultural businesses.
Many Korean stars are crossing borders to perform in other East Asian media, including advertisements, TV dramas, and films. Of course, not all of these commercial productions with transnational casts succeed. The public seems to understand that the media business mainly uses transnational casting for financial gain—capitalizing on the popularity of Korean media culture—rather than for any particular cultural or artistic expression. For instance, Chinese critics have described the influx of Korean performers in the quickly growing Chinese media as “the gold rush of Korean stars in China” (Tsai 2013). However, films and TV programs with Korean casts are usually less commercially and artistically successful than local productions in terms of TV and box office ratings. They seldom gain overwhelming success. The “transnational productions,” what Ying Zhu (2008, 94) calls the Chinese clones of Korean TV dramas, seem only to consume the surplus value of the popularity of Korean popular culture.
Japanese media are recognized for their rigorous criteria and demands for high production quality so the Japanese public seem to be less concerned about the lack of cultural expression. Nonetheless, Japanese society seems to have a nationalist backlash against the import of Korean media and transnational casting. The best-selling Manga Kenkanryū [Disliking Korean Wave] (2005) further ignited anti-Korean sentiment, including illuminating the territorial dispute concerning a group of islets between Japan and Korea, known as “Dokdo” in Korea and “Takeshima” in Japan. Japanese nationalists reject Korean entertainers who display a patriotic pro-Korea stance concerning Korea–Japan territorial disputes and other historical problems (The Chosun Ilbo 2011). The nationalistic response of ordinary individuals to these foreign stars is parallel to the Japanese official response to the Korean government in politics. Consequently, Japanese politicians have called for a reduction in the craze for Korean popular culture in 2012 (Lee 2012).
The above negative responses from China and Japan to the movement of Korean actors are not hard to find in the public spaces concerning the recent East Asia media culture. The discussions, be they of rational analysis or emotional response, indicate the necessity of continual discourse and theorization on star/society relations in East Asia. Stars are meant to occupy the center of public attention because the nature of the profession is to face the public by addressing the psychological demands or ideological desires of the latter. Nevertheless, globalization has led to many East Asian stars appearing on stage in various different countries—performing for audiences with vastly different nationalistic viewpoints. Often, transnational stars must handle sudden crises after unintentionally stirring up sensitive geopolitical issues, which may have a negative effect on their careers.
The star/geopolitics relationship has acted as a catalyst for inter-Asian star studies. It has introduced a sub-theme of inter-Asian pop culture studies that critically examines the inter-Asian flow of media culture and its impact on the formation of cultural identities in East Asia. Over the last decade, inter-Asian star studies have developed useful theoretical tools to understand the emotional and geopolitical minefield surrounding transnational East Asian stars. This chapter presents the inter-Asian approach to East Asian star studies. I will examine the complexities of East Asian stardom in the age of globalization, where East Asian media centers are competing in the global/regional market with transnational employment and joint production projects.
To introduce the inter-Asian approach to stardom, I shall begin with star studies. Following Richard Dyer’s Stars, first published in 1979 and regarded as the pioneering landmark of star studies, English-speaking critical scholarship has markedly developed. During the last three decades, its focus has been systematically diverse (Dyer 1979; deCordova 1990; Gledhill 1991; Marshall 1997; McDonald 2000; Shingler 2012).
Revolving around the Hollywood star system in the United States, the scholarship sees the American film star in capitalist media industries as an artifact with three interrelated dimensions: star as labor, as image, and as capital (McDonald 2000, 5). The first dimension refers to the fact that stars should be trained workers, their labor constituting an important component of media industries. Without the performers, meaning and messages cannot be conveyed in film and TV. The stars also have their unions, such as the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG, AFTRA), which represent performing workers’ interests in capital/labor negotiation. In the second dimension, stars are a source of meaning and objects of identification as images produced by film and television. The carefully framed images address social demands by presenting popular identities with which the public can identify. The public makes true a performer’s rise to stardom by embracing the created ideology. Following the two dimensions, stardom as an artifact subsequently becomes a form of capital/asset in capitalist media business, its economic value functioning either as a promotional or a production tool. For instance, the audience might be invited to participate as film extras in exchange for meeting and hanging out with the stars.
The influence media stars have on society links them to gaining influence in a political domain. In a democratic society, veteran media stars making the switch to become politicians, such as Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, are prime American examples. East Asia has also witnessed many media stars who became politicians, such as Yoshiko Yamaguchi, also known as Li Xianglan, in Japan. P. David Marshall (1997) analyzes the relationship between media and power and argues that the power of the public figures cannot be so easily discerned. Marshall (1997, 54–75) argues that celebrities or stars in society can be likened to “charismatic and affective prophets” whom individuals in societies look up to in an effort to make sense of their worlds through the rationalizing process of modernization. The power of these stars stems from their on-screen subjectivities, which appear as various types of individualities and personalities. They function as the will and expression of particular social groups and invite affective investment from these groups. Their public personas are hence “hyperindividuals,” continuously articulating transitional legitimate identification and cultural values. Various social values and identities (attribute to) formulate and mediate through the hyperindividuals. The public figures are fundamentally ambiguous despite their temporary attachment to particular identities and values because they function as public spheres allowing all types of discourses, which concern values, identities and individualities, to configure, to position and to proliferate in contemporary society. From a Gramscian viewpoint, the cultural value and meaning of stars is always evolving as a result of the dynamic hegemony between ruling groups and subordinate groups. In this way, the public personalities form a link between collective configurations and the mass populace.
The American-oriented star studies are useful when analyzing the role of the star in a society within a nation-based framework and how the stars’ image articulates specific trends in a spatially and politically bounded society. However, the nationally bounded theories do not accommodate for the spatial and topological difference of a star’s image when that star crosses borders to work in a different national media, despite the fact that the industrial phenomenon has never been rare in contemporary film and television history, due to its methodological nationalism in the social sciences (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003).
This approach to stardom has inspired scholarship in other countries to pay attention to their own star systems, such as the edited volume of Mary Farquhar and Yingjin Zhang (2010) on Chinese film stars, and the work of Neepa Majumdar (2009) on Indian film stars. Farquhar and Zhang’s anthology examines cases of stardom in three imagined communities in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The analysis concentrates on the relations of stars/societies but does not acknowledge the dynamism between the stars images, although some of the stars have moved between different Chinese-language media, such as Brigitte Lin, Chow Yun-Fat, and Jet Li.
The geographic–spatial dimension of stardom in the Hollywood star system has not been completely overlooked in the United States. Rather, it has been contextually directed to ethnic and racial issues, for both epistemological and empirical reasons. Epistemologically, most of the critical energies in the white-centered yet multicultural Western societies have been directed towards class, racial and gender politics, and stereotypical representations in the images systems. Research on Jackie Chan’s Hollywood career exemplifies this type of questioning (Gallagher 2004; Park, Gabbadon, and Chernin 2006). Lo Kwai-Cheung (2001) insightfully notes the difference in Chan’s persona in Hong Kong as compared to Hollywood. Comparatively, cultural identity issues of white actors from outside of the United States pursuing a career in Hollywood has not been theoretically identified in the West as a serious matter of contention. The indifference is fathomable, given that white-dominant Western societies seemed to have already come to an age of post-ethnic multiculturalism.
Empirically, Hollywood is at the center of the contemporary world of image-making, owing to its global dominance for more than half a century. The stage in Hollywood is believed to be the biggest and most universal, enjoying worldwide popularity and influence. The entertainment industry in the most powerful media/star system has incorporated other smaller and marginal media/star systems. Hollywood regularly employs talents and other means of production from other media/star systems in the world, especially those in the other five main English- speaking countries (Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand). Pursuing a career in Hollywood has been considered a path to upward mobility in a star’s career. Although Hollywood is no longer the only media center, it might be the most prestigious stage for many entertainers. Based on capital concentration, the American media/star system is still the most powerful media system in the world.
While the Western media systems seem to be in a post-national phase, East Asian media are closer to cultural nationalism, which is, in fact, the consequence of the former. The prosperous East Asian economic growth led by strong nation-states in the twentieth century has provided material conditions for the development of various media entertainment systems and star systems based in the East Asian national markets. The power hierarchy of these regional media centers, which are all under global Hollywood domination, is fairly dynamic and changeable. Long under the influence of Hollywood, the East Asian states and media systems are very aware of the ideological and economic power of media, witnessing how the Hollywood media have articulated the American mainstream ideologies, promoted American lifestyles, and contributed to the American economy. They also desire to become at the very least a regional power in East Asia, and at the most a power extending beyond their borders (Chua 2012). The East Asian media systems are constantly connected to the nationalist political forces that control the media and so either function as a national ideological apparatus or as an important part of the national economy to which the nation-state offers supporting policy. Chinese media is state-owned. Media conglomerates in Japan and Korea are also closely connected to the state. East Asian media, especially mainstream East Asian media, have not yet entered a post-national age characterized by the domination of civil societies pursuing public agendas.
Consequently, stars embody national aspirations and patriotic spirit. An actor’s rise to international stardom is the symbol and the result of national economic and cultural development in an East Asian country. This phenomenon is most clearly illustrated in Korea. Labeling stars with nicknames, such as national actor/actress or children/brothers/sisters, suffices to explain the nationalization of Korean stardom (Kim 2011, 338). Inside and outside, they are expected to be national representatives and ambassadors. All the above factors help explain why class, race, gender, and other post-national issues have seldom reached the same level of attention, since the East Asian public sphere is primarily nationalistic by nature.
Paradoxically, East Asian states allow regional interaction in order to increase economic and media development since restricting such interaction has been shown to be counterproductive. Inter-Asian star studies was born in this context. These studies aim to critically capture the East Asian media dynamism and the geocultural politics surrounding East Asian stars, thus placing the topographically varied star persona in comparative perspective (Tsai 2005).
In the media intersections, stars also function as image, labor, and capital, all in different contexts. First, the East Asian media systems have been competing for regional empire status by employing elements from other East Asian media systems. A talent would pursue a career in a stronger and more affluent media center than his or her original media center. A good example is the collective experience of ethnic Chinese Singaporean, Malay, or Taiwanese talents debuting in the stronger Hong Kong, Chinese, or Japanese media. To counteract this effect, a media in the lower level of the hierarchy would try to exploit the surplus value of strong media by casting the latter’s valuable talents.
Second, the East Asian media enterprises not only scout talents but also join forces in terms of finance and production in efforts to share their own national market and conquer larger markets. East Asia has witnessed many industry-level financed coproductions since the twentieth century. The media alliances usually demand the mutual and equal participation of cast and crew from contributing partners. The pan-Asian cooperations between Hong Kong and Japan in the 1990s and between China/Hong Kong and Korea in the 2000s are worthy examples. The mediated geopolitical expression would articulate the regionalizing desire of the East Asian national capitals. In some extreme situations, the star images in the joint projects could become ideologically pure, set in an archetypal or highly generic East Asia, since the media capitals are very eager to maximize their markets by being politically correct. Typical examples include the Promise (2005), a pan-Asian film set against a fantasy portrayal of East Asia. There are also some occasions when nationalized media enterprises team up to produce political narratives. For instance, Chinese and Korean film industries are collaborating on a film project about Korean patriot and political activist An Jung-geun, who assassinated Itō Hirobumi (the Prime Minister of Imperial Japan) in the Chinese city of Harbin in 1909 (Yeh and Kim 2014). The media text that offers transnational cross-cultural scenes would serve as “rehearsal space,” offering spaces for the audience to contemplate the relationship between their own national identity and that of their foreign neighbors (Hitchcock 2002, 69).
Transnational employment within the East Asian media intersection deserves close examination; it is more ambivalent in many aspects than the nationalistic alliance of media. The previous rush of transnational performances can be traced to the debuts of Hong Kong talents in Japan and that of the Japanese talents in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1990s. Currently, in the twenty-first century, Korean stars are taking part in the media of Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Performers and artists in the borderless age are driven to cross over to other countries, precisely because of the external surplus of their original culture. Their new roles would be determined by at least four factors of the receiving media system: first, how the media industries address their target audience, e.g. those who love Korean popular culture, or the pan-Asian martial art/action film audience; second, the production conventions and strong genres of local media; third, collective or national attitude toward the culture of the foreign actors; and fourth, their own identity-making in the age of globalization.
For instance, in the 1990s, Hong Kong filmmakers invited Japanese TV drama stars to act in their action genres or Wong-Kar-Wai’s stylized visual works alongside a cosmopolitan cast placed in a cosmopolitan Hong Kong society. Japanese media scouted Hong Kong film stars to play the role of Chinese students, gangsters or workers in boundary-lade Japanese films and TV dramas. In the 2000s, Korean TV drama stars have followed in the transnational footsteps of the Hong Kong and Japanese stars in East Asian media. They currently split their time playing protagonists in Taiwanese TV dramas and Chinese film and TV. Their Korean identities are usually erased in the latter two media centers, whose commercialism has articulated Sino-centrism (Lai 2014). Casting Korean stars, but having them play non-Korean characters, satisfies both of the commercial considerations. The two media production systems want to attract an audience with the stars, but they have no strong intentions to produce cross-border stories that might discourage their audience.
Two questions have puzzled the Asian media enterprises practicing transnational employment. It has already been noted that coproductions fail, while clones and format trading succeed more easily, especially when the target audience is mainstream (Zhu 2008, 94). The very beginning of the chapter noted that China–Korea cooperations, which lump together all profitable talents and elements in one project, usually become artistic and commercial flops and never become regional sensations. Some of them are even the best examples of failure (such as The Promise mentioned previously and My Combat Butler and Absolute Boyfriend, two Taiwanese manga remakes, casting a Korean actress). These phenomena have frequently taken place in Chinese-language films and television, especially in Chinese and Taiwanese mainstream media.
Their failures are related to the gap between the artistic commitment of the appropriating productions and the tastes of the target audience. Take the participation of Korean stars in Chinese media and Japanese stars in Taiwanese media for instance. The popularity of the foreign cultures in the two countries is precisely the reason why audiences cross over to other media systems to demand and seek what the domestic media productions do not possess. The lack of a competitive edge in the Chinese and Taiwanese media among the runaway audience is due in large part to two factors, First, the loss of appeal of domestic values (usually connected to governmental media control), and second, the production quality (usually connected to the accumulation of media capital and talents). For instance, the Chinese media system is tightly controlled by the state and its more traditional official value system that in return offers policy protection. In Taiwan, many Taiwanese audiences have run away from the “poor quality” of the domestic media since the early 1990s. They shy away from the embedded value system in the narratives (Iwabuchi 2002, 150), and industrial underdevelopment and formulaic standardization of the content (Hu 2002 and 2008, 122). When foreign stars work with local projects, their performances are aesthetically subjected to the local ecology. If the projects do not have commitments to improve production all round, especially addressing the targeted yet reluctant audience, the multinational casting would not satisfy the targeted audience that opts for the foreign culture.
The expense of casting a much more established star usually means incurring greater expense for the projects at the lower levels of the East Asian media hierarchy. The project must take advantage of the star-capital to cover the extra expense of hiring an established star-worker. Here there is a difference between the Chinese/Japanese and Taiwanese/Hong Kong media. Chinese or Japanese projects can easily recoup the expense in their growing home markets. Alternatively, many transnational casting projects from Taiwan and Hong Kong are export-oriented. As regards Taiwanese and Hong Kong media, which lack a growing home market, multinational casting projects usually expand their market plan to regional markets: either Japanese, Chinese, or the South East Asian market. In recent years, the Chinese state’s censorship and control of the media have had an undesirable effect on the creativity of not only Chinese but also Taiwanese and Hong Kong productions. Particularly affected are those projects involving mediation of geo political facts and political dissidences. The pan-Asian media projects that hold Japanese financial investment are subjected to Japanese media rules and interest.
The second question is why these transnational works are not well received outside the producing country, even if they are well made or have well-known East Asian stars. Their overall underperformance is mainly related to the national difference in East Asia. Arjun Appadurai (1990, 6–7) provides an effective framework for us to understand these national differences. He considers the global cultural economy a landscape of five fluid and open-ended dimensions: ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, financescape, and ideoscape. The five landscapes are “deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors,” especially nation-states, multinationals, etc. The landscapes form the building blocks of what Appadurai (1990, 7) calls multiple “imagined worlds” that are constructed by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups in the world. Individuals and social groups today have their own imagined worlds constructed within imagined communities that contradict each other. The various imaginations contest each other and sometimes subvert official imaginations. In each imagined world, the image (e.g. TV and film), the imagined community (e.g. the nation) and the imaginary operate together as a social practice to stage collective aspirations through the images (Appadurai 1990, 4–5).
Using this framework we can begin to understand why transnationally casted works are not well received outside their initiating contexts. First, disjuncture takes place between the landscapes. Such disjuncture is easy to find in East Asia. For instance, a Taiwanese or Chinese fan of a Korean star (mediascape) might detest Korea as a nation (ideoscape). In giving precedence to the geopolitical landscape, Chinese nationalists might argue that Korea is trying to possess cultural legacies belonging to the Chinese, and Taiwan nationalists might not be happy that Korea has topped Taiwan in the regional competition.
Second, the border-crossing reception of the transnationally cast images, especially the employment type of projects, depends on the equivalence in the cultural imaginations of the addressing and addressed contexts. Here the theoretical tool provided by Stuart Hall (2001, 168–169) for explaining audience reception helps illuminate the cultural contestation. Hall notes that media as a meaningful discourse presumes a match between encoding and decoding sides. The decoder-audience shall be in an ideal reading position preferred by the encoder-producer so as to understand and enjoy the discursive meaning. Resistant reading (e.g. misunderstanding) would take place if an individual whose ethno-cultural-social structural position is very different and distant from the preferred position. The lack of equivalence between the two sides is the main reason for the misunderstanding. Consider these transnational images mentioned in the question as multiple imagined worlds. It is difficult for a national individual as a decoder to understand the imagination produced by media from another nation (an encoder), especially if the two nations conflict with each other in many aspects. Thus the inter-Asian images that have foreign characters and stage cross-cultural encounters would not be received well in another country’s mainstream market.
In this way, when star actors debut in another media, their public personae and traits are articulated into the imaginations of this media in accordance with its cultural imaginations in relation to the world (Said 1978; Hall 1997). Eva Tsai (2005) has tackled the contrast between star images in different East Asian media systems. Using the concept of “starscape” to indicate the topologically changing star images and meanings, Tsai traces the performing career of East Asian actor, Takeshi Kaneshiro. Born to a Taiwanese mother and a Japanese father, Kaneshiro had a strong presence in the media of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan in the 1990s and early 2000s. Tsai identifies three discursive locations that Kaneshiro and his hybridity landed in respectively: the idol economy in post-colonial Taiwan, the Hong Kong film industry’s adaptation to globalization, and the pan-Asianism of the 1990s Japanese media. Although Kaneshiro demonstrated high mobility, most of his works had seldom been comprehended outside their local markets. The locally situated images contradicted each other because the three Asian countries do not have consensual perceptions about each other due to their different postcolonial experiences, negotiation with globalization, and interacting media cultures (Tsai 2005, 102).
In the twenty-first century, East Asian media dynamism has provided the mobility for Korean TV drama stars to work in four imaginations: the pan-Asian action genre films of Hong Kong/ China, romantic urban TV dramas and films in urbanized mainland China, the multicultural media making of post-Sinocentric and post-colonial Taiwan, and the mediation of urban hetero geneity in Japan. Many of these imaginations are quite different from the contexts in which Kaneshiro was working (Lai 2014). These major productions capitalize on the power of more established stars to cross borders, even though some of the meanings are nationally specific. Whether audiences located in other national markets would appreciate or misunderstand these specific meanings is an open question and beyond capital calculation.
Major productions are usually dominated by the mainstream, utilizing national ideologies and conventional narratives, while minor projects are more art-oriented and tend to counter the former. For instance, the Chinese-speaking media, which specialize in making all types of apolitical fantasies, tend to erase the cultural backgrounds of Asian performers in their projects, especially those in the very center of the tightly controlled and monitored Chinese film and TV production system. The art-house production system, which is also full of transnational collaborations, has more interest in portraying border-crossing encounters and multinational realities in twenty-first-century urban China. Several of these productions, including The Longest Night in Shanghai (2007), A Season of Good Rain (2009), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2011), contain subtle and detailed depictions.
In mainstream Japanese media, which always emphasizes the boundary between Japanese and non-Japanese—a seemingly unbreakable binarism noted by Iwabuchi (2010, 36)—foreign stars from outside Japan normally play foreigners. In this domain, ambiguity and multiplicity might sometimes become a source of novelty for media productions. For instance, the Japan–Hong Kong production Christ of Nanjing (1995) arranged for a Hong Kong actor and Japanese actor to switch nationality on screen. The Korean actress Bae Doona played an inflatable sex doll that develops a consciousness in the critically acclaimed Japanese Hirokazu Kore-eda art-house work Air Doll (2009). Moreover, in Rondo (2006), Choi Ji-Woo’s Korean-turned-Japanese character seems, to a certain degree, to be an attempt to blur the clear-cut boundary between foreigners and Japanese.
Nation-based star studies believe that “star as image” is where the hegemony between various social groups takes place. It explains how the star text, which functions as an object of debate and discussion, plays a significant role when it comes to the participation of individuals in the public sphere. The star text articulates all sorts of public identifications and cultural values as “hyperindividuals.” Although stars can be identified by minority spectatorship (Dyer 1986), most of the star/spectatorship relationships are mainstream. One main type of public subjectivities that stars articulate is a model of national/patriot for nationalism. In nationalistic countries, the official nation-state or an ordinary individual audience member would treat some stars as national representatives or ambassadors, especially when the latter’s popularity crosses the border and onto a larger stage. In Korea, stars obtaining international or global fame are usually framed by the nation-state as a national success in the global soft power competition. Moreover, K-pop idol girls have played a role in the redefinition of the Korean nation as a “republic of idol” in the Korean public sphere. Within the idol republic is the proliferation of “Lolita Nationalism” in which a girl’s body serves the national economic need. This form of national contribution has been criticized as an articulation of the national governmentality of stars’ bodies, a neocultural imperialism and a neoliberal value of competition (Kim 2011, 342).
One common debate among the East Asia public surrounds the forms and direction of national loyalty. When stars are identified as model patriots, the public attention focuses on their patriotic contributions. Adapting to a new workplace is considered a form of professionalism for performers. Yet at the same time it is considered evidence of national betrayal, especially when the performers shift from a small stage to a larger, albeit sometimes antagonistic platform. The definition of a public figures’ national loyalty has long been dictated by nation-state officialdom. The particular phenomenon of East Asian popular culture and star flow in terms of public discussion is that the cultural flows have created many transnational interest groups, who then start to think post-nationally or non-nationally in contrast to the acknowledged nationalistic state.
For instance, Taiwanese stars are currently at a crossroads between different types of nationalisms, as represented by the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese Nationalist Party, and the Democratic Progressive Party. They all have requested the stars—and hence the individuals—to become ideal nationals in their own competition to shape the national identities of contemporary Taiwanese people. However, some of the Taiwanese fans of pop singer Chang Hui-mei (who is ethnically aboriginal) had different opinions from both the Chinese and Taiwanese nation-states regarding the Taiwanese political status, and ultimately the meaning imposed on Chang’s involvement at the presidential inauguration of the Republic of China government in Taiwan in 2000 (Tsai 2007). Another example is how the Chinese-language female fans of Korean star Song Seung-Heon, who evaded mandatory conscription in the early 2000s, organized to negotiate with the Korean government. The government had requested Song to immediately begin military service—the definition of a Korean star’s national loyalty (Tsai 2007). The overseas fans argued that Song’s contribution to Korean popular culture counts as his patriotic service for his nation. Not surprisingly, the voices of these transnational social groups were ignored by the nation-state authorities in the public domain. The groups were elusive and powerless, when they turned to a politically defined cause, but they had different definitions of national loyalty. Whether they could eventually influence the authorities depends on the progression of the public sphere in East Asia.
This chapter introduces inter-Asian star studies for researchers who are interested in this comparative approach to the transnational star/society phenomena in East Asia. Inter-Asian star studies are built upon the studies of media stars in Western film, media, and cultural academia. It treats the production and consumption of media stars, which is the configuration of social consensus over collective values and identities, as one of the main social mechanisms in contemporary society.
The nation-based and inter-Asian approaches to media stars and celebrities are useful for different research questions. The theoretical tools of inter-Asian star studies pursue the specific inter-Asian issues pertaining to East Asian stars, idols, and celebrities. One of these questions in which the public figures are involved is the triangular relation between the stars’ image, especially their inflected geopolitical ideological meanings, media exchange, and regional soft power dynamism. The second is related to the emergence of transnational public space, which is formed of nation-states, transnational fan groups, among others, and their contested negotiation on the stars’ public subjectivity, such as forms of national loyalty.
Sensitivity on West–Asia dynamism remains important, partially because the contemporary East Asian media culture is one outcome of the global West–East opposition. While Jackie Chan’s Hollywood career served the global domination of American media, the experiences of white thespians working in the Hong Kong film industry formed an interesting contrast to Chan’s experience (Morris 2012). The performance of Chinese star Zhang Ziyi as a geisha—traditional Japanese female entertainer—in the Hollywood film Memories of a Geisha (2005) was also treated by some Chinese nationalists as a betrayal of her national loyalty (Kourelou 2010).
Regarding possible directions for future inter-Asian star studies, new inter-Asian media star phenomena might include, initially, the emergence of cross-cultural celebrity couples; for example, the Chinese film actress Tang Wei, who is married to Korean director Kim Tae-Yong, and the marriage between Korean actress Chae Lim and Chinese actor Gao Zi Qi. Researchers can analyze how media frame the intimate relationships of these celebrities, who live out the Korean reality show, We Got Married, and echo the larger China–Korea interactions in diplomacy and economy.
Another objective might be cultural politics surrounding the performers who have multicultural backgrounds. East Asian media have never been in lack of Western educated media stars, but “mixed blood” performers, whose foreignness can mean either privilege or inferiority, have become more prevalent in East Asian show business in the age of globalization. Each medium environment as a system has its affordance, which is, in fact, mutable in the long run, for the performing space of these “foreigners.” For instance, TV drama and variety shows typically attract audiences by producing closeness and domesticity, whereas film would do so by deliberately controlling audiences’ cognitive distance with text (Marshall 1997, 198). The “mixed blood” performers may become the face of fashion and advertisements, but they hardly break into the highly domestic domain of television drama. In Taiwan, some performers of Eurasian descent have taken leading roles, previously long occupied by ethno-national performers. In Taiwanese urban romantic dramas, their physical differences are abstracted into socioeconomic gaps as they usually play urban youngsters with upper class backgrounds. In another case, Vietnamese-Taiwanese actress Helen Thanh Dao has complained about being typecast as the Vietnamese wife to a Taiwanese man, such as in the social realist dramas on Public TV System (The Little Cosmos No 33 2013). The on-screen difference between the two types of “mixed blood” performers signi fies the racial hierarchy pattern in Taiwanese society and the lingering Western domination. In variety shows, the performing artists are framed as individuals suffering from various stereotypical imaginations. The eagerness of both types of “mixed blood” performers to break these stereotypes that the society attributes to them seems to illuminate the myth of multiculturalism in Taiwanese society which is oscillating between Sino-centrism and post-Sino-centrism. Their career as public figures in a media business and market-driven capitalist economy depends on the contesting public attitude towards the formation of culture and individuality in the course of time. How they are presented in these media deserves more critical attention.
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