This special session brings together four papers on imagining premodern Chinese literary characters through its modern and contemporary media adaptations in East Asian cinema, television drama, television opera, comic books, and video games. Together panelists explore how cinematic, televisual, digital adaptations and transformations of classical literary figures and narratives address the matrix of an enlarged readership or community of audiences, and how modern and contemporary multidimensional media environments generate new modes of spectatorial desire, pleasure, reception, and consumer practices. Media reconfigurations allow traditional narratives or performances to make transformations to cater to the tastes of a modern audience and compete against other forms of modern entertainment. Further, media adaptations and technological innovations bring innovative articulations of mythical legacies, gender and sexuality, performance art, or social, cultural and political ambiances of marginalized subjects.
In “The Chinese White Snake in Postwar Japanese and Korean Cinema”, Liang Luo examines three Japanese-language films from the 1950s and two Korean-language films from the 1960s to explore the revamping of the Chinese White Snake legend in postwar Japanese and Korean film industries. Why did Japanese and Korean film industries produce a number of “White Snake”-themed works in the 1950s and 1960s respectively? How would excavating these largely-forgotten works in their respective contexts better our understanding of cultural flows and geopolitical entanglements of the East Asian region at the postwar moment? Three thematic clusters surrounding issues of gender, media, and politics emerge from such examinations: the rise of sexually-aggressive femmes fatales on screen paired with wartime sexual explorations by women; representation of the humanity of the nonhuman paired with changing media technology from monochrome to color, live action to animation, and increasing use of special effects; the politics of national representation paired with the economics of national rejuvenation at the postwar moment. This presentation attempts to explore these thematic dynamics through formal and contextual analyses of the films in question, with special attention to multidirectional literary and cinematic exchanges across the East Asian region.
Ning Ma’s “Cinema’s Perfect Spirit Animal: Evolving Images of the Monkey King in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Media” analyzes Monkey King’s evolving images in modern and contemporary Chinese media, including cinema, comic books, TV dramas, and video games. Eileen Chow characterizes the Monkey King as the “cinema’s perfect spirit animal,” “with his preternatural powers of transformation, self-replication, and illusion, Monkey is the best metaphor for the art and technology of mechanical reproduction.” Ma aims at charting a cultural history of the “fields of view,” associated with the lore of the Monkey. It asks how these fields of view rework past imaginaries of the strange and the divine toward reshaping subject formation in the face of the transcending forces of modernity, which entangled the pressures of Western globalization, nation building, and mechanic technology. Monkey King’s visual culture sustains Buddhism and Daoism’s ontology of emptiness within modernity. Its evolution demonstrates the multiplicity and changeability of global, national, and technological forms as the very conditions of their subversion and transformation. “Cinema’s perfect spirit animal” embodies and disavows the visual culture of post-industrial media, creating an alternative space for individual creativity and communal bonding.
In “Reinventing the Classics: The new literary genre of Gods, Fairies, and Paladin,” Claire Yu-Min Chen examines Tang Qi’s online novel To The Sky Kingdom, inspired by the Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhaijing, 4th century). Tang’s novel was published as a book and made into a film and TV drama. This paper examines Tang’s novel, its film and the TV drama adaptations, the way that To The Sky Kingdom reinvents its historical and geographical backgrounds, as well as fairy and monster characters from the Classics of Mountains and Seas. The novel adapts class hierarchy and morality based on Confucianism into its plot development. Also it reinterprets cause and effect, and overcoming one’s tribulations in order to obtain nirvana from Buddhism and Daoism. By comparing the novel and the TV drama, Chen argues that To The Sky Kingdom establishes a mythological world by incorporating and recreating elements from the literary classics, and poses dialogical debates on Chinese morality, philosophy, and religions. It traces how the Classics can be adopted, modified, and reinvented for contemporary works. The TV adaptation and film, with their visual-audio effects and restructuring of the novel, enrich the perspectives and understanding of the text.
In “Transforming Meng Lijun: TV Opera Adaptations of Destiny of Rebirth in China and Taiwan”, Li Guo studies how TV operas reinvent the heroine Meng Lijun in the Southern Chinese huangmeixi (yellow plum opera) and Taiwanese gezaixi. The eighteenth century novel Destiny of Rebirth depicts a gentry woman Meng Lijun who disguises herself as a man to flee from family calamity, and becomes a prime minister after success at the Civil Service Exam. Guo compares three adaptations, including a huangmeixi TV opera Meng Lijun (1992), and two gezaixi TV opera Meng Lijun (1984) and Huangfu Shaohua and Meng Lijun (1995). These adaptations expand theatrical crossdressing through manifold impersonations and cross-genre adaptations. How does the multidimensional media transform the audiences’ visual and auditory experiences? What impact did commercial television make on the distribution and development of traditional operas? What experiments were made to preserve classic expressions and meet the audiences’ demands in singing, verse-speaking, and acting? How do televisual images reconfigure spectatorship and visual pleasures in staging a tale of masquerade, disguise, and homoeroticism? What techniques are utilized in producing and editing sound and vocal music? And how do such pleasing mannerisms talk to the diverse palates of the audience?
By imagining mythical and legendary figures through media, this special session endeavors to bridge studies of modern and contemporary media and premodern literature and culture, and invite considerations of the dialectics between history and the present, between indigenous legacies and intercultural adaptations. Ultimately, the panelists inquire how inter-medial representations of dynastic Chinese figures, texts, histories or performances engender nascent imaginations and contestations of transnational histories and global modernity.