This panel examines spectacle as a mode of intercultural mediation, exploring how visuality operates as a site where power, perception, and affect are negotiated across transregional contexts. Rather than treating spectacle as aesthetic excess, the papers approach it as a mediating practice that renders cultural difference visible, translates authority into shared sensory forms, and structures asymmetrical encounters between audiences and performers. Bringing together four case studies, this panel spans premodern to contemporary contexts. A Tang epitaph recast performance as a spectacle of imperial authority amid geopolitical decline. A mid-Ming court play stages imperial voyages before foreign envoys, transforming spectacle into a form of diplomatic power. In colonial Manila, multilingual poetic performances render Chinese presence visible while exposing uneven cultural translation. A contemporary co-produced film reworks footbinding into a transnational affective medium. Building on and extending existing scholarship in visual culture, performance studies, and transnational studies, particularly work on spectatorship, representation, and the circulation of images, this panel shifts the focus from representation alone to the mediating functions of spectacle across cultural boundaries.

Mi Liu’s paper “Spectatorship and Cultural Authority: Western Regions Performance in a Late Tang Epitaph for a Court Entertainer” investigates how a court-commissioned epitaph reconfigures performance into a site of imperial spectatorship and intercultural mediation by portraying Née Dong, a palace entertainer renowned for her mastery of Western Regions songs and dances. Dong’s performances, which captivate not only court audiences but also rhetorically extend to celestial spectators, are framed less as artistic acts than as spectacles that authorize imperial modes of seeing, interpreting, and curating foreign cultural forms. Liu argues that this privileging of spectatorship constitutes a mediating practice through which the Tang court appropriates and re-signifies Western Regions performance traditions, transforming them into visible markers of cultural authority. Situated in the aftermath of the An–Shi Rebellion, the epitaph’s narrative operates as a compensatory rhetoric that reasserts imperial centrality despite geopolitical decline.

Wenbo Chang’s paper “Spectacle as Diplomatic Mediation: Staging Empire in the Mid-Ming Court Play Following Heavenly Order: Sanbao’s Voyage to the Western Seas” examines how a mid-Ming court zaju play mobilizes spectacle as a form of mediation between dramatic imagination and real-world diplomacy. Based on imperial maritime expeditions, the play foregrounds elaborate staging, foreign rulers, and ceremonial display over plot. Performed before both the Ming emperor and visiting foreign envoys—figures also represented on stage, the play collapses the boundary between theatrical representation and diplomatic reality. Chang argues that spectacle here functions as a mediating practice that translates imperial authority into a shared visual field, while negotiating the presence and perception of foreign audiences. By analyzing its staging strategies, the paper shows how theatrical display operates not merely as entertainment but as a diplomatic instrument that both asserts and calibrates imperial power in a transregional context.

Rachel Junlei Zhang’s paper “Spectacles of Mourning: Chinese Poetic Performance and Intercultural Mediation in Colonial Manila” analyzes Chinese- and Spanish-language poems composed by Manila’s Sangley community for the royal funeral of Philip III, as recorded in Diego de Rueda y Mendoza’s Relación verdadera de las exequias (1625). It argues that these multilingual works functioned as colonial spectacle, rendering Chinese presence visible within an Iberian ceremonial framework. As part of royal mourning, the poems translate imperial authority into a shared yet uneven textual and visual field in which Chinese authors were both spectators and participants. Through close readings of three classical Chinese poems and three Spanish compositions, the paper shows how Buddhist imagery and baroque rhetoric create intersecting visualities that mediate cultural difference. At the same time, Rueda’s prose “translations” reveal asymmetries, selectively reframing or erasing Chinese meanings. The paper reconceptualizes poetic production as a medium that both enables and constrains cross-cultural legibility in colonial Manila.

Zhou Huang’s paper “Intertexuality and Beyond: Visualization of Footbinding in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” explores the visualization of foot binding in a Chinese-American-Korean co-produced movie directed by Wayne Wang that adapts Lisa See’s novel while situating its narrative and emotional force within visual language unique to cinema. In this paper, Huang argues that the film engages in intertextual dialogue with nineteenth-century missionary and travel writing by reproducing institutionalized depictions of bodily suffering associated with footbinding. Yet the film also transforms this meaning: through cinematic techniques, pain becomes a transmedial mode of emotional communication, transcending time, space, and language to shape a long-lasting sisterhood.

The 75-minute session includes four 12-minute presentations, an 8-minute respondent’s commentary, and 15 minutes of Q&A, with 4 minutes reserved for logistics and contingencies.