Workshop Abstract
Asian Trends Back Home:
Reflecting the Collective-Selfhood via Pop Culture
Hiroshi Aoyagi
Workshop Abstract:
Quarter of a century had passed since Asia attained its fame as a sizzling socioeconomic zone in the global flow. Asia’s open regionalism, initiated by such intergovernmental organizations as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), drew vastly developing countries in this region closer to each other through increased trade, international communication, and population movement. This created a cultural arena in which the identities and lifestyles of people living in Asia’s industrial economies are contested through marketing powers. Flows of Japanese, Chinese and Korean popular cultures, or “J-wave (日流),” “C-wave (華流),” and “K-wave (韓流)” respectively, in various parts of East- as well as Southeast Asia offer consumers of these areas with opportunities to construe and localize the urban lifestyle of Asia’s emergent middle-class.
With such a backdrop in mind, presenters of the current workshop will attempt to empirically examine how Asian trend-setters and trend-buyers (let alone critics) react to the emergent Asian trend back home. Kwaicheung Lo will explore manga as a window into a greater understanding of collective self reflexivity and national differentiation. Recent awarding of Hong Kong manga by the Japanese government, and intended demonstration of East-Asian unity thereof, may nevertheless represent Asia's internal national diversity from the perspective of Chinese manga reproducers. Laikwan Pang will discuss a transborder film project called "Focus First Cut" (2006), which includes 6 films from 6 new directors, who are all ethnically Chinese coming from different Asian regions: mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. Focus First Cut represents a trend of similar film projects seen in recent years. These projects are producer-based, supervised by a strong and experienced producer, but featuring a combination of new directors from different Chinese cultural backgrounds. The specific director-producer package is characterized by an interesting set of tensions and collaborations between the two roles. The directors are young and fresh, often below thirty years old, and they tell stories around their own experiences, with a microscopic tendency exploring the everyday lives of a particularly group of people, sometimes even in a deliberately parochial sense. The producers, on the other hand, are experienced, cosmopolitan, and have elaborate finance and distribution connections. Hiroshi Aoyagi will scrutinize the Japanese indifference toward the popularity of her fame as the powerhouse of trend creation in Asia. He will propose potential causes for such a disinterest, connecting the attitude to some prominent aspects of modern Japanese nationalism, or what he calls "self-reflected national character." Not that the Japanese are unaware of their recent popular-cultural status in Asia, they nevertheless remain to be more concerned about doestic flows of trend than about situations abroad. Finally, Gavin Whitelaw will add critical comments to these presentations in order to seek possible ways in which the meaning of Asia -as an "imagined community," as well as the cross-culturally constructive role played by popular culture in enhancing the idea of Asia as a unified region ought to be reconsidered.
Each of these presentations illustrates significant behavioral aspects of local subjects that try to readjust, reproduce, and authenticate their collective identity in accordance with ways in which they perceive their popular cultural properties to be celebrated in a broader, multinational region in which they themselves take part. These aspects and perceptions may involve a pride of national demonstration, collective self-reflections with respect to overseas reactions, or a frustrating gap between expectations and recognitions abroad.
The current workshop is the second part of AJRC’s ongoing project that aims to map out through concrete instances, and theorize through interdisciplinary means, the manner in which cross-bordering popular cultures contribute to the cross-cultural construction and transformation of public spheres in Asia.
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Individual Abstracts:
Japanese Manga, Hong Kong Films and the “Unity” of Asia
"Focus First Cut" and the New Translborder Chinese Cinema
Focus First Cut a new director project highlighting new Chinese directors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the PRC, Malaysia, and Singapore. These six films, all released in 2006, include mainland China’s Crazy Stone (dir. Ning Hao), Taiwan’s The Shoe Fairy (dir. Robin Lee), Malaysia’s Rain Dogs (dir. Ho Yuhang), Singapore’s Love Story (dir. Kelvin Tong), as well as two films from Hong Kong, I’ll Call You (dir. Lam Tze Chung) and My Mother is a Belly Dancer(dir. Lee Gong-luk). All of these six filmmakers had already directed their first feature films before, and their names have been heard in the film festivals circuits and certain local circles. According to Danial Yu, the executive director of the project, First Cut was not motivated by simple good wishes to cultivate future talents for Hong Kong cinema, but it was a business decision of Focus Films, a small size local film company which was trying to establish itself anew in the worst time of Hong Kong cinema. In addition to Focus First Cut, there is a trend of new-director series being launched in the last few years: Peggy Chiao’s “Three Cities” project (2001 – 2004), Lola’s “Chinese New Cinema: The Yunnan Project” (2006 – ), Eric Tsang’s “Winds of September” project (2008), as well as the documentary project CNEX (2007 – ). They all emphasize a collection of films made by new directors coming from various Chinese regions, and the works collected are all relatively small budget films sponsored by smaller studios or a combination of independent sources. All these projects are producer-based, supervised by a strong and experienced producer, but featuring a combination of new directors from different Chinese cultural backgrounds. The specific director-producer package is characterized by an interesting set of tensions and collaborations between the two roles. The directors are usually young and fresh, often around or below thirty years old, and they tell stories around their own experiences, with a microscopic tendency exploring the everyday lives of a particularly group of people, sometimes even in a deliberately parochial sense. The producers, on the other hand, are experienced, cosmopolitan, and have elaborate finance and distribution connections. Although presented as a collective project, each of the Focus First Cut film maintains its own cultural identity and local distributions, and many of these films also emphasize their cultural embeddedness of the particular communities, in contrast to the co-production blockbusters which try to tap into as many markets as possible by one film.
