Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2022. ix, 301 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9781478018117.
Mila Zuo’s Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium is an exciting intervention in Cinema and Media Studies. The case study is Chinese women stars whose films circulate globally in the process marking their performances as “acting Chinese.” Marking a trajectory from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) through to Chinese American performers, the analyzed are Gong Li, Maggie Cheung, Joan Chen, Bai Ling, Tang Wei, Vivan Hsu, Shu Qi, Charlyne Yi, and Ali Wong. The book is written from a Chinese American and female minoritarian perspective in the very distinctive and highly charged identity politics cultural wars of the United States and will rightly find a welcome with its particular target readership. However, the return to the long-neglected topic of beauty and the innovative methodologies developed and deployed here give the project a much wider resonance.
Aesthetics in general has been off the scholarly agenda in Film and Media Studies for well over 50 years, since the desire for scientific rigor and the focus on meaning that arrived with semiotics relegated it to the realm of subjective emotion. The “affective turn” that has spotlighted both embodied pre-cognitive response and emotion as integral to—amongst other things—the cinematic experience. Yet beauty has continued to be overlooked, despite its appeal constituting one of the major reasons for watching films. Therefore, Zuo’s re-examination is long overdue. Zuo focuses on what she calls the “beauty encounter,” the moment when the audience experiences an affective response, in both the senses of the pre-cognitive and to the appearance and actions of the film’s stars.
However, beauty is both highly culturally specific and carries a long and sometimes disturbing legacy. Zuo’s focus on Chinese women stars demands a new approach, separate from the “mechanisms of subject-object binarisms that subjugate the Chinese woman” (22) and the “stain” of “patriarchal consumer culture capital’s residues” (24). Situating her work in the lineage of scholars such as Rey Chow, Anne Anlin Cheng, and others who have sought to examine the vicissitudes of the Chinese female star in the racialized and gendered subject-object relations of modern Western culture, Zuo seeks out other models that empower and enable new potential, without denying those existing vicissitudes. Instead of the famous patriarchal gaze that pins the female object, Zuo proposes staring as an act of continuous looking encouraged by the cinematic medium and as a kind of seduction that destabilizes the looker because the lapse between filming and viewing means the looking is never returned and requited.
Zuo also moves on from the ocular-centrism of modern Western culture and seeks out a model based on “Chinese somatic knowledge” that “proceeds from ancient, cosmological mind-body dualism” (13). Zuo selects the concept of flavour (weidao), inspired by the five traditional Chinese medicine flavours (bitter, salty, pungent, sour, and sweet) to characterize her beauty encounters with the stars under consideration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the excessive and even unpleasantly flavoured qualities of these stars that capture Zuo’s greatest attention. These qualities constitute what she refers to as vulgar, in contrast to the traditionally esteemed quality of blandness (dan), held to be transcendent and refined. As she explains, “The crisis provoked by vulgarity is that it comes from the wound that is minoritarian suffering, but it also has the ability to wound, its disturbing effects reminding us that difference is often coded as undesirable and indigestible” (18).
Gong Li’s flavour, as analyzed by Zuo in her opening chapter, is bitter, protesting national suffering in her earlier Chinese films and erotic suffering in her later more international films. Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep and Joan Chen in Twin Peaks embody saltiness, considered in Chinese medicine to have cooling properties. Positioned as enigmatic and alluring objects of desire for white men, their agency exceeds and eludes these roles. With Tang Wei in Lust, Caution and Bai Ling in The Crow in chapter 3, Zuo moves on to pungency, embodying hot, intense qualities that demand acceptance and tolerance. However, in her reading, their tragic ends reveal a deathlier response to these demands from patriarchal and colonial cultures. Chapter 4 steps outside the Chinese American framework that characterizes most of the book to look at Taiwanese stars Vivian Hsu and Shu Qi and their appearances in PRC films The Knot and If You Are the One. Zuo considers their performances as sajiao, a kind of knowing sweetness that toys with the patriarchal and even neocolonial desire of the Chinese male protagonists. Last, stand-up comic Ali Wong and Charlyne Yi exude sourness to disrupt dominant narratives about Chinese American women. Fittingly, the book ends with an epilogue called “Aftertaste.”
My one quibble with Vulgar Beauty is that the “global sensorium” turns out to be the very particular politics of the United States. In a way that is both characteristically American and not adequate, the rest of the world is implied as somehow being included. But maybe this just opens up questions about how acting Chinese plays in other cultures, and not only the cultures of the West. Furthermore, by opening questions of beauty and cultural specificity up and also providing an example of reaching outside the Western cultural and conceptual tradition to develop new ways of answering those questions, Vulgar Beauty marks an important and highly provocative breakthrough.
Chris Berry
King’s College London, London