As Chinese performers have become more visible on global screens, their professional images – once the preserve of studios and agents – have been increasingly relayed and reworked by film fans. Web technology has made searching, poaching, editing, posting and sharing texts significantly easier, and by using a variety of seamless and innovative methods a new mode of personality construction has been developed. With case studies of high-profile stars like Jet Li, Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen, this ground-breaking book examines transnational Chinese stardom as a Web-based phenomenon, and as an outcome of the participatory practices of cyber fans.
This talk focuses on the star-making phenomenon in the backdrop of digital culture. The advent of Web technology and fan participation enable ordinary audiences of various cultural backgrounds to readily transpose filmic and publicity materials about famed figures from DVD to fan-site, from movie website to blog, realizing distinct star-fan dynamics.
Speaker’s bio: Dorothy Wai Sim Lau is an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests include digital culture, cyberculture, Chinese-language cinema, transnational cinema, stardom and fandom. Her publications appear in journals such as positions: asia critique, Continuum, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of Asian Cinema, and a number of edited volumes. She is also the author of Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture (2018). She is currently writing her next monograph, Reorienting Chinese Stars in Global Polyphonic Network: Voice, Ethnicity, Power (working title) (Palgrave Macmillan, under contract).
