Construction of New Female Image in Early Modern China - Review of iPerforming China: Female Stars, Performance Culture, Visual Politics, 1910-1945 /iby Huiling Zhou

The author of the book iPerforming China: Female Stars, Performance Culture, Visual Politics, 1910-1945/i, Huiling Zhou, through the method of careful cross-text reading of cultural and video data and the theory of performance cultural studies, studies the tortuous course of constructing new female images of Chinses women represented by female film stars in the early 1920s and 1930s. They are not only “theater actresses” on the screen, but also “social actresses” in social practice. In face of various social opinions, gossip and party comments at that time, early Chinese female stars found ways to release themselves in their screen roles and real lives in the real society. Their performances in the process of China’s modernization revealed the society’s conception of the country, urban scene and female image at that time. Hollywood’s influence on Chinese films in the 1930s was profound and extensive, from the portrayal of urban women in China to the demonstration of film marketing strategies. From the perspective of film performance, the author analyzes the process of cross-cultural communication and interaction between China and the United States in the 1930s, involving various aspects of film, literature, politics, painting and industry. The difficulty of reading this book lies in its strong theoretical nature. Then, the film documents and image data selected by the author in the early 1920s and 1930s are relatively unknown to many people today. The author’s cultural research method with visual as core of cross-cultural interaction research can make us have some new thinking about many popular cultural forms at present, and broaden our vision and thinking.