The Distorting Mirror focuses on the turbulent period in China from the 1880s to the 1930s, analysing how urban subjects engaged with the emerging visual culture. The media and visual forms examined in this book include lithographic printing, photography, advertisements, films, and theatrical performances. The urban middle classes enthusiastically embraced this visual culture, delighting in it and yearning for the promises of modernity: novelty, excitement, and trends.
Pang Lai Kwan meticulously analyses the developmental trajectories of these visual representations, emphasising the interactions between various visual forms. The book argues that these visual forms were not isolated cultural phenomena but were in constant interaction, collectively shaping China’s visual modernity and influencing the broader cultural landscape of the time.
The discussion begins with the late 19th-century lithographic printing techniques, offering a comprehensive historical and theoretical analysis, and exploring how modernity became enthralled with notions of authenticity. Subsequent chapters highlight the obsession with the female body in the new visual culture, examine how culture was born in entertainment venues, and reveal how the urban middle classes understood and interacted with the new realities.
Author: Pang Lai Kwan
Translator: Zhang Chuntian
Producer: Enoch Yee-lok Tam
Editor: Ho Hang Yuen, Enoch Yee-lok Tam
Proofreading: Tsang Hing Lam, Lina Xie
Art & Design: Kathy Wong
Edition: First edition, May 2019
ISBN: 978-988-14233-8-2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.70783/distortingmirror
Page: 335
Price: HK$138
Language: Complex Chinese
Content
List of Illustrations
2018 Chinese Edition Preface
Translator’s Note
Introduction
Part I: The Pictorial
Chapter 1: The Pictorial Turn and the Realist Desire
Chapter 2: Photography, Performance, and the Making of Female Images
Chapter 3: Advertising and the Visual Display of Women
Part II: The Theatrical
Chapter 4: Peking Opear, from Listening to Watching
Chapter 5: Walking into and out of China’s Early Film Scene
Chapter 6: Magic and Modernity
Epilogue Modernity as an Unfinished Project
Bibliography
Filmography
About the author
Pang Lai Kwan
Currently a professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with a PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. After graduating, she has been teaching in Hong Kong. Her research areas include Hong Kong cinema, visual culture, discourses on intellectual property, and Mao-era China as well as global Maoism. Her Chinese publications include The Art of Cloning:Creative Production During China’s Cultural Revolution (2017), Sunset Not Yet: Post-1997 Hong Kong Cinema (2010; 2018), and an upcoming monograph on the Umbrella Movement. She received the Chinese University Research Excellence Award in 2008 and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholarly Publication Award in 2012.
About the translator
Zhang Chuntian
With a PhD from the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, he has undertaken research visits or short-term teaching positions at Heidelberg University in Germany, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and the University of British Columbia in Canada. He is currently teaching in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at East China Normal University.
His authored works include Revolution and Lyricism and Women’s Liberation and Modern Imagination. He has edited volumes such as A Reader on “Late Qing Literature” Studies, A Century of Overseas Scholarship, and An Alternative History of Academia. He has also translated works including The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China and Zhang Taiyan’s Political Philosophy. He was selected for the Shanghai Pujiang Talent Programme in 2017.
Recommendations (in alphabetical order)
This book presents a careful historicization of the ‘visual.’ Rather than take the act of seeing as natural, Pang brilliantly argues that the visual is a modern phenomenon, linked to but extending and transforming indigenous cultural forms of seeing and looking. Equally meticulous in its theoretical and empirical coordinates, this book is eminently readable and consistently insightful. A wonderful look at how modern Chinese came to see.
──Rebecca E. Karl, Professor of History at New York University, US
This is a book that is both serious and entertaining! The author successfully overturns the conventional paradigms in visual studies regarding viewing and being viewed, instead highlighting the materiality, bodily practices, and collective nature of visual representation. Through the careful selection and detailed discussion of various visual details, the book reveals an alternative visual history of modernity and the cultural power it entails.
──Joyce C. H. Liu, Professor at the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
This book combines meticulous archival work with sophisticated theoretical analysis, and it is truly spectacular. What makes it so is not only its outstanding achievements but also its use of spectacle theory as a lens to re-examine the visual culture of late Qing and early Republican China. At the same time, it brings early modern China into dialogue with popular understandings of the logic of spectacle itself.
──Carlos Rojas, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University, US
Professor Pang has tackled one of the most exciting areas in modern Chinese studies, the dynamics of visuality. Through the kaleidoscopic prism of the Chinese encounter with modern visual apparatuses, she covers a wide range of issues, from the discourse of novelty to the technology of media and reproduction and beyond, in the politics of spectacle. The Distorting Mirror is a fascinating study of how Chinese were watching and being watched, at a crucial moment in modern history.
──David Der-wei Wang, Chair Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, US
Focusing on the interaction between visual representation and subjective experience, this book outlines the mesmerising life experiences of urban Chinese a century ago amidst a kaleidoscope of lights and shadows. It analyses how the self is tamed, distorted, and transformed through its entanglements with cultural others and mechanisms of power. In Peng Li-juan’s hands, the turbulence of modernity becomes an unquenchable desire, a relentless process of cultural reproduction, and a vibrant, unfinished project. Driven by the force of modernity theory, The Distorting Mirror unveils the gaze of modern China within the overlapping and fragmented landscapes of technological spectacle.
──Wu Shengqing, Associate Professor, Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Praises and Reviews
The Distorting Mirror offers a wealth of cultural history materials from the perspective of visual culture. However, it is clear that the author’s intention is not (or at least not solely) to visually demonstrate how “modern” we once were. Unlike many works in Chinese studies that delve into obscure details simply to perpetuate myths about “modernity,” The Distorting Mirror consistently reveals its theoretical ambition: to tackle the broader question of how to understand China’s modernity and identity, and the role that visual culture has played in this process.