East Asian stars, public space, and star studiesand social groups today have their own imagined worlds constructed within imagined com-
munities that contradict each other. The various imaginations contest each other and some-
times subvert official imaginations. In each imagined world, the image (e.g. TV and film), the
imagined community (e.g. the nation) and the imaginary operate together as a social practice to
stage collective aspirations through the images (Appadurai 1990, 4–5).
Using this framework we can begin to understand why transnationally casted works are not
well received outside their initiating contexts. First, disjuncture takes place between the land-
scapes. Such disjuncture is easy to find in East Asia. For instance, a Taiwanese or Chinese fan of a
Korean star (mediascape) might detest Korea as a nation (ideoscape). In giving precedence to the
geopolitical landscape, Chinese nationalists might argue that Korea is trying to possess cultural
legacies belonging to the Chinese, and Taiwan nationalists might not be happy that Korea has
topped Taiwan in the regional competition.
Second, the border-crossing reception of the transnationally cast images, especially the
employment type of projects, depends on the equivalence in the cultural imaginations of the
addressing and addressed contexts. Here the theoretical tool provided by Stuart Hall (2001, 168–169)
for explaining audience reception helps illuminate the cultural contestation. Hall notes that
media as a meaningful discourse presumes a match between encoding and decoding sides. The
decoder-audience shall be in an ideal reading position preferred by the encoder-producer so
as to understand and enjoy the discursive meaning. Resistant reading (e.g. misunderstanding)
would take place if an individual whose ethno-cultural-social structural position is very differ-
ent and distant from the preferred position. The lack of equivalence between the two sides is
the main reason for the misunderstanding. Consider these transnational images mentioned in
the question as multiple imagined worlds. It is difficult for a national individual as a decoder to
understand the imagination produced by media from another nation (an encoder), especially if
the two nations conflict with each other in many aspects. Thus the inter-Asian images that have
foreign characters and stage cross-cultural encounters would not be received well in another
country’s mainstream market.
In this way, when star actors debut in another media, their public personae and traits are
articulated into the imaginations of this media in accordance with its cultural imaginations in
relation to the world (Said 1978; Hall 1997). Eva Tsai (2005) has tackled the contrast between
star images in different East Asian media systems. Using the concept of “starscape” to indicate
the topologically changing star images and meanings, Tsai traces the performing career of East
Asian actor, Takeshi Kaneshiro. Born to a Taiwanese mother and a Japanese father, Kaneshiro had
a strong presence in the media of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Tsai identifies three discursive locations that Kaneshiro and his hybridity landed in respectively:
the idol economy in post-colonial Taiwan, the Hong Kong film industry’s adaptation to globali-
zation, and the pan-Asianism of the 1990s Japanese media. Although Kaneshiro demonstrated
high mobility, most of his works had seldom been comprehended outside their local markets.
The locally situated images contradicted each other because the three Asian countries do not
have consensual perceptions about each other due to their different postcolonial experiences,
negotiation with globalization, and interacting media cultures (Tsai 2005, 102).
In the twenty-first century, East Asian media dynamism has provided the mobility for Korean
TV drama stars to work in four imaginations: the pan-Asian action genre films of Hong Kong/
China, romantic urban TV dramas and films in urbanized mainland China, the multicultural
media making of post-Sinocentric and post-colonial Taiwan, and the mediation of urban
hetero geneity in Japan. Many of these imaginations are quite different from the contexts in
which Kaneshiro was working (Lai 2014). These major productions capitalize on the power of
more established stars to cross borders, even though some of the meanings are nationally specific.