Jocelyn Yi-Hsuan LaiWhether audiences located in other national markets would appreciate or misunderstand these
specific meanings is an open question and beyond capital calculation.
Major productions are usually dominated by the mainstream, utilizing national ideologies
and conventional narratives, while minor projects are more art-oriented and tend to counter
the former. For instance, the Chinese-speaking media, which specialize in making all types of
apolitical fantasies, tend to erase the cultural backgrounds of Asian performers in their projects,
especially those in the very center of the tightly controlled and monitored Chinese film and TV
production system. The art-house production system, which is also full of transnational collabo-
rations, has more interest in portraying border-crossing encounters and multinational realities
in twenty-first-century urban China. Several of these productions, including The Longest Night
in Shanghai (2007), A Season of Good Rain (2009), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2011), contain
subtle and detailed depictions.
In mainstream Japanese media, which always emphasizes the boundary between Japanese and
non-Japanese—a seemingly unbreakable binarism noted by Iwabuchi (2010, 36)—foreign stars
from outside Japan normally play foreigners. In this domain, ambiguity and multiplicity might
sometimes become a source of novelty for media productions. For instance, the Japan–Hong
Kong production Christ of Nanjing (1995) arranged for a Hong Kong actor and Japanese actor
to switch nationality on screen. The Korean actress Bae Doona played an inflatable sex doll that
develops a consciousness in the critically acclaimed Japanese Hirokazu Kore-eda art-house work
Air Doll (2009). Moreover, in Rondo (2006), Choi Ji-Woo’s Korean-turned-Japanese character
seems, to a certain degree, to be an attempt to blur the clear-cut boundary between foreigners
and Japanese.
Stars as objects of discussion and debate in the East asian public space
Nation-based star studies believe that “star as image” is where the hegemony between various
social groups takes place. It explains how the star text, which functions as an object of debate
and discussion, plays a significant role when it comes to the participation of individuals in the
public sphere. The star text articulates all sorts of public identifications and cultural values as
“hyperindividuals.” Although stars can be identified by minority spectatorship (Dyer 1986),
most of the star/spectatorship relationships are mainstream. One main type of public subjecti-
vities that stars articulate is a model of national/patriot for nationalism. In nationalistic countries,
the official nation-state or an ordinary individual audience member would treat some stars as
national representatives or ambassadors, especially when the latter’s popularity crosses the border
and onto a larger stage. In Korea, stars obtaining international or global fame are usually framed
by the nation-state as a national success in the global soft power competition. Moreover, K-pop
idol girls have played a role in the redefinition of the Korean nation as a “republic of idol” in
the Korean public sphere. Within the idol republic is the proliferation of “Lolita Nationalism” in
which a girl’s body serves the national economic need. This form of national contribution has
been criticized as an articulation of the national governmentality of stars’ bodies, a neocultural
imperialism and a neoliberal value of competition (Kim 2011, 342).
One common debate among the East Asia public surrounds the forms and direction of
national loyalty. When stars are identified as model patriots, the public attention focuses on their
patriotic contributions. Adapting to a new workplace is considered a form of professionalism for
performers. Yet at the same time it is considered evidence of national betrayal, especially when
the performers shift from a small stage to a larger, albeit sometimes antagonistic platform. The
definition of a public figures’ national loyalty has long been dictated by nation-state official-
dom. The particular phenomenon of East Asian popular culture and star flow in terms of public