Joan Chen: National, International and Transnational Stardom

Abstract

Joan Chen (b. 1961) is undoubtedly one of the most globally recognizable film stars to have risen from Chinese national cinema in the late 1970s. Yet she remains critically underexplored, despite having appeared in films by three generations of Chinese directors, Hong Kong New Wave directors (e.g. Stanley Kwan), internationally known directors from the Chinese diaspora (e.g. Wayne Wang and Ang Lee), and highprofile international film-makers (e.g. Bernardo Bertolucci and Oliver Stone). For over three decades, her shifting star personae have been registered with socially and politically contested meanings. In the years immediately after the traumatic Cultural Revolution (1966–76), Chen’s politically innocent and emotionally redemptive ‘little sister’ characters pulled the heart strings of Chinese audiences in need of an emotional outlet. Removed from her developing star image after emigrating to America in 1981 — a ‘betrayal’ of her motherland in the eyes of many Chinese audiences then — Chen’s Hollywood career was constrained by racial typecasting, as demonstrated in her ‘oriental mistress’ roles, in spite of her rise to glamorous transcultural stardom. Chen’s return to Chinese language cinemas in the 1990s marks yet another shift of her star persona, which meta-narratively engages public memories of her ‘little sister’ roles to parody socialist collectivism and simultaneously exploit her Hollywood persona to entertain public fantasies about global identity in a post-socialist age.KeywordsCommunist PartyCultural RevolutionMovie ReviewStar PowerAsian ActorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.