Events
“Mao’s Children are Wearing Fashion!”: Romantic Love, Fashion Consumption, and the Politics of Socialist Modernization in Huang Zumo’s Film Romance on Lu Mountain (1980)
6 Mar 2020
10:00am-11:30am
ZOOM
Prof. Calvin Hui (Associate Professor of Chinese Studies, College of William & Mary, United States)
Calvin Hui is a tenured Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the College of William & Mary in the United States. In 2013, he received his PhD in Literature at Duke University. His first book focuses on fashion, fiction films, documentary films, and consumer culture in post-socialist China. His second research project concerns contemporary China’s copycat cultures. He is a recipient of 2019 American Council of Learned Societies fellowship.
mingruiwen@cuhk.edu.hk
In this talk, Prof. Hui will engage with Huang Zumo’s (黃祖模) film Romance on Lu Mountain (廬山戀) (1980) to explore the consumption of romantic love (including the first representation of the kiss in People’s Republic of China cinema), fashionable clothes, and petty bourgeois sensibility. Similar to the red dress in Qi Xingjia’s film Red Dress is in Fashion (1984) and the red shirt in Lu Xiaoya’s film The Girl in Red (1985), the depiction of female character and her fashionable clothes in Huang’s film can be regarded as a signifying site where the changing relationship between the libidinal and the political in the beginning of economic reforms and opening up is staged and dramatized. He also presents the fashion shows, magazines, and television melodramas that accentuate the rise of this fashion consciousness. Taken together, he contends that fashion and consumption constitute a productive locale to situate the culture of socialist modernization in the 1980s China.
Organiser:
MA Programme in Intercultural Studies, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, CUHK
