Photography, Performance, and The Making of Female Images

University of Hawai'i Press
Chapter Title: Photography, Performance, and the Making of Female Images
Book Title: The Distorting Mirror

Book Subtitle: Visual Modernity in China
Book Author(s): Laikwan Pang
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press. (2007)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wr05c.5
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chapter two
Photography, Performance, and

the Making of Female Images
A
s mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, the value of lithog-
raphy as a mass visual medium was wiped out quickly by the inven-
tion of photography, a phenomenon seen in China and in most other
countries.1 With people’s new realist sensibility and the mass pictorial
culture introduced by lithography, the Chinese people were ready to
greet photography as an emblematic medium of modernity. In this chap-
ter I investigate how parts of the realist desire cultivated in late nineteenth-
century lithographic culture were turned into a desire for performance, thanks
to photography’s even more realistic and democratic nature. This performative
dimension of photography can be seen as an opposite but related side of the
realist desire discussed in the previous chapter. If realism is so much about
holding on to a changing reality, freezing it in time and space for viewers to
scrutinize, study, and control, using photography as a means of performance
in fact liberates this stabilizing effect. I call the mediating mechanism behind
the lithographic culture the realist desire because, formally, lithography strives
for but fails to achieve complete accuracy. But photography fulfills this drive
in that it seemingly allows modern people to access the world with a precision
that traverses time-space boundaries. It is at this moment of fulfillment that
other possibilities emerge.
Photography was invented at a time when the development of many mod-
ern societies was in full swing, and it came to witness perhaps the first happy
marriage between leisure and science — both key areas of development in
the modernity project. As a compelling symbol of people’s newly acquired
technological power, photography for the first time gave people the ability to
reproduce images in exact detail, allowing them to transcend their unstable
70 the pictori a l
memory or their confined physical presence to access images of their own

pasts or images of past events originally unavailable to them. Underlying this
hope are the “truth values” invested in the form. Unlike other pictorial forms,
photographic images bear witness to the “presence” of the photographic object,
whereas in other representational forms the depicted objects could be imagi-
nary. In the words of Roland Barthes, “I had identified truth and reality in a
unique emotion, in which I henceforth placed the nature — the genius — of
Photography, since no painted portrait, supposing that it seemed ‘true’ to me,
could compel me to believe its referent had really existed.”2 Photography as a
form of representation signifies and reproduces a truth that cannot be refuted.
Photographs, therefore, have been widely used as objective evidence, which
are given authority over life and death when they are used as legal evidence.3
This is a property earlier representational forms do not possess.
However, it is also due to photography’s direct replication of reality that
the status of reality is confused. If the imprecision of lithography indicates
some unbridgeable distance between representation and reality, photography
conflates the two. The new lithographic culture strove to stabilize meanings
and objects through detailed visual representation, while photography has the
opposite tendency of destabilizing reality, because the desire to manipulate
reality becomes a new point of departure. I want to investigate how this new
function of photography gives the visual culture new room for experimenta-
tion, particularly in terms of the certainty of gender identity that has been
taken for granted. If reality is representation, reality can also be performed and
constructed. The characteristics of photography as a form of representation
also reveal the “identity-as-choice” premise of the modernity project.
The putative “truth value” of photographs is also constantly threatening
to slip out of control because the representations can be mechanically repro-
duced. While we do know that there is a direct relationship between the ob-
ject and its photographic representation, the representation can be infinitely
reproduced to the extent that the original is lost in a sea of representations.4
Jonathan Crary argues that with the invention of photography, the world of im-
ages changed from metaphoric to metonymic, in that people could no longer
tell the difference between the original and a copy.5 This conflation of the
real and the simulacrum made itself felt in many other cultural dimensions.
As Nancy Armstrong illustrates, not only did photography break the absolute
dichotomy between originals and replicas, but people in the nineteenth cen-
tury also started to see, read, and write about the real world as it was repre-
sented in photographic images.6 The two characteristics of photography — its
direct replication of reality and the infinite number of copies that could be
Photography, Performance, and Female Images 71
produced — made the relationship between the representation and the rep-

resented complex. When we look at a photograph, is it, or is it not, the very
subject/object being recorded? To what extent can photographs stand for the
photographed?
The comparison between gender and photography is, I believe, a meaningful
project, since gender, like photography, occupies an uneasy position between
reality and construction. I seek to discover whether photography introduced the
Chinese to a new way of seeing gender, in terms of the significations mediated
by technology, by modes of distributions and receptions, and by surrounding
sociocultural structures and ideology. I use the concept of performance to link
gender and photography. If gender is a performance, photography as a form of
representation can work both to dramatize and to naturalize this performance.
Such dynamics are particularly evident and intense in late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century China, when the newly imported photography had
to negotiate the existing representation systems, such as painting and theater,
which had previously been among the primary modes of exploiting the female
image. I trace how different “female” subjects — courtesans, Cixi the Empress,
and dan performers — participated in the new photographic culture to perform
their gender. A major objective of this chapter is to show that the cultural
construction of modernity in China rested upon a system of unstable gender
meanings, which both supported and destabilized modernity.
Lithography vs. Photography

While there are records that optical knowledge of reflection was known in
China as early as the 400s BC,7 photography as a modern technology, like
lithography, was clearly imported to China from the West. In fact, it is intri-
cately linked to imperialism. Allegedly, the first Chinese to be photographed
was the Qing diplomat Qi Ying, who, right after the Opium War, distributed
portraits he had taken in Macao to Western diplomats in 1844 as a friendly ges-
ture to make peace with the Western powers.8 In the same year, the Chinese
scientist Zou Boqi invented the first Chinese camera.9 But most of the earliest
photographers in China were Westerners, who opened photographic studios
in Hong Kong and Guangzhou.10 Around the 1850s and 1860s, many of them
moved to Shanghai, which became the center of the country’s photographic
industry, and a large number of Chinese photographers started up their own
businesses.11 While some amateur photographers used the medium for docu-
mentary purposes, photography in China quickly became a leisure activity
of the upper class.12 As I will show in the following pages, studios also sold
72 the pictori a l
photographs individually or compiled their own photographic albums for sale.

Taking photographs and collecting these albums were both expensive and thus
were activities of the upper class.
This upper-class status of photography in late Qing China accentuates its
association with entertainment and games. But before investigating the per-
formative potential of photography, I would like to analyze a remarkable and
highly illustrative example to demonstrate the response of the Chinese intel-
ligentsia to photography, which could serve as a pictorial metaphor to intro-
duce the complexity of identity performance in photography. It also shows
the hidden pride and bitterness of a successful lithographer in the face of the
increasing popularity of photography. In an 1893 issue of Feiyingge huace (Pic-
torial of the flying shadow chamber), we find a very interesting lithograph
produced by Wu Youru, which documents a moment of two women having
their photograph taken in a studio (fig. 2.1).13 The lithograph seems to represent
Wu’s commentary on the photo-taking activity so popular among women at
the time. Judging from the image, the lithograph’s title, Wo jian youlian (I see
and pity), could have multiple meanings. In relation to the word jian (see), the
picture represents two systems of seeing — the photographic representation
and the lithographic representation; the female subjects are simultaneously
captured in the photo and the lithograph. The word wo (I) can refer to the
photographer shown in the picture, the artist Wu Youru who drew this picture,
and the potential viewers who look at the photograph and/or the lithograph.
The two layers of visual economy — that of the photograph and that of the
lithograph — are, interestingly, displayed also through two sets of visual ma-
nipulations. First, the two women represented in the lithograph call attention
to the two visual structures. The artist has oriented them at slightly different
angles and their gazes are cast in different directions, with one watching the
cameraman/viewer of the photograph while the other looks directly at the as-
sumed painter/viewer of the lithograph. Second, there are two spaces here. In
the background there is a painted wall suggesting an outdoor scene (for the
photograph) in the studio. The two perspectives collide on the vertical line at
the right side of the picture, producing a surprisingly disorienting effect.
Wu Youru depicts photography, but he does not celebrate it. On the con-
trary, he seems to emphasize the level of manipulation involved in photogra-
phy, which, by extension, invites the reader to think twice about the idea of “I
(i.e., man) see and pity (woman).” This criticism is embodied in the woman’s
standing in the middle of the picture. In traditional Chinese portraiture, the
person higher up in power or status sits — the one less powerful, be she a maid,
daughter, or daughter-in-law, stands.14 In this picture the standing woman is
Fig. 2.1. “Wo jian youlian” (I see and pity), by Wu Youru. Late nineteenth century.
deliberately drawn slightly larger, higher, and in a more prominent position

than the other two, particularly to the miniaturized photographer, therefore
to the photographic space. It is she who looks directly at the viewer, escaping
temporarily from posing for the photograph. This lithograph calls attention
to the operation of photography, which, however, must be concealed in these
studio portraits to produce the “I see and pity” effect — being seen as natural
instead of as constructed. Yet the standing girl’s refusal to look at the camera
and her direct gaze at the viewer highlight a sense of self-awareness, just like
the old lady in figure 1.13. One female subject is captured and manipulated by
photography, while the other looks past it, suggesting a movement of escape
from the photographic space to the lithographic space, and it is the latter being
naturalized in this picture. The two women could also be two mutually con-
ditioning dimensions of the same subject, who is at the same time looking and
being looked at. This might be China’s first piece of art to incorporate a meta-
criticism of visual reprographics, to which both photography and lithography
belonged. This print can also be read as the modernist response of a Chinese
74 the pictori a l
artist to the evolving modernity in China, which has a strong photographic di-
mension — the woman sees herself being seen, and she partly directs her own
objectification. The loose female agency suggested in this lithograph brings us
to the courtesan.
The Flamboyant Courtesan Culture

The rapid expansion of Shanghai’s prostitution culture from the late nineteenth
century to the early twentieth century paralleled the commercial development
of the port city. When Shanghai was still a small regional commercial center
in the mid-nineteenth century, prostitutes advertised themselves and took cli-
ents in scattered and mobile locations such as boats or isolated run-down spots
around town. As the port city developed, courtesans started to move to the city,
first in the Hongqiao area and later to Fourth Avenue. Around the turn of the
twentieth century there were already elaborate and famous red-light districts
in and around the city.15 As Shanghai evolved into a cosmopolitan city at the
turn of the twentieth century, courtesans soon became the most visible symbol
of class and power among the new urbanites. A number of famous courtesans
became the first modern celebrities — among them the legendary Sai Jinhua,
who spoke German, traveled around Europe, and participated in Chinese dip-
lomatic negotiations regarding the Boxer Rebellion.16 Courtesan culture, the
evolving commodity culture, and the rise of the new urban bourgeoisie were
intimately connected. As Catherine Yeh succinctly summarizes, at the end
of the nineteenth century, Shanghai’s courtesans created a new playground
in which they represented both tradition and modernity and in which their
clients could enjoy and forget themselves.17
In late nineteenth-century China, while many ordinary folks still found pho-
tography mysterious, threatening, and somehow intractable, those who were
first drawn to portrait photography on a massive scale, not surprisingly, were
the courtesans. Yeh writes that contemporary literati were engaged in courte-
san-photo collection as a hobby.18 Poetry of the time also indicated that getting
photographed was a popular activity among courtesans, as this poem from
around the 1880s records:
Photography from the West has been much acclaimed;

It seems to excel painting.
Hundreds of thousands of famous courtesans have had their
pictures taken;
fearing that in years to come their beauty would lessen.19
The poet Li Mo’an wrote in 1876:
Photographs reveal microscopic and realistic details.

Better than painting, photographs bring out also the spirit.
Customers fight to buy these photos,
Through these pictures they visit beautiful women.20
Both poems emphasize the value of photographs over paintings in captur-

ing the splendor of the courtesans. Photography is realistic and it freezes the
women at their most beautiful, so photographs were valued by both the cour-
tesans and their clients. Courtesans had them taken as a means to preserve
their beauty, while clients purchased them in the form of pictorial pamphlets
from which to select their lovers. In other words, photography was popular
within the courtesan culture in terms of both its documentary and advertis-
ing abilities. The caption of an 1884 lithograph, titled “Zhaoxiangguan min-
ghua liuying” (Famous ladies having their pictures taken in a photographic
studio) printed in the pictorial journal Shenjiang mingsheng tushuo (Pictorial
of Shanghai’s scenic and historical spots), reads, “No one among the courte-
sans and the opera circles’ beauties was not attracted to photography. They
would have their portraits taken and reprinted in reduced sizes to distribute to
their loved ones.”21 The courtesans’ exploitation of photography started soon
after the medium’s introduction to China. For their part, photographic studios
actively sought the visits of famous courtesans so they could hang their photos
on the front doors as advertisements and sell these photos directly to the public
for profit.22 A 1909 writing also indicates, “Photography is popular these days.
Photographic studios are everywhere. For advertising purposes, they all hang
up huge portraits, some of great politicians, some of famous courtesans, on
public display.”23 Allegedly the most popular photos of the time were those of
Sai Jinhua (fig. 2.2).24 A market for courtesan photos developed, as evidenced
in late Qing entertainment newspapers, which indicate that many readers had
their own collections of courtesan photographs.25 As a 1911 Youzheng Shuju
(Youzheng Bookstore) advertisement indicates, photos of famous courtesans
were sold individually for forty cents each. The bookstore also collected them
into two volumes. One was made up of six hundred pictures of courtesans
from all over China and priced at $3.50, while the other featured five hundred
pictures of women in Shanghai and sold for $3.00.26
As indicated in the novel Haishang hua liezhuan (Lives of Shanghai flowers)
published in 1894, photos of courtesans had been used as advertising materi-
als for a long time. When the procuress Third Sister Zhu tries to impress her
new patron Li, she reminds him of a well-known photo of her and her sisters,
76 the pictori a l
Fig. 2.2. Photographic portrait of Sai Jinhua.
titled The Seven Sisters, which had hung in many photographic studios years
before.27 In the late nineteenth century, public display of a courtesan’s photos
was a crucial indicator of her success. The ability of photographs to be repro-
duced in unlimited numbers effectively expanded the reach of courtesan cul-
ture and facilitated the promotion of photography. While courtesans were the
first women to openly enter consumer culture in China, they were also the first
ones to be publicly presented as symbols of consumption. They were the major
clientele of the booming fashion retail business, but they themselves were ob-
jects of consumption. Many red-light district guides sprung up in the market,
including Haishang fanhuatu (A picture of flourishing Shanghai), Haishang
dengshilu (Records of the lighted city of Shanghai), Shenjiang mingshen tushuo
(Pictorial of Shanghai’s scenery), and Haishang youxi tulu (Pictorial record of
Shanghai’s amusements), providing descriptions of various courtesans.28 If we
believe the courtesan was also a form of commodity, she benefited much from
the new invention of photography, as the commodity culture could flourish
only when the commodities, both in their material form and as visual repre-
sentations thereof, were widely available in the market.
The courtesans’ new values of visual exchange in the cosmopolitan culture
can be detected before the photographic age in contemporary mass-produced
lithographs. I take one of Dianshizhai’s lithographs as an example. In a late
nineteenth-century lithograph titled Bugan cifu (Not willing to bend over as
a female), we see a female courtesan dressed in men’s clothing sitting with a
Fig. 2.3. “Bugan cifu” (Not willing to bend over as a female),

Dianshizhai, November 18, 1889.
man in a restaurant (fig. 2.3).29 The accompanying text states in part, “Some
courtesans dress and pretend to be Mandarins; others adorn themselves with
Western or Japanese clothing — but they all assume female identity. Someone
takes up the strange idea of changing her feminine beauty into masculine
suaveness to stroll about the human world: ‘Who can tell if I am a man or a
woman?’ ”30 While transvestism and the prominent courtesan culture develop-
ing in Shanghai were clearly featured and viewed as symbols of the strangeness
of modernity in this lithograph, the most important aspect of this picture’s
visual economy, I would argue, is the display of woman’s spectacularity. The
accompanying text indicates that those onlookers think of her as a handsome
young man. But we can identify these surrounding gazes as those of the read-
ers, who on the contrary recognize, are attracted to, and investigate precisely
her female identity. With the text’s suggestion of her real sex, the lithograph
directs our gaze to her body and ultimately to her bound feet, which are the
chief visual hint of her femininity. Everyone inside and outside the picture
gazes at the courtesan and questions the relationship between her and her
78 the pictori a l
male patron, as well as the relationship between her appearance and her sexual
identity. While the accompanying text is trying to tell a story, the key features
of this lithograph are image instead of narrativity, and spectacularity instead
of activity. With this emphasis on visual scrutiny, the picture also diverts our
attention from the courtesan’s physical agency (transvestism, mobility, and
consumption) to her state of being possessed by her patron, as bound feet were
seen as the most erotic female sexual feature at the time. But the text never
mentions her being an object and instead emphasizes her as a subject: “Who
can tell if I am a man or a woman?” In other words, the lithograph, itself a
prominent product of the developing visual modernity in Shanghai, empha-
sizes and exploits the visual economy of prostitution, while its accompanying
text, which seems to be the more traditional form of communication, suggests
the prostitute’s agency. It documents that we cannot take the connections be-
tween the visual and the progressive for granted, and it also demonstrates how
the visual facilitates female objectification.
Zhang Ailing dates the birth of modern fashion in China to around 1908,
when women’s clothing for the first time displayed a significant change in style,
and after which clothing styles continued to change.31 But as demonstrated in
literature and memoirs of the time, courtesans, as the trendsetters, competed
among themselves from the late nineteenth century onward to be innovative
and original in their dress.32 The courage to adopt new fashions and lifestyles
demonstrated the courtesan culture’s high sensitivity to trends and their acute
awareness of the coming of a new age.33 Wang Tao (1828–1898), a flamboyant
Shanghai intellectual of the time, exclaimed that “the bewitching fashions of
the courtesans stir each other into a frenzy.”34 Stories of courtesans were among
the most popular subjects to be recorded and visualized in fiction, newspapers,
and pictorials. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, foreign commodities
gradually arrived in Shanghai on a massive scale, and soon a growing number
and variety of commodities entered the market. Famous courtesans were now
sought after and promoted by the new consumer culture as actual subjects
who flaunted and personally benefited from their acts of consumerism. These
trendy women were then the most available and seductive symbols of consum-
erism’s empowerment, both to the courtesans (who bought the commodities)
and the male patrons (who bought the courtesans). The courtesan functioned
as a sort of accessory; the money and power of the client could be displayed
in the courtesan’s wardrobe. The rapid development of prostitution, therefore,
can be seen as an inevitable result of the rising bourgeoisie and the wealthier
business class, which insatiably craved commodities to parlay the money they
Fig. 2.4. Photo of the “Ten Most Famous Courtesans” in Shanghai, 1890s.
earned into social status, and which in the end reinforced their power and
influence. The newly developing consumer society needed agents to publicly
display and endorse the act of consumption — of commodities as well as of
prostitution — as pleasurable, admirable, empowering, and simply modern.
This explains why courtesans were willing to be captured in photographs
while many others still saw their own images as sacred — they were the ones
most ready to embrace modernity and the visualization it alone brought (Fig.
2.4). Scholars have reminded us to be aware of the intelligentsia’s superficial
relationships with high-ranking courtesans and its tendency to romanticize
them.35 But I would argue that courtesan fashion was not a literary fabrication
of the writer-patrons, but a real material link between the consumers and the
consumed. The courtesans put on flashy clothing and decorations to attract
the attention of rich men, but it was the latter who were behind the whole
fashion frenzy. They gave the courtesans the money and the incentive to buy
the clothing, with the ultimate aim of showing off not just the courtesans but
themselves as patrons.
The strong connection between courtesans and photography also influ-
enced pictorial portrayals of courtesans. Yeh claims that late nineteenth-
century Shanghai’s illustrated courtesan albums had a strong connection with
photography, as the courtesans were shown with full figures and dynamic ges-
tures, whereas beauties in traditional paintings were often depicted as willowy,
with vapid facial expressions. While many of these courtesan albums deliber-
ately avoid the direct depiction of the city — a lack that reinstates a sense of
universality and emphasizes the link with tradition — the representation of the
80 the pictori a l
courtesans was clearly different from traditional representations of women.

“If we compare the illustrations in this album with illustrations of courtesans
in traditional baimei tu, the strong sense of individuality is distinctly modern
and the result of photography. It is evoked through distinct physical and facial
features that defy standards current at the time.”36 With the introduction of
photography, courtesans were imbued with a new sense of physicality that was
unavailable in traditional painting.
Photography arrived in China when a brand-new consumer culture was de-
veloping at full speed. Photographic recording greatly fueled people’s desire for
possession and control, and the courtesans were more than willing to have their
images manipulated to serve such purposes. Most importantly, photography al-
lowed the courtesans to be consumed on a second level; not only they, but also
their photos, became collectible items among their patrons. Consumer culture
valorizes exchange values, and it also demands a new system of categoriza-
tion that helps order commodities so they can be more efficiently exchanged
and consumed. Photography is an excellent means to systematize and exhibit
things and people alike, and courtesans — with their dual status as persons and
as consumable objects — were perfect candidates for the systemizing efforts
of photography. According to Susan Sontag, “[t]hrough being photographed,
something becomes part of a system of information, fitted into schemes of
classification and storage.”37 Late Qing courtesan culture was characteristically
modern partly because for the first time its images could be mass-produced
and distributed as stand-ins for actual courtesans. This mushrooming of repre-
sentations challenged the assumption that the value of the courtesan resided
in her body, which provided physical pleasure to men. These photographs
demonstrated that their worth could be detached from their sexual services
as collectable images. It is these photographs, I would argue, that most dra-
matically highlight the commodity status of the courtesans, whose value was
defined as much by their exhibition as by their labor.
If late Qing courtesans were among the first to use photography to further
their own interests, it might have been because both photographs and courte-
sans were meant to be circulated. As documented in contemporary novels such
as Haishang hua liezhuan, the main activity of courtesans, particularly those
in the upper echelons, was to go to different banquets and tea parties to sing or
simply to provide companionship. They moved from one party to another in
any given evening, and the high fees allowed patrons to have the courtesan’s
company only for a short while. Sexual service was usually not included, and
the highest-ranked courtesans had sex only with a few selected patrons and
with their lovers. The high amounts charged, therefore, corresponded primar-
ily to their exhibition value. Photography is also characterized by its exchange

and display values. Hubert Damisch says this about early photography: “We
know that the first inventors [of photography] worked to fix images and simul-
taneously to develop techniques for their mass distribution. . . . So that photog-
raphy’s contribution, to use the terms of classical economy, is less on the level
of production, properly speaking, than on that of consumption.”38 This notion
of consumption not only refers to the artistic or fetishistic value of photography,
but it also applies to the use of photography as stand-in for fetishistic objects.
The widely circulated and collected courtesan photos became a uniquely
modern emblem of consumer culture in China, as they clearly displayed the
new power that images had acquired in the consumer realm and showed that
women’s bodies were a key site of contestation where exchange values were of
primary importance.
Cixi and Cross-Dressing

Following quickly on the heels of the courtesans, women of the upper classes
were also attracted to photography. Funü shibao (Women’s news), for example,
solicited photos from readers. Readers could lend their photos to the paper,
which would not pay any royalties, or the editors would pay high prices to
acquire particularly interesting photos.39 In its issues we find photos of famous
courtesans along with those prestigious upper-class women, including ladies
in the Imperial court. Obviously many women of the leisure class were in-
terested not only in having their photographs taken but in displaying them
without reaping any financial reward. Photography became so popular among
women that in 1914 the studio Huaxiao Lou (House of Huaxiao) was opened
and operated entirely by women to attract a female clientele.40 A devoted fan
of early photography in China was Empress Cixi (1835–1908), then the most
powerful person in China. According to the memoir of Deling, the daughter
of a returned ambassador from France, Cixi first saw a photograph while she
was casually strolling around Deling’s room (Deling was living with Cixi at
that time). Cixi was so fascinated by Deling’s photographs that she decided she
had to have some taken, too, and Deling’s brother Xunling was asked to be the
Imperial photographer.41 While there are records indicating that Cixi had been
introduced to photography as early as the 1860s,42 these 1903 photos of her are
the earliest ones extant.
Not only did Cixi have photographs taken of herself, she also had them
mass-produced. According to Sun Yanjing, Cixi reproduced 103 copies of her
favorite photo, with all copies 73 cm × 60 cm and elegantly framed (fig. 2.5).43
82 the pictori a l
It is recorded that Cixi also had her photos reprinted and posted in public.44
She even allowed her pictures to be sold publicly, as evidenced by a 1904 news-
paper advertisement.45 In one of her photos, we see her posing as the Buddhist
goddess of mercy Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara), who is known for her benevolence
to the people (fig. 2.6). This photograph had been meticulously planned, as
documented in an internal report recording in detail the various kinds of deco-
rations, characters, and settings Cixi demanded.46 The performative nature of
the picture had long-lasting effects. Allegedly it was because of this picture that
Cixi’s subordinates began to address her as laofoye (Master Buddha), a name
by which Cixi is still known among Chinese today thanks to television, film,
and literary representations.
There are at least three types of pleasure Cixi might have experienced
through photography: her association with the traditional feminine virtues of
Guanyin, the act of becoming someone else, and the expectation that her
image would be seen by many — all of which are connected to photography.
First, Guanyin contains the unmistakable connotations of ultra-femininity.
Originally a male god, Guanyin was quickly transformed into a goddess once
imported to China, and she is popular among Chinese because she embod-
ies the ideal of motherhood: she is kind, caring, and loving. Among all the
imported Buddhist deities, Guanyin is the only genuine Chinese goddess, and
this extraordinarily successful indigenization seems to be intimately linked to
the deity’s feminization. Guanyin’s vast popularity led to the rise of goddess
cults in late imperial China.47 In these first photographs, Cixi chose to present
herself as Guanyin in stark contrast to the authoritarian and masculine image
her people had of her. Avalokiteśvara had to change sex to be embraced by the
Chinese, and Cixi deliberately highlighted her feminine side in her photo-
graphs, probably hoping the image would be embraced by the many viewers
who would later have access to this photo. While the masculine power Cixi
held was intrinsic and unquestionable, she wanted to be seen as feminine — a
process that photography greatly facilitated.
There was a short story by the famous late Qing novelist Han Bangqing
about how the chivalrous bandit Green Dragonfly was deified by the local
people because he cross-dressed as a female fox spirit and conducted righteous
and charitable acts.48 This story of cross-dressing emphasizes the intimate link
between feminization and deification in China; the man tried but failed to
attract wide recognition from the masses until he developed a female persona,
which in the end allowed him to gain sainthood.49 The story embodies the
pleasure of performing alternative gender identities. The cross-dressing of the
Green Dragonfly reveals less about identity confusion than about the will to
Fig. 2.5. Empress Cixi, a devoted fan

of early photography in China, 1903.
perform another identity. Likewise, Cixi, who herself was a great opera fan,
enjoyed singing and performing Peking Opera50 and took pleasure in perform-
ing femininity.
Paola Zamperini demonstrates that a number of cross-dressing activities
were in evidence in late Qing Shanghai,51 and I believe this cultural phenom-
enon can be seen as a manifestation of the new posttraditional order. While
Zamperini might accurately identify the trend of cross-dressing as a reflec-
tion of the confusion of identity that resulted from the social chaos spreading
throughout Chinese society,52 we must also take into consideration the compo-
nent of agency in the act of dressing. As demonstrated earlier, the Dianshizhai
lithograph Bugan cifu suggests a sense of playfulness and pride in the cross-
dressing of the courtesan, even though she is highly objectified (fig. 2.3). Many
courtesans dressed in men’s clothing partly because the male guise gave them
more freedom to enter public areas originally denied to them.
As Siao-chen Hu reminds us, cross-dressing is an age-old literary theme in
traditional Chinese literature, and it became a particularly prominent strategy
in the female writing of tanci of the eighteenth and nineteenth century to
allow female writers and readers to fantasize a new world of a public career
and sexuality unavailable to them in reality.53 What was new in the late Qing
84 the pictori a l
Fig. 2.6. Cixi disguised as Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara), 1903.
period, I believe, was the more prominent tendency of a male assuming a

female role through cross-dressing, as shown in the Green Dragonfly story and
the many cross-dressing photographs. There is ample evidence of upper-class
males cross-dressing as females, not entirely unlike the photographic perfor-
mance of Cixi, whose social/political identity was more masculine than femi-
nine. At stake was the cross-dresser’s newfound confidence and playfulness in
performing different personas. In other words, cross-dressing was no longer
just an empowering imaginative space for the repressed, but it became trendy
and “fun,” which might be related to the cult of the self and the consumerist
ideology promoted by modernity. One could transcend one’s identity through
performance — an act that simultaneously implies self-control. Scholars tend
to theorize the construction of a modern Chinese identity as part and parcel of
a new anti-imperialist and antifeudal nationalist discourse. The underlying as-
sumption is that the construction of a new nation requires the construction of a
new collective identity. While this understanding is accurate in many respects,
we must remember that modernity also assures people that they have the abil-
ity to form their own individual identities. As Anthony Giddens reminds us,
modern society promises us that identity emerges from choice.54
Photography accentuates, or forges, this cult of the self, since photographs,

unlike other forms of performance, can be seen not only by others but also
by oneself, and photography suggests a will to power in terms of controlling
one’s body and identity according to one’s wishes. Cross-dressing photos were
not limited to late Qing courtesans (fig. 2.7), but were also a playful entertain-
ment for the upper-class male. An advertisement for Minying Zhaoxiang Guan
(Minying Photographic Studio) lists the prices for photos of different sizes, but
it also includes prices for other features:
• There is a 50 percent surcharge for turning one person into two;

for three images of a single person on the same photo the price is
doubled;
• Posing in theatrical costumes, Western clothing, or traditional attire
costs thirty cents extra; . . .
• Our studio also provides a small flying ship, with a two-person capac-
ity; it looks exactly like flying in the sky.55
Unlike portrait painting, people went to photographic studios not only to

capture their figures, but also to perform and have fun with photographic
techniques like superimposition or costumes and settings. A Weixin Zhaoxiang
Guan (Weixin Photographic Studio) advertisement more clearly demonstrates
the trend of huazhuang zhao (costume photography) that was popular in urban
China (fig. 2.8). Located in the public garden Yu Yuan (Yu Garden), Weixin
specialized in costume photography, and its advertisement highlighted the
many costumes and colorful sets of popular Peking Opera performances avail-
able for customers to choose from. Its manager — Mr. Lu, an opera specialist —
taught the customers how to pose with the right gestures and expressions for
specific characters and storylines. We will talk more about the connection be-
tween photography and Peking Opera in the following section. Here I just want
to highlight how certain photographic studios provided a stage for people to
perform. As the late Qing scholar Shen Taimou documented in his Donghua
suolu (Record of trivial things in East China), literati of the time were fond of
getting their photos taken as a leisure activity. They wore different costumes
and decorations, from traditional to Western, and took on the personas of
monks and women. Many of these photos were for sale in the marketplace.56
Lu Xun criticized the hypocrisy of late Qing literati who had bizarre portraits
taken in which they appeared simultaneously as both master and slave — these
rich literati were the most ready to embrace class hierarchy.57 We can safely
infer from these cultural activities that photography was welcomed by late Qing
elites as a leisure activity partly because of its ability to document and repro-
duce performance.
86 the pictori a l
Fig. 2.7. A German soldier with a cross-

dressing courtesan in late Qing.
This leads us to another mechanism of pleasure in Cixi’s “Guanyin” pho-

tograph: it produced a visual record of a performance to be retrieved later and
shared with others. In this sense, Cixi could be seen as very modern. At a time
when the Qing court still did not allow the people to look directly at the Impe-
rial family, in 1903 she allowed her images to be captured and displayed in two
forms, photographs and Western paintings. At the same time she was attracted
to photography, she also commissioned an American female painter to produce
four huge portraits in oil. The display and ownership of the four paintings were
clearly planned; one was shipped to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair to impress
foreigners.58 While a fundamental difference between the photograph and the
painting is the much larger number of copies the former could produce, Cixi
wanted to have similar control over the photographs, and she ordered only 103
copies of her photograph to be produced.
In this sense, Cixi embraced only one of the two unique features of photog-
raphy. She allowed her images to be captured and reprinted, but she did not
allow them to be infinitely reproduced. While photography appears to give
people a new way to assert their agency, the mechanical reproductive nature of
photography also undercuts the performer’s fantasy of control. Cixi was excited
Fig. 2.8. Advertising of Weixin Photographic Studio’s costume

photography, Xi zazhi, no. 9 (December 1923).
about the idea of her subjects scrutinizing her photographs, probably because
she believed she had total control over her image. But Cixi did not want to sur-
render her images to countless viewings beyond her control,59 which makes the
advertisements of her photos in newspapers an enigma. Although she held the
highest power in the country, Cixi did not understand that the meanings of her
photographic images were produced not only by herself but also by the viewers.
Cixi’s absolute power, and therefore her absolute ignorance, characterized the
differences of her performances from those of the courtesans, who sought the
free appropriation and consumption of their photographs by the masses. Cixi,
therefore, had yet to embrace this truly modern aspect of photography.
The Photogenic Dan

As shown in the two cases analyzed so far, soon after photography was im-
ported to China, it was quickly welcomed among the people. From courtesans
to Cixi the empress, many women became fond of the new medium, which
allowed them to “perform” their identities. While having photographs taken
88 the pictori a l
quickly became a female pastime, men also had photographs taken, but they
were mostly kept as personal belongings and were seldom widely circulated.
Men’s photos appeared less often in magazines, and they were usually not
available for sale (with the exceptions of some photos of famous high officials
or those with special effects); masculinity could hardly afford such visualiza-
tion and subsequent objectification. Women’s affinity with photography is con-
trasted sharply with the uneasiness shown toward the medium by many men.
Lu Xun, for example, constantly rejected magazines’ invitations to take and
print his pictures.60
A similar gender affiliation with photography can also be seen in the new
Peking Opera culture of the early twentieth century. Dan (male actors special-
izing in the performance of female roles) demonstrated most spectacularly the
complexity of cross-dressing and gender performance revealed in the photo-
graphs of Cixi and male literati discussed in the previous section. Although
almost all opera performers had photos taken of them, those of dan were more
popular and more frequently reprinted in newspapers and magazines than
were photos of other opera performers. In contrast to the strong “photogenic”
components in the new star culture of dan, the famous male-character per-
formers had far fewer photos taken during the period. Allegedly, Sun Juxian
(1841–1931) refused to have any tableau photos taken, while some, like Tan
Xinpei (1847–1917), had only a handful taken.61 With the help of photographs,
dan preceded movie actors to form the first modern “star” culture in China
around the 1910s and 1920s.
Historical records reveal that since the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 219) there
has been a continuous history of female impersonation in Chinese drama.62 As
an extremely specialized art, dan performance did not become a wide cultural
practice until the Qing dynasty, when repeated bans on female singers and
dancers required that all female performers be replaced with dan.63 Interest-
ingly, it was during the early Republican period, when the public display of
women was once again allowed, that the cultural predominance of the dan
culture reached its zenith. It was also during this period that a new tie-in/
advertising product — tableau photographs of performers — was adopted in
opera circles, and this two-dimensional flattening of performed femininities
intertwined with the popularity of the dan performers to become a unique
form of representation.
The popularity of dan tableau photos was a result of two major cultural
mechanisms: the spectacular dimension of the dan performance and the merg-
ing of Peking Opera into the larger consumer culture via women’s participa-
tion. The Qing government banned both female performance and prostitu-
tion, thus dan performers became the most available and visible symbol of
“female” eroticism. New genres and role types were developed to showcase the
seductiveness of male dan, and after watching the suggestive shows, interested
patrons would check out the featured dan and solicit sexual services. The world
of Beijing’s theater at that time was one of lust, in which the male devotees/
patrons saw the dan performers predominantly as sexual objects, a point of view
evidenced in writings in which the male writers describe the beauty of dan
in quintessentially feminine terms.64 Their wide participation in prostitution
quickly cast dan into the lowest stratum in society. Mei Lanfang (1894–1961),
for example, came from a distinguished but isolated lineage of dan perform-
ers.65 In Jo Riley’s words, “[t]he male line of the Mei family went on stage; the
female line married into the profession and gave birth to male performers and
female marriage parcels to be married off to other actors. Those in the acting
profession were social outcasts. They intermarried with other acting families
and lived beyond the main city gates as a group of outsiders, a clan of profes-
sional performers.”66 While actors were social outcasts in general, the dual
marginalization of their gender (female personification) and sexuality (homo-
sexual prostitution) made dan the least respected type of entertainer.
These dan performers, however, were always popular, as their appeal was
more sensational than that of other performers. We will elaborate on the devel-
opment of Peking Opera in chapter 4. Here we first focus on the dan performers.
In this traditional art form, which prized singing over appearance, dan occu-
pied the visual domain. Wei Changsheng (1744–1802) — the dan performer who
first brought Hui theater, the antecedent of Peking Opera, to Beijing — was able
to capture Beijing audiences largely because he introduced new hairstyles and
costumes to display a new and graceful form of femininity. Hu Xilu (1827–1890)
and Mei Qiaoling (1842–1882), the two most famous early Peking Opera dan
stars, experimented with costumes, adornments, and the combination of dif-
ferent role types to create new ways of performance. Huang Yaoqin (1881–1954)
realized the new huashan role by bringing together a wide variety of available
dan acting styles, paving the way for later dan performers to develop a compre-
hensive theater of female impersonation in the Republican years. If traditional
Peking Opera privileges the aural over the visual as artistically more lofty, the
dan (with the exception of the qingyi, a sub role type who mainly sings and
seldom moves) is allowed the space and indeed encouraged to perform visual
experiments. These performers, not surprisingly, were also more receptive to
the new modern entertainment culture that stressed the spectacle.
The popularity of dan performers can be seen as a loose continuation of
the courtesan culture. Most scholars attribute the downturn of the courte-
90 the pictori a l
san culture beginning in the 1920s to the rising social discourse advocating
the legal regulation of prostitution.67 As documented in progressive cultural
productions like Wu Yonggang’s 1934 film Shennü (The goddess), prostitu-
tion was now framed in moral terms as social corruption, female oppression,
and a hindrance to China’s modernization.68 Luo Suwen also argues that by
the 1920s there were many new high-class commodities, such as residential
housing and automobiles, entering the commodity market, and the rich now
had other, probably more visible, commodities than courtesans with which to
display their social status.69 The dan performers quickly took up the symbolic
role the courtesans left behind, and the dan performers could be even better
players to advertise fashion and modernity because of their natural affinity with
the new entertainment industry. With the help of emerging mass media such
as magazines and phonograph records, dan performers formed the first star
culture in China. The visibility and penetration of these mass representations
far exceeded the symbolic power of individual courtesans seen strolling and
being talked about around the city.
In the late 1910s and early 1920s, Peking Opera emerged as a key modern
entertainment form across many Chinese urban centers, shaping the extreme
popularity of Si da mingdan (the four great dan): Mei Lanfang, Shang Xiaoyun
(1900–1976), Xun Huisheng (1900–1968), and Cheng Yanqiu (1904–1958), who,
along with their other achievements in acting and singing, were most famous
for introducing new visual excitement to the traditional theater, transforming it
into a modern mass entertainment. 70 Mei Lanfang controversially placed a real
Singer sewing machine on the supposedly minimalist Peking Opera stage,71
Shang Xiaoyun first introduced Western dances in Modengqie nü (Modeng
qie’s daughter),72 and Xun Huisheng mimicked Shirley Temple’s expressions
and gestures in his performances.73 The early Mei Lanfang was criticized by
commentators, who suggested that he was so popular among audiences mostly
because of his special attention to beautiful costumes.74
The sense of spectacularity in the new dan culture was further reinforced
by the performers’ gender play and fluid sexual personas. While some dan
performers were still prostitutes to male patrons, there were increasingly more
female patrons, sometimes famous courtesans themselves, who chased after
the dan performers.75 All four great dan performed as transvestite female char-
acters. They wore men’s costumes onstage only when the female characters
they played assumed men’s identities, and often as pretext for them to engage
in battles and demonstrate some kinds of female masculinity. Mulan congjun
(Mulan joins the army), which was modeled after the traditional story of Hua
Mulan, who joins the army in her father’s place, was first performed in 1917
and was one of the key performances that brought Mei stardom. He was most
appealing in his performance of Mulan in the army, in the rather “queer”
performance of a male actor portraying a female character who is pretend-
ing to be a male soldier. Xun Huisheng also played several such characters,
including the heroine of Daying jielie (The glorious and unyielding Xiuying).
The new dan culture presented a complex gender landscape that gave an extra
dimension to early twentieth-century Chinese culture and its gender politics.
According to his acute reading of Ba Jin’s short story “Di’er de muqin” (The
second mother), David Wang argues that Ba Jin uses the sexual and gender
performance, or the queerness, of dan to reformulate a radical anarchist proj-
ect, in which the identity of China as one’s nation is also destabilized.76 Wang’s
reading demonstrates that in spite of its connection to and easy symbolization
of the feudal past, the gender ambiguity of dan has a rich potential to generate
new meanings associated with the modern age, which is evidenced in the
enormous range of experimentation associated with or engineered by dan on
the Peking Opera stage.
However, this complex genderscape reinforced and was reinforced by the
development of consumer culture, which played an important part in the rise
of the dan tableau photo culture. The first tableau photos were allegedly taken
in Fengtai Photographic Studio, which opened in Beijing in 1892. Its owner,
Ren Qingtai (aka Ren Jingfeng, 1850–1932), had been a successful entrepre-
neur. The business network he owned was extensive, ranging from photogra-
phy to filmmaking, from furniture to soft drinks, and he also invested heavily
in the famous Dong’an market entertainment area, in which Daguanlou (the
Panorama) featured some of the most popular Peking Operas at that time.77
Carefully observing which actors and which sections of the performances were
popular among the audience, Ren would ask these opera stars to his studio first
to pose in the most “marketable” gestures and costumes for still pictures, and
then to perform selected fighting scenes in front of a motion-picture camera.78
While I will tackle the relationship between Fengtai’s moviemaking and Pe-
king Opera in chapter 4, I would like to emphasize here that these photographs
and movies were probably the first modern tie-in products to fully exploit the
commercial potential of a popular cultural activity — Peking Opera.
The tableau photos of dan became popular overnight. According to Xu Ji
chuan, the biographer of Mei Lanfang and an esteemed scholar of Peking
Opera, the trend of tableau photos as trendy collectable items started with
Mei. Xu recounted that in 1912, Mei distributed his tableau photos to viewers
of his last show in Shanghai to commemorate this first trip of his to the city.
Mei’s pioneering gesture soon developed into a trend that many famous Peking
92 the pictori a l
Opera performers followed.79 Mei also recorded this incident in his autobiog-
raphy, describing it as a novel advertising scheme concocted by the Shanghai
theater owner to boost ticket sales.80 People began to see Mei’s photos printed
on the backs of mirrors or inside washbasins, and with these commodities
Mei’s images and fame traveled quickly across the country.81 Obviously these
commodities were women-oriented since women would supposedly see Mei’s
image as their own when they or others looked in their mirrors and washbasins.
In fact, women’s participation was an important component of this new dan
culture. Many female audience members rushed to theaters in the beginning
of the Republican era when the new government revoked the ban on women’s
presence in public places.82 The drastic growth of the female audience trans-
lated into increasing attention paid to stage costumes, sentimental storylines,
or, more simply, female-oriented dramas, which directly encouraged the de-
velopment of dan culture. Many new audience members were not enthusiastic
about traditional aesthetic measures such as the strict rules of individual sing-
ing styles and movements. Instead, what fascinated them were dan images and
costumes.83 And through the distribution of tableau photos, the costumes worn
by dan became fashions to be followed not only by theatergoers but also by the
much larger audience exposed to the photographs.
While the early courtesan photos directly advertised the woman photo-
graphed as the object of consumption, the dan photos took a more convo-
luted pathway of signification. Like the courtesan photos, these tableau photos
also became commodities to be purchased individually, and magazines and
newspapers reprinted them along with their reporting about opera circles. But
the dan images not only represented the performers but also were advertising
symbols for other products — for example there was a Mei Lanfang cigarette
featuring Mei’s photo on the package. The development of this tableau photo
culture witnessed the rise and the mutual reinforcement of Peking Opera and
consumer society. The photos were given away at opera shows to attract audi-
ences and were also icons printed on different commodities. Although the
courtesan photos and the tableau photos seem to suggest two very different
cultural economies — the former was defined by sexuality and the latter by
artistic or entertainment value — photography was used as an advertising tool
in both cases, and both courtesans and dan were commodities. Originating
from a heavily erotic tradition, the new dan culture of the early twentieth
century became a commercial product that invited image capturing and easy
fetishization/identification.
While staunch revolutionary critics like Lu Xun criticized the decadent
aesthetics of dan as a defilement of the realist project of art,84 the new dan
culture that developed alongside a consumer culture was a more complex

discourse than feudal arts, and it bequeathed to spectators a new taste of and
expectation for entertainment. Peking Opera performers faced unparalleled
commercial competition, yet an unprecedented income was also made pos-
sible by the new entertainment environment.85 The dan vogue marked for the
first time in Chinese history the commodification of performers, whose private
lives were revealed to and investigated by the public,86 and the dan had to keep
abreast of the latest cultural trends and living styles. Modern commodities are
produced both as “promotional objects” and “commodity signs” in that they
are designed to be simultaneously both objects and advertisements, allowing
the logic of promotion to invade the production process.87 The tableau photos
of dan were products with a similar cultural mechanism. These photos took
part in and witnessed the development of a larger commodity culture, and
what was at stake in their popularity was not only their own commodity status
but also what they signified. While the photos were commodities to be sold,
they were also advertisements for the stars, the performances, and all those
commodities that took advantage of the images of dan. In classical Marxian
terms, commodity fetishism refers to the conflation of the use value and the
exchange value of an object. But in this case we are dealing with more compli-
cated movements among various use values and exchange values involved in
opera performances, photo collections, and the commodities utilizing them.
Their complicated relationship and mutual references further reinforce their
cultural power as commodities.
The more the photos signified, the higher the consumption values they were
given, and the more the photos represented and replaced other social relation-
ships, the more readily they invited commodity fetishism. The circulation of
these tableau photos transformed Peking Opera from a folk performance into a
modern mass commodity culture with an influence and a commercial network
that extended far beyond the theater, in which the dan performers both ben-
efited and were exploited. As seen in the large number of tableau photos still
extant,88 the dan performers tend to look directly at the camera, whereas most
other performers’ tableau gestures imitate theatrical performances. These dan
performers seem highly aware of the camera and of the implied viewers of the
photograph. In the tableau photos of the plays Yiliu ma (A strand of flax) (fig.
2.9) and Deng Xiagu (Deng Xiagu) (fig. 2.10), two of the first modern stories
brought to the Peking Opera stage, Mei Lanfang poses in ways that present the
pictures less as theater stills than current studio photos of an ordinary girl. This
tendency is most obvious in the photo for Deng Xiagu. The curtain reminds us
not of the theater but of a secluded domestic space, as if the shy young girl has
94 the pictori a l
Fig. 2.9. Mei Lanfang in Yiliu ma (A strand of flax), 1915–1916.
just emerged out of her private space to confront the public, and the implied
viewers here are less the theatrical audience than the photo viewers, who oc-
cupy a privileged position from which to scrutinize and enjoy all the subtle and
seductive gender messages the picture suggests.
This photogenic sensibility is also observed in Mei’s tableau photos for other
traditional plays. In the photo for Qinwen sishan (Qinwen tearing fan) (fig.
2.11), Mei’s soft reclining gesture is clearly intended for the photograph’s view-
ers, who could scrutinize “her” at close range, than for the theater audiences,
who could only see the character from afar. The pose also suggests a kind of
voyeurism commonly seen in Western paintings. A photo for Taizhen wai-
zhuan (The legend of Yang Yuhuan) (fig. 2.12) is an astonishingly modern pic-
ture. Mei’s facial expression, gesture, costume, and ornaments are distinct from
those of traditional Peking Opera. Set in a dark and unspecific background,
the picture also deliberately dissociates itself from the traditional Peking Opera
theater environment, stressing the self-signification of the figure and therefore
its independent status as a photo. This style promotes easier identification and
objectification, creating an image dissociated from the plot and the character
Fig. 2.10. Mei Lanfang in Deng Xiagu

(Deng Xiagu), 1915–1916.
and promoting a form of fetishistic identification. These pictures were taken

in the 1910s and the early 1920s. Interestingly, Mei’s photographic sensibility
changed markedly in his later years, when he began to identify himself as an
artist rather than as a popular star. In later pictures, like that for Guifei zuijiu
(Drunken beauty) (fig. 2.13), the more mature Mei offered discreet theatri-
cal gazes and gestures, which, combined with the background draperies that
clearly resemble the stage settings, invites less photographic objectification
than the photos taken earlier. One might interpret them as results of chang-
ing trends, and I do not want to privilege Mei’s agency in these poses, as these
photos, after all, are commercial products. But the effects are clear. The 1910s
photos are collectible items relatively autonomous to the operas, while the
older, less sexually attractive Mei in the later photos is tied more closely to
the theatrical performances, more appropriate to the “world artist” status he
gained after several highly acclaimed world tours in the 1930s.89 In contrast
to these later tableau photos, the earlier photos were sexually suggestive, and
their visual designs were structured more according to the visual economy of
photography than that of the stage, also reminding us that young dan perform-
96 the pictori a l
Fig. 2.11. Mei Lanfang in Qinwen sishan (Qinwen tearing fan), 1915–1916.
ers were clearly inscribed within the new gender economy of the emerging
consumer culture.
Polysemous Photographic Femininity

in the Age of Consumption
Dan, originally an “inferior” substitute for actresses necessitated by the ban-
ning of women from the stage, came to embody the essence of femininity
itself, which female performers were supposedly unable to study and acquire.
The tradition of xieyi (spirit writing) in Chinese aesthetics, which focuses on
abstract moral forms and life patterns,90 seems to endorse the assumption that
male performers’ femininity-in-spirit is superior to female performers’ feminin-
ity-in-appearance. As this aesthetic tradition values spirit over appearance, in
theory a successful male dan could grasp the essence of femininity while fe-
male performers could only stay on the supposedly subordinate “realist” level.91
In other words, femininity is not necessarily equated with biological sex but
can be acquired and performed; gender and sex are differentiated. However,
relying on this theory to interpret dan culture prevents us from seeing the
actual objectification of the dan body. Within the actual opera world, the dan
Fig. 2.12. Mei Lanfang in Taizhen waizhuan

(The legend of Yang Yuhuan), 1923–1925.
not only presented female spirit but also provided actual sexual services and en-
ticements. The new patriarchal commodification culture co-opted traditional
aesthetics to further exploit the image and the body of dan.
Photography, which calls attention to the performance of the body, echoes
both traditional aesthetics and the commodification of the dan body, provid-
ing a new representational space for gender performance. Roland Barthes re-
minds us that photography’s ability to capture reality gives its representations
two contradictory features. Its closeness to reality makes the representations
extremely polysemous, which Barthes describes as “madness,”92 and photog-
raphy tends to hide its mediation process, mythologizing the representation
as natural instead of constructed — its connotations became denotations.93
Therefore, while photography has the potential to destabilize gender mean-
98 the pictori a l
Fig. 2.13. Mei Lanfang in Guifei zuijiu (Drunken beauty), 1930s.
ings, photographs can also be easily manipulated by the dominating ideologies

to become their mouthpiece. If viewers really take the photographs of these
dan performers seriously, they might come up with many obtuse readings. For
example, in figure 2.9, why is the building in the background a typical Western
cottage — rarely seen in China at that time? Why is the background covered
with snow while flowers blossom in front? The attention paid to the artificiality
of the photograph could destabilize its presentation of femininity, allowing us
to escape the consumerist and patriarchal gaze to behold the gender “perfor-
mance” this picture presents. However, in these dan photos that are gender
performances to start with (male personification of female roles), most viewers
ignore these plural gender meanings in favor of the more comfortable readings
legitimated by the dominant discourse, i.e., the beauty and the domesticity of
Mei Lanfang.
The polysemous nature of photography might have facilitated the logic of
traditional aesthetics, which did not take the sexed body for granted. Yet the
evidence presented here suggests that photographs, instead of liberating them,
actually captured and objectified the meanings of female images as photo-
graphic-realism-for-sale. It was not the “female spirit” of traditional Chinese
thinking but rather the erotic “female body image” reprinted for various kinds
of consumption that dominate the address and the signification. As shown in
the many tableau dan photos, acquired femininity was no longer embodied in
exquisite singing and performances that artistically mediated the meanings of
gender. Thanks to the invention of photography, femininity could now be fixed
in portable and framed images to be circulated within the largely patriarchal
popular culture. The dan photographs dematerialize and disembody feminin-
ity only to expedite male consumption.
In other words, photography is polysemous, but its polysemous nature can
easily be subdued. Let us examine one more example to further analyze how
powerful, or how fragile, it is for the dominant patriarchal discourse to define
the meanings of a tableau photo. If the viewers tend to take Mei’s femininity for
granted in these tableau photos, this example demonstrates how unsettling it is
when his real male identity is revealed, immediately destabilizing the gender
and sexual significations of these photos. Beiyang huabao reported gossip about
the pending marriage between Mei Lanfang and Peking Opera male imper-
sonator Meng Xiaodong, a marriage that, like much entertainment news, was
only a fabrication (fig. 2.14).94 The most interesting aspect of this report is not
the fabricated story but the “dialogue” between the writing and the photos.
The story of Mei’s heterosexual romantic affair was accompanied not by a
photo of him in everyday life, but by a tableau photo in which he is cross-
dressed. Like those studied earlier, this photo suggests a kind of contemporary
feminine beauty that (wo)men desired, but the Mei depicted in the writing
was a traditional man, and the report revealed how he attended all of Meng’s
performances and longed to take her as his third wife, a move endorsed by
his first wife to counter the intractable second wife. In the writing we find a
rich Chinese man living in a feudal time, consorting with actresses with the
approval of the wife at home. But the photo gives a surreal dimension to this
feudal story, as the theatrical persona of Mei reminds the readers of the perfor-
mative dimensions of gender and sexuality, which also indirectly undercuts the
heterosexual hierarchy and the games described in the writing. The obvious
incompatibility between the Mei Lanfang depicted in the photo and the one
100 the pictori a l
Fig. 2.14. Polysemous nature of photography and slipperiness

of gender identity. Beiyang huabao, August 8, 1926.
in the writing strangely complement each other, as both the significations are
endorsed by patriarchal values, yet the gender identity of Mei shifts from the
objectified female to the dominating male, making this report so unsettling.
While it is impossible to know how this report was read by the public at the
time or why the editor selected that particular photo, from my own historical
vantage point I can only interpret this “accident” as manifesting the slipperi-
ness of gender identity, not only in Mei’s theatrical performances, but also in
the ways his photos might destabilize gender meanings. An interesting aspect
of the modern visual culture that emerged in China was its cultivation of a new
context in which images play against and derive meaning from each other, as
demonstrated earlier in Wu Youru’s Wo jian youlian (I see and pity), which jux-
taposes photography with lithography. The fiction of gender integrity is partic-
ularly obvious in the medium of photography, which so easily abducts images
from their original sites of meaning to various contexts that give new meanings
to the images. New meanings arose through the placements of the photos in
various contexts and in dialogue with different images and narratives.
But the concept of queer politics may not be the most useful one with which
to understand the phenomenon because Mei had no control over this gos-
sip report. A dan submitting “her” images to be photographically reproduced
treads on a path of estrangement. In order for “her” image to be captured in a
photograph, the star must become alienated from “her” performing persona in
the public circulation of the picture. “Her” identity and career achievement is
no longer defined by onstage performances; they can easily be appropriated by
different forms of desire. This might explain Mei’s tendency to pose in more
clearly defined theatrical postures and settings in later tableau photos. This
tendency is exactly a response to what Walter Benjamin meant by “the loss of
aura,” as the photographic reproduction of the performer’s image, no matter
how much it models itself after real theatrical performances, is no longer at-
tached to the live presentation and can no longer produce the cult values art
claims to possess.95 It is in the tableau photo that a dan performer could no
longer call himself an artist but a star, since he no longer controls the images
being photographed and circulated. There is no agency as such in the dissemi-
nation of photographic images, and the images could easily be appropriated by
its distributors and receivers. In this gossip report, the meanings generated are
unstable probably because the ways images are used are not yet fully controlled
by patriarchal consumerist ideology. A coherent pattern of “seeing,” or a coher-
ent modern China, is still in the making.96
If photography introduces a new way for Chinese to understand and experi-
ence gender, the effects produced are multivalent, and they both liberate and
confine the meanings of gender; by loosening our understanding of gender, we
are also invited and seduced to further appropriate gender. What is so unique
about photography, particularly in its dual capacity to set free and imprison
femininity, is the seemingly direct and honest representation of reality in-
scribed within a mechanical reproductive system that always implies a network
of reception beyond the producers’ control. If the performative dimensions of
Cixi in her photographs resided mostly at the production level, the courtesans
and the dan were more willing to surrender control over their images to the
larger consumer culture because of their own commodity status. And it was
the latter who understood best what photography is.

Photography, Performance, and The Making of Female Images

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Photography, Performance, and The Making of Female Images

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University of Hawai'i Press

Chapter Title: Photography, Performance, and the Making of Female Images

Book Title: The Distorting Mirror

Photography, Performance, and

memory or their confined physical presence to access images of their own

produced — made the relationship between the representation and the rep-

Lithography vs. Photography

photographs individually or compiled their own photographic albums for sale.

deliberately drawn slightly larger, higher, and in a more prominent position

The Flamboyant Courtesan Culture

Photography from the West has been much acclaimed;

The poet Li Mo’an wrote in 1876:

Photographs reveal microscopic and realistic details.

Both poems emphasize the value of photographs over paintings in captur-

Fig. 2.2. Photographic portrait of Sai Jinhua.

Fig. 2.3. “Bugan cifu” (Not willing to bend over as a female),

courtesans was clearly different from traditional representations of women.

ily to their exhibition value. Photography is also characterized by its exchange

Cixi and Cross-Dressing

Fig. 2.5. Empress Cixi, a devoted fan

Fig. 2.6. Cixi disguised as Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara), 1903.

period, I believe, was the more prominent tendency of a male assuming a

Photography accentuates, or forges, this cult of the self, since photographs,

• There is a 50 percent surcharge for turning one person into two;

Unlike portrait painting, people went to photographic studios not only to

Fig. 2.7. A German soldier with a cross-

This leads us to another mechanism of pleasure in Cixi’s “Guanyin” pho-

Fig. 2.8. Advertising of Weixin Photographic Studio’s costume

The Photogenic Dan

culture that developed alongside a consumer culture was a more complex

Fig. 2.9. Mei Lanfang in Yiliu ma (A strand of flax), 1915–1916.

Fig. 2.10. Mei Lanfang in Deng Xiagu

and promoting a form of fetishistic identification. These pictures were taken

Polysemous Photographic Femininity

Fig. 2.12. Mei Lanfang in Taizhen waizhuan

Fig. 2.13. Mei Lanfang in Guifei zuijiu (Drunken beauty), 1930s.

ings, photographs can also be easily manipulated by the dominating ideologies

Fig. 2.14. Polysemous nature of photography and slipperiness

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