In a fashion reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's “Arcade Project,” Laikwan Pang leads us through a wide variety of visual experiences at the turn of the twentieth century. These visual experiences, while scattered, are the core of what Pang calls “visual modernity,” a concept she uses to denote the urban, the popular, and the everyday elements reshaped by the new visual technology designed to entertain the masses. Pang hopes to draw attention to the visual instead of other components of modern Chinese culture because she believes that “the new was often more easily and effectively introduced through the visual than through other means, and these spectacles had lasting and irreversible effects on the seeing subjects” (p. 19).
The “seeing subject” is key to Pang's main argument. To establish her argument, Pang adopts the “distorting mirror” as a master trope: the mirror reflects, refracts, and distorts the image of the viewing subject in such an amusing and alluring way that a new subjectivity is formed. In Pang's words, “the Chinese experience at the turn of the twentieth century was like looking at this fantastic distorting mirror, through which the viewing subject acquired an alluring yet threatening sense of identity that was not available before” (p. 2).
Pang is never really clear about how the subject—collective instead of individual, commodified instead of free choosing—came into being through its contact with the distorting reflective surface. Her explanations are usually circular—that the new subjectivity is generated through the visual modernity, that the visual modernity is made possible by the forming of the new subjectivity, and that “the daily new visual experiences of Chinese urbanities … most fascinatingly reveal the multiplicity, fluidity, and internal alterity of Chinese modernity” (p. 10). Despite this logical deficiency, Pang does have an interesting point. Pang tries to combine “Lacan's and Shenbao's [the distorting] mirrors” (p. 5). Because she is not a bit interested in psychoanalysis, she would have been clearer if she had resisted the apparent association with the Lacanian mirror and turned instead to Althusser. Like the Althusserian “ISAs” (Ideological State Apparatuses), the distorting mirror “interpellates” the entertained public into a group that is actively engaged in public spectacles and, during the engagement, makes itself part of the spectacle while questioning the unstable and manipulative nature of modern optical devices.
The minor flaw does not diminish the significance of this book: it is historical, based on careful and thorough archival research; it is theoretically sophisticated, touching on, although a bit perfunctorily, almost all of the major critical reflections on modern viewing experiences; it is comprehensive, covering everything from the Dianshizhai pictorials, early photography, Mei Lanfang's operatic portrayal of feminine images, early advertisements, and early cinema culture to magic performances.
Pang organizes her wide-ranging materials into two parts: part I is on print culture and centered on image presentations, and part II is on theatrical scenes and performances. Each part consists of three chapters. Although each chapter deserves a book-length study, Pang is able to remain focused by questioning the intriguing relationships between visual devices, representations, especially representation of women, and consumption. Brilliant and insightful observations abound. In discussing early Chinese cinema scenes, for instance, Pang correctly points out that Tom Gunning's “cinema of attraction” scheme is not adequate for understanding what attracted Chinese audiences to the early films: “While people in the West re-experienced their own everyday life in these actuality films, the Chinese might receive Western-made images in profoundly different ways.” Because of the novelty of Western scenes, what impressed a Chinese viewer “was as much the representation process as the referent itself” (p. 177). In other words, not only the film exhibition apparatuses such as the projector but also the projected images were intriguing for early Chinese film audiences. The exotic images were thus more actively engaged with by Chinese audiences than by Western audiences.
In discussing magic performances both in live forms and in early films, Pang also correctly recognizes the inadequacy of dichotomizing magic and rationality. Because of the interference of modern optical devices, “magic and modernity negatively constitute and define each other, so that through magic we can gain an alternative view of modernity, and vice versa” (p. 205).
Neither a historical nor a literary study in the strict sense, Pang's book can be best described as a vivid depiction, through the optical lenses, of the material condition of modern Chinese society: how the public was entertained and helped create new forms of visual entertainment, how the spectators were related to each other and to the new spectacles, and how the new viewing experiences were made sense of by the viewing subjects. In this regard, The Distorting Mirror is justifiably comparable to the Benjaminian arcade project. To be sure, the visual experiences are chaotic and disorganized, but their meanings can nevertheless be unearthed to tell us something about turn-of-the-twentieth-century Paris or Shanghai and about modernity. Benjamin was not able to complete his project; Pang has far from exhausted the richness of China's early modern visual culture. But at least Pang's work opens a door to numerous possibilities for organizing and reading China's myriad “arcades.”
