Gong Li got her name known by the world in late 1980s and early 1990s with the popularity of the so-called Chinese “Fifth Generation” films, and gradually become a symbolic personality of the new wave of Chinese film. In the recent two decades, as an international Chinese film star, who originally comes from mainland China, and an eyewitness for the development of Chinese language film surviving from the global context, the significance of Gong Li and her stardom has exceeded its primary terrain toward a broader intertextual context, in which it can reflect the phenomenon of Chinese social culture and ideology. Being aware of this, different from conventional image/body discussion refer to Gong Li, this paper aims for a reasoned and elaborated stardom research taking her comprehensive stardom into account. At the same time, it could be an attempt for the “Chinese localization” of Western stardom theories and methodologies.
The main body of this paper is allotted together for three chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the status quo of stardom research in both the West and China, with the latter educing the original thoughts and object of study of this paper. The main method of study is then emphasized to be taking star as “text” in a broad context. Chapter 2 observes the significance of the stardom of Gong Li from double lines of sight. In the realm of the alternative equivalent to ideology, “post-socialism”, the author not only reveals a multiple duplicate mirror-structure existing within the interactions between Gong Li and Chinese domestic social context, but also accentuates the confidence of otherness when she confronts the West and the discriminatory identity she has strongly demonstrated in Hollywood films. Based on the significance pointed out in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 focus on the way it has constructed. The author creatively applies Judith Butler’s “performative” into stardom research, aiming to elaborate that the international Chinese film stardom of Gong Li is performatively constructed through an intertextual multi-space, which includes subjective/internal performance as performer and objective/external agenda setting as celebrity.
