Leaving aside the subsequent series of events, in any case, this is not a short film that makes Chinese and even Chinese audiences feel comfortable watching, and the humiliation may not be discussed, but it is already arrogant enough. After all, the video scene can only show the helplessness of the West when guiding the helpless East, while the understanding of the East is so present and sloppy.
(D&G "Chopsticks eat" promotional video)
This is not the first time that Dolce & Gabbana has demonstrated this arrogance, and a set of promotional photos released by Dolce & Gabbana in 2017 labeled #D&G Love China has also been questioned. Models dressed in D&G's gorgeous clothes suddenly appeared next to the plainly dressed Beijing citizens, greeting the camera with confident smiles. The citizens are out of focus and reduced to a dim background, the only role of which is to help create an out-of-place visual atmosphere.
(D&G 2017 #D&G Love China # promotional photo)
Such visual logic seems to return to the context of the West's presentation of the East at the end of the 19th century—representing China as a numb, hollow, "other" as the object of curiosity, foiling and listening to the West as the subject. This makes one regretfully realize that the visual struggle of "orientalism" that "comrades" from the West tried to overthrow in the 20th century, or the active integration gesture of the West after the end of the Cold War, have been forgotten. More pessimistically, this seems to show that "Orientalism", as an exotic picture, can only be inevitably wrapped in the fashion trend of camp kitsch in such an era of consumption, and since then there are more reasons to live and say goodbye.
Construct the Other: China Man, which is peddled as a visual spectacle
Photography was invented in the West. Naturally, the West had the opportunity to preemptively focus the camera on the East.
Yet the West's view of the East– the birth of this one-dimensional "Gaze"— heralded the inevitable construction of an unequal power structure of watching/being viewed, as if as a natural metaphor – that the 19th-century West had long since looked up to China, Marco Polo's "heavenly kingdom," but had stood up straight, relied on a strong ship and cannon, and arrogantly scrutinized the potential fertile colonies of the East.
This look, on the other hand, becomes the process of the West finding itself and constructing its own subjectivity. In the light of the "rough and numb" East, the West considers itself undoubtedly "civilized and advanced", illuminating the world with the long days of the West, as if it were a matter of course, as Said explained in Orientalism, the "East" is constructed as the other to highlight the West itself.
At the end of the 19th century, colonialism reached its climax, and cameras became portable enough. Westerners entering China carry guns and cameras with them. After all, in a way, both of these are tools that can be "shooted" and flaunted in front of grassy villagers and even Qing court officials in python costumes.
Their compatriots, who reside in their home countries, are anxious to experience the same exotic roaming. As a result, photographing the distant and mysterious Chinese (China Man) has become a hot business. As a "visual spectacle" that satisfies the curiosity, the Chinese who first entered the lens of foreign photographers are often unclothed, smoking opium or suffering torture, their eyes are often numb and empty, and there is no emotional communication with the lens. It's not so much "people photography" as it is "landscape photography."
Western photographers photographed opium-smoking Chinese
When the photographer and the photographed person enter the same photo, the well-dressed photographer representing the "West" often occupies the center and stares at the camera strongly, while the Chinese of the subject, mu ne di nestled in a corner, the eyes are evasive, almost in harmony with the background. This photograph of the famous Western photographer John Thomson and Chinese, a Scotsman who published the Emperor's four-volume "Photographs of China and Chinese" in 1873, is a typical example. This may show that at that time, the logic of Western aggression against China's national subjectivity was also reflected in visual culture.
(John Thomson with Chinese)
"Comrades" from the West: from Edgar Snow to Julius Evans
By the time of World War II, the "common alliance" had surpassed the "nation", and with the rise of the left-wing movement, the photographers who came to China were no longer poachers of the "wonders of the East", but tried to faithfully document the situation in China, such as the famous Magnum legendary field photographer Robert Kapa and the Dutch director Julius Evans. Some of them are "comrades" who regard themselves as Chinese people, but only from the West, such as Edgar Snow, an old friend of the Chinese people.
Edgar Snow
Edgar Snow wanted to use China as the starting point for his world travels, but after arriving in Shanghai in 1928, he stayed in China for 13 years. He was deeply aware of the arrogance of his compatriots, and in a 1930 manuscript he sharply satirized this: "'The white people [in Shanghai] often use arrogance to describe the attitude of Chinese, but on the contrary, these foreigners in Shanghai are completely indifferent to the thoughts and thoughts of the Chinese living around them, except when their racial vanity and conceited skin are poked by the independence and pride of the new China." In his description, few Americans would say Chinese, as do American families who have lived in China for three generations. They had never heard the names of Mei Lanfang and Chen Duxiu, and even avoided Chinese food and screamed when they heard Chinese music.
Unlike these foreigners who have never been to cities outside of Shanghai, as a journalist, Edgar Snow has traveled extensively on Chinese soil, traveling through cities and villages large and small, recording China's social reality with words and images from an equal perspective: floods, famines, Chinese tough and agile faces. As a photographer, he also enjoys being Chinese – holding Chinese children in horse coats, wearing military uniforms, riding on horseback and taking photos with soldiers, looking at the camera with them, looking at each other and smiling.
(Group photo of Edgar Snow and Children of Shanghai)
(Group photo of Edgar Snow and soldiers)
The fact that China's image in Western visual culture has changed so much in this era can also be attributed to the fact that the trend of documentary images is entering China. Left-wing activist and documentary pioneer Julius Evans ended the filming of the film "Land of Spain", which reflected the Spanish Civil War, and was commissioned by the left-wing organization to go to the "Eastern Battlefield" to shoot the famous "Forty Thousand People". As the documentary movement emphasized, the purpose of documentation is to focus on communication and even to intervene in changing society. In evans's lens, which holds this idea, Chinese is no longer proudly stared at as a distant "other", but as the subject itself, showing a tenacious life against aggression on the screen. The natural structure of the view/view, the West/East, is thus invisibly dissolved.
However, assuming that Evans, a "comrade" from the West, also became a "China pass" because of chance, like Edgar Snow, is undoubtedly a romantic fantasy. Although Evans took it as his mission to record China all his life (the documentary "Forty Million People" during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and the 12-episode feature film "Yugong Moving Mountains" after the founding of New China), at the end of the day, he still had to admit through images that China was mysterious and incomprehensible to him after all.
In The Tale of the Wind, shot in his nineties, he introspects but also intoxicates himself in the same frame as the chinese image of magic realism: Sun Wukong disguises himself as a doctor, enters his hospital room, and brings him a panacea; Chang'e, dressed in flowing clothes, dances beside him, and the Western face watches in confusion, trying to follow her guidance - it must be noted that while presenting his Western face, he insists on wrapping himself in a Zhongshan suit on the screen. This scene is almost a metaphor for his life.
(The Wind's Tale, By Julius Evans)
Reunion after goodbye: the gesture of trying to fit in is always moving
When the shadow of the "Cold War" shrouded the world, the West and the East closed their doors to each other heavily, but they could not help but imagine each other through the cracks in the door.
The image of the mysterious and evil Oriental Doctor "Fu Manchu", who has been silent for 25 years, returns to the screen through the body of Christopher Lee. In the five years from 1965, the Fu Manchu series was released in five films: The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), The Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1967), The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968), and Fu Manchu (1968) The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969).
(Fu Manchu series of movies)
By Nixon's visit to China in 1972, Western audiences had the opportunity to see the real China through the mass media.
The August 1979 issue of VOGUE, titled "In China Now," featured many moments of a visit to China with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's wife, Nancy Kissinger. In this picture of the streets of Shanghai, the wife of the secretary of state is naturally the center of gravity of the picture, and the real visual subject is still the Chinese masses who are all dressed in good clothes, but have different looks.
(Nancy Kissinger in Shanghai)
VOGUE also playfully collaged the photographed Nancy waving his hand on the square and the Chinese masters practicing qigong into the same picture, finding some almost poetic similarity. In the Western lens of the long-lost reunion, China and the West can coexist harmoniously, and from another side, it reflects the sincerity of the West in trying to integrate and cooperate. Although cultural barriers will always exist, the gesture of trying to integrate is actually moving enough.
(Nancy Kissinger waving, Chinese uncle practicing qigong)
The "Orientalism" that cannot be bid farewell: the "exotic picture" that the era of consumerism will always need
The era of consumerism came with the wave of globalization, forcefully riding on issues such as "nation" and "class" to serve only itself. A more dazzling array of fast food "others" have been appropriated and established by the fast-moving consumer industry such as the fashion industry, becoming a continuous stream of "exotic pictures" that are being produced, and on top of industrial assembly line products, trying to forge the "halo" as a work of art. It seems strange, but it is actually camp.
"Chinese sex", condensed by Western commerce into a sexy and pure qipao, auspicious and lively dragon and phoenix rich, once refined, it is mass-produced.
The cheongsam exports the sexiness and meekness of "Chinese women", and the Western fashion industry sells it to Western customers to help them cosplay the sexy and innocent China Doll in "The World of Suss Yellow", adding love and fun.
(China Doll in cheongsam in "The World of Sousse Yellow")
After exporting from China, Longfeng Fugui turned to domestic sales to help Western merchants and label them as understanding China, but the effect was often not good: in 2015, Burberry launched a limited edition Heritage Kashmir scarf, embroidered with a big "Fu character", originally wanted to please the number of Chinese consumers soaring, and finally by Chinese customers to be considered "embarrassing and ugly".
(With the word "Fu" on it, a limited edition Heritage Kashmir scarf launched by Burberry in 2015)
However, there is no need to be too self-pitying, "China" is not the only national image that is consumed, and the image of the Japanese in East Asia, the black ethnic group within the West, and even the minority ethnic group cannot escape the fate of being misappropriated and consumed. Part of Victoria's Secret "Go East" series, a costume dubbed "Sexy Little Geisha" has been accused of reducing Japanese identity to exotic fantasies and sexual stereotypes that stir up a racial fascination with Asian women.
(Victoria's Secret "Sexy Little Geisha" set)
The "other" is also constructed within Western civilization for consumption. D&G's work on the Milan Show in '13 is full of outdated racist imagery of black women, and most people think that the printed image actually comes from the image of a black female slave on a slave-era plantation in the United States (Jemima), which actually seriously romanticizes slavery and plantation life.
(13 years of D&G Milan Show's work has been accused of being full of outdated black racial imagery)
Moreover, just as it is often taken literally that Sayyid and his "Orientalism" is misunderstood as a concept proposed against China, in fact, the homeland of Central Asia is the "Orient" to which he refers. It should be pointed out even more that if "Orientalism" is directed only to specific and fixed objects, it is undoubtedly a great narrowing of the widely existing antagonistic relations such as "subject" and "other", which are worth exploring.
After all, for the "East", there is often such a existence as the "East of the East", and we are often indifferent to it. Looking back at themselves, Chinese merchants have not known when they have also taken the consumption of African-American "others" as a trend. There are many examples, from the unusually embarrassing black children in the circle of friends to hold up advertising videos, to the grandeur of the "blacks" washed "white" on the mass media, it is difficult to get rid of the suspicion of racial discrimination of the laundry beads advertising, but as ordinary viewers, we are often indifferent.
In an era of rising consumerism, "Orientalism" seems to be forever difficult to say goodbye to, but it is not enough to simply turn questioning and criticism to the "Chinese image" that has been arrogantly expropriated. We must be vigilant against all the "others" that are created as objects of consumption, and against the robbery of all valuable issues by consumerism, which is the introspection that we must introspect in the current era to resist consumerism and avoid social narrowing.
Author: Feng Zhou
Editor: Miyako Proofreader: Xue Jingning