Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation

The focus of Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu's book Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation is how Chinese filmmakers and artists have responded to an increasingly transnational environment for Chinese film by returning to the nation—in his words, how “the national has managed to reinvent itself within the transnational” (3). Lu's book joins recent work by Ying Zhu and Aynne Kokas on the interaction between the Chinese film market and the global film industry and Chris Berry's recent articles on the emergence of the Chinese nationalist blockbuster.¹ Looking beyond China, Lu's book complements Joseph Jonghyun Jeon's work on how the Korean film industries have been shaped by globalization.² Naturally, Envisioning the Nation also serves as a continuation of Lu's own substantial contribution to the study of transnational Chinese cinemas, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity.³ If that book addressed the advent of global postmodernity in China...