Inheriting and transforming the ghost: the commercialized and gendered painted skin

Abstract

The paper offers a comparative analysis of the literary text "Painted Skin" from the collection of classical novella Liaozhai Zhiyi by Pu Songling, and of its contemporary film adaptation with the same title directed by the Hong Kong filmmaker Gordon Chan in 2008. The paper first illuminates how the literary classic has been reappropriated and visualized as the cultural product in today's world. It accentuates the transformation of genres of the text-from a horror story with moral lesson and political overtone to a de-horrified romantic story with hybrid generic qualities such as historical epic and martial arts. This deployment entails the predominant mode of film production in Hong Kong since the introduction of CEPA in 2004, that is, the Pan-Asian co-production. By looking into the characterization, the paper then delves into the gendered representations of both texts. With a feminist lens, the comparison explicates the situations of women in different cultural and historical contexts in China.