Through a Pink Looking Glass
Every now and then, when my eyes blur over with red, I refresh my mind with kitsch of the American variety. After all, one’s home culture is like their mother tongue, a system of symbols that we speak the most fluently, and ultimately react to most viscerally. This might explain why, in bouts of homesickness, I’ll pass on the pizza and watch Beyoncé on Youtube instead.Pop culture viewed through the filter of geographic distance allows for a very different analytical perspective. And as the largest global exporter of culture, we Americans should be aware that the rest of the world doesn’t interpret Gaga or Michael in the same way. And this works both ways. Many non-Chinese living in China find television galas, etc. “kitschy,” something culturally inferior and laughable.Last week, while watching Katy Perry’s performance on the Today Show (on Youtube here), the amazing similarities of Chinese and American culture struck me. From outside in, American culture can be just as spectacularly kitschy, pointlessly elaborate and ridiculous as any Chinese television gala could ever aspire to be.Of course, this is obvious. But I thought it would be fun to draw a comparison here, a trip through the looking glass into our respective pink, glittery, dreamlands gracing national broadcasting.此条有新的中文版，请按右手的“中文”让它显示
In her “candyland,” Katy Perry dances in a forest of giant lollipops and gummi bears, she’s wearing some sort of retro-styled glitter nude suit à la pink tutu. She leaps up and down in pseudo rock gestures, a mile of heaving cleavage threatens full exposure as she sings barely provocative lyrics to her barely preteen audience, “let’s go all the way tonight.” Her dancers wear incredible ice cream cone bras. The pink candyland theme is some riff on “California girls,” although she neglected to spray whipped cream from her mammaries as she did in her video.
Zhang Ziyi, in perhaps her pinkest performance on television, rises from a hole in the stage in an enormous pink gown for the 2008 Chunwan New Year’s Gala (on Youtube here, CCTV website here). The fabric in her skirt alone could clothe Katy’s entire entourage. She doesn’t dance, as she seems mounted on a mechanized floor that rotates with each stanza; she only needs to stand and wave her arms to invoke the “Flower scattering fairy” 天女散花, as the name of the song suggests she is. The digital flowers on the screens behind her (the marvels of science!) seem to respond to her gestures. Ever demure––this is also the most popular program of the year, more eyes watch Chunwan than any other programming on the planet––attention is drawn to her lip-syncing face (not her breasts), which has been dappled with rhinestones, they’ve even bedazzled her a unibrow.
Both performances are kitsch in the classic sense, garish, alluding to culture, but created for popular and commercial tastes, conventional and formulaic. They even share the same formula. Superficial similarities abound: pink tutus, dream lands, performances and costumes based on stereotyped femininity, glitter, smoke and megastars. It’s just as simple to identify the stereotyped cultural differences: Boisterous Katy sings of her aggressive sexuality and risqué “Teenage Dream” in a husky voice, and Ziyi sweetly murmurs about fluttering flowers and an earthly existence supported by fluffy clouds of pink smoke. What a wonderful world it is!
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