From Mei Lanfang to Li Yugang: theorizing female-impersonating aesthetics in post-1976 China

Abstract

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) in China marked a period fraught with ideological tensions and violent social reforms that had long-lasting impacts on the traditional performing arts. If, in the decades before, the nandan art, or female impersonation in Beijing opera (jingju), was embodied in the figure of Mei Lanfang—leader of the Four Great Dan (si da ming dan), who played charming feminine characters onstage and fulfilled the role of morally conscious citizens offstage—then the art was banned, stigmatized, and re-gendered during the Revolution. Picking up from when China’s institutional support had allowed jingju actresses to play dan roles previously performed by males, this article historicizes the grassroots phenomenon of Li Yugang’s genre-defying female-impersonating aesthetic and problematizes the very use of current terminologies (e.g., fanchuan, female impersonation, cross-dressing, transvestism, etc.) and Western critical theory to discuss a culturally specific mode of performing whose discursive assumptions need making transparent. Further, the article examines Li’s relationship with the Mei school of acting to theorize the multidirectional strategies with which postmodern female impersonation disentangles itself from its precursor’s ideological commitment: conjuring up simulacra of idealized feminine subjectivities by vying for ever-heightening gratification of the aural and the visual; embracing contradiction and ambiguity; and generating its own self-mutilation and eventual deconstruction. Sketching these female-impersonating strategies will explain how Li Yugang’s aesthetic facilitates assimilating postmodern technology and thematics to promote the Chinese traditional culture, helps address old problems of the artist’s social and cultural legitimacy, and naturalizes the mass audiences’ reception of the androgynous body.

Problematics of a twentieth-century female impersonation

The juxtaposition of Beijing opera legend, Mei Lanfang, and so-called pop singer, Li Yugang, through the common denominator of female impersonation (fanchuan) seems an odd mixture on several grounds; on the one hand, the constitutive difference in genre—the ultimate criterion that has led critics to draw the neat line between Mei’s highbrow art and Li’s popular cross-dressing performance—ostensibly precludes a comparative analysis of the socio-historical circumstances that shape each artist’s approach to portraying the aesthetic feminine. On the other, the problem of periodization raises doubts about such a project: to what extent can one read the revival of female impersonation (the art of nandan) in Beijing opera (jingju) as a continuation of the Mei school of acting after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), and hence, of a modernism proper? Given that the concept of postmodernism was not introduced into the discursive parlance of the Chinese intellectual elite until Jameson’s lecture at Beida in 1985 (Wang 1996), how then may Li’s female-impersonating aesthetic be a postmodern break from Mei’s—especially as the terms of the Chinese modernist topography were not yet delineated?

Further complicating a theory of the development of fanchuan is the very translation of the term itself. Loosely denoting the practice of playing reverse roles in Chinese traditional theatre—e.g., those whose genders are different from an actor’s biological sex—fanchuan can be rendered into “cross-dressing” or “female-impersonating” in English. But the interchangeability of these translated equivalents with fanchuan proves highly questionable when we consider the former’s various connotations of a vaudeville drag—with its often comic, sometimes subversive strategies aimed at exposing established gender norms to be a “regulatory fiction” (Butler 1999, p. 175); a cultural fetishization of gender categories; and a necessary homosexual Other on which the derivative heterosexual category depends to retain its illusory stability (Butler 1991, p. 23). Thus, before we could see how Li Yugang’s aesthetic signals a multidirectional development wherein fanchuan no longer steadfastly grounds itself in the non-mimetic splendor of artistic stylization and convention, but is now moving along—with constant self-renewal and self-deconstruction—the nexus of marketization and commodification, it is necessary to restrict “female impersonation” to signifying fanchuan, in this case understood as a culturally specific phenomenon in which various modes of intelligibility (e.g., social, gestural, acoustic, cognitive, etc.) are mobilized in performance to create a convincing impression of attributes belonging to a feminine subjectivity. Such an impression would by necessity be different from that gathered from the most generalized physical traits of the fanchuan performer.

Originally one of the four major role-types in Beijing opera, the dan, or female role—along with the sheng (male role), the jing (painted-face male role), and the chou (clown role)—in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, was mostly played by male actors, or nandan, for whom performing locations could range from the typical rowdy late-Qing teahouse, the Imperial Court, the experimental Republican modern playhouse, to the alluring Shanghai new theatre (Goldstein 2007). Apart from training under a rigorous system (the xianggong) wherein these female impersonators had to stretch the limits of the human body to master the four basic skills of singing, verse-reciting, dance-acting, and acrobatics (chang, nian, zuo, da), they must also negotiate their onstage performance and offstage sexuality at the will of theatre patrons (Li 2010, pp. 88–89). As the project of nation-building and social reform became a constant preoccupation for both the Republican (1912–1949) and the Communist governments (1949–), perceptions of the nandan fluctuated between two poles of equally extreme reification: he represented either a backward, feudalistic vestige of a homoerotic and decadent elite culture that hindered the modernization of China and therefore should be abandoned in favor of realist art (Wu 2013), or a source of national pride—a national essence that could be employed to counter the interrogating gaze of imperialist forces and achieve propagandistic ends. It was against this backdrop of complex politico-social relationships that the female-impersonating aesthetic of Mei Lanfang emerged and registered its epistemological influence.¹

Fully aware of the low social status accorded the nandan at the time, anxious to dissociate jingju from its stigma of homosexuality and immorality (now that the Qing dynasty had fallen), and pressed to defend the Chinese traditional theatre against mounting attacks from May Fourth intellectuals who demanded a new expressive medium capable of conveying unmediated reality, Mei Lanfang was one of the four great female impersonators (si da ming dan) who would later become iconized as the greatest actor of the genre. However, Mei’s project of reforming and revolutionizing Beijing opera could not have materialized without the theoretical buttress of Qi Rushan. Opting for a totalizing move that fostered a strict divide between aestheticism and realism, the East and the West, Qi was on the one hand insisting on aestheticism’s opposition to realism, on the other, renouncing every possible relationship that the former’s constituents could tentatively bear to reality (Goldstein 2007, pp. 153–164). The need to invent a semiautonomous existence for jingju inevitably led Qi to propose a new aesthetic principle: “No movement that is not ‘dancified’; no sound that is not ‘musicified’” (Goldstein 1999, p. 385). Under this artistic dictum, a new repertoire of “ancient-costume song-dance drama” (guzhuang gewu ju) was produced, which manifested an enormous series of hand-gestures, costumes, hairstyles, choreography, eye-expressions, and vocal techniques collectively devised to beautify and transform characters in traditional drama.² Yet rapid inventions of such inundating nature would have risked alienating a new audience that, as Mei himself noted, consisted of visually-bent female theatre-goers, “inexpert in discerning [the] musical subtleties” of the ancient kunqu (Goldstein 2007, p. 122). At this critical juncture, the interesting, yet rather far-fetched, Brechtian interpretation of the Verfremdungseffeckt in Chinese drama would have yielded some validity, had Mei not anchored the terms of his performative intelligibility in a universal category other than Aristotelian mimesis, a category that Mei articulated eloquently in “Guanyu biaoyan yishu de jianghua” (“A Talk on the Art of Acting”) in 1960:

Fig. 1

Demonstrations of Mei Lanfang’s orchid-flower hand-gestures (lanhua zhi). In Sina. https://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2007-11-30/10031813745.shtml, 30 June 2007

Fig. 2

Mei Lanfang performed his signature sword-dance in Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bieji). In Sohu. https://www.sohu.com/a/157764753_488999, 17 July 2017

Every play has a story; every story has its characters; and every character, whether male or female, has a different social status, age, personality, and living environment. We actors should get to know clearly the historical background of each story first, then we should carefully analyze and deeply experience the characters we play in all four distinct aspects mentioned earlier [social status, age, personality, and living environment]. This is an area directly related to an actor’s intellectual sophistication and political consciousness. A play script stipulates whether a character is good or bad, but it is ultimately up to the actor to bring the play and the character to life. (trans. Fei 1999; italics are mine)

Emotional interiority hence became the telos of aesthetic pursuit, the sacred realm that the female impersonator in jingju must explore and attempt to project outward, convey, exteriorize through stylization and convention. This “dual structure of exterior and interior processes in Chinese acting” (Martin 1999, p. 79) effectively ensured that the audiences were not estranged by ornate expression by presuming the existence of some immanent emotional universality, of which they would be more aware when they perceived it in aestheticized, distilled, and heightened forms.

The line of argument that both Qi and Mei pursued further seemed to establish jingju’s distinction from kunqu—the oldest form of Chinese opera, which was now reinscribed as aurally expressive, yet too abstruse and static. As noted above, such a stance is ineluctable when we remember the context that necessitated the shift from the aural to the visual: the importation of Western cinematic techniques and theatrical paraphernalia, the competing marketability of spoken drama, the growing sector of female audiences (Goldstein 1999, p. 388), to name but a few, heralded a declining interest in mere vocal excellence of the qingyi (virtuous female role) and a thirst for novelty. Borrowing performance techniques from kunqu and designing costumes inspired by ancient Chinese paintings while also incorporating Western technology, Mei created what proved to be a palatable combination of visual attraction and aural virtuosity:

To these five dan subtypes, Mei added the huashan. . . . Huashan appear in dozens of Mei’s plays, including the two plays for which he is perhaps most famous, Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bieji) and The Favorite Concubine Drunk with Wine (Guifei zuijiu). The core scenes of both these signature plays contain dances (note the visuality) marking the play’s emotional pinnacles. Both characters . . . evince the lofty status and elegant bearing of a qingyi, yet sport sumptuous costumes. (ibid., pp. 393–395)

But focusing on how the femininity of characters in Mei’s ancient-costume song-dance drama plays out in the field of abstractionism in predominantly visual terms does not imply that the aural aspect takes secondary priority. Indeed, equally important and even more subtle is Mei’s stylized singing in accompaniment with the ensemble. Even as this significant component of Mei’s female impersonation escaped the critical attention of most foreign spectators during his American tour (1930) and his Moscow visit (1935)—an underappreciation largely attributable to a stark difference in language and cultural perception—Mei’s singing style complemented the visual splendor conjured up by his aestheticized costumes and gestures. An effort, however, to analyze the contribution of this factor to the dramaturgical gestalt seems doomed to an impasse, regressing instead to a recognition of the inadequacy of language to convey the soundscapes of jingju or any other culturally specific modes of signification; Tan (2012), in Acoustic Interculturalism: Listening to Performance, summarizes the dilemma:

Any attempt to describe sound is always already an act of translation and transposition onto the symbolic plane. The act of describing what is heard or what these sounds can mean then becomes a contamination of the phenomenological experience. A transcription of sound, as symbols on a page or graphemes on a score, is an act of epistemic relocation that translates and transforms the pre-symbolic experience into a symbolic one. (p. 36)

If the attempt to capture the affects of sounds through the medium of language is always already a thwarted one, then perhaps the totality of Mei’s singing can be better intuited via listening and watching, rather than by reading vocal transcriptions of his performances. Nonetheless, Elizabeth Wichmann’s (1991) analysis of the ways complex melodic-phrases, metrical types, modal systems, and an artist’s vocal timbre in jingju are deployed to convey not just the external bearing of a character but also her thought-progression (pp. 53–217) is sufficient in marking the thoroughness and magnitude of innovation in Mei’s fanchuan aesthetic. Singing, like verse-reciting, dance-acting, and acrobatics, also strictly conforms to the criterion of essentialism—merging “the ‘inner technique’ of introspection with the outgoing techniques of representation” (Huang 1981)—inasmuch as it does not seek to create authentic muliebrity per se (as if such quality could be conveniently extracted from some gendered subject); instead, the semiautonomy of jingju as a stylized system perhaps means that the male falsetto of Mei Lanfang in the opening aria of Guifei zuijiu (The Drunken Concubine), for example, on the one hand conjures up an impression of idealized and symbolic femininity through its relational contrast to other characters’ voices (e.g., those of the laosheng, the jing, and the chou); on the other hand, it has to constantly work out that reminding tension between the masculine element which offers glimpses of itself through the bright, penetrating timbre—and the instant unfolding of glissandos, controlled vibrato, empty-words, and end-syllable (weiyin) ornamentation that relentlessly engulf and transform it. The male falsetto boasts both solidity of breath support and roundness of enunciation, vibrating at a slower speed than that of its Western operatic counterpart to create a widening of pitch, which bespeaks Concubine Yang’s royal dignity. Indeed, the delicate accentuating and trilling of specific words in the lyrics (e.g., to express the Concubine’s joy at the moon rising over the sea-island, her wonder at seeing the Jade-Hare ascending the eastern sky, her arrogance about her nature-rivaling beauty)—points to a breath-column adroitly maneuvered, ready to exert its control by punctuating the mosaic of piercing nasal tones with pseudo-silences, which then discretize the melodic-phrases into their own acoustic perfection.³

The resultant cumulative effect is quite nuanced: the notion of the dialectic of yin/yang that Li (2010) sees in Cheng Yanqiu’s female impersonation (pp. 103–105) seems to have lost its transcendental force. Unlike the aestheticization of the nandan’s body surface with elaborate costume and make-up—which allows for a more thorough elision of anatomical difference and an ostensibly unbroken impression of the symbolic female while minimizing salacious provocation—the nandan’s falsetto reveals a potential break in the aesthetic continuum. If the anatomical structures of the male and female vocal resonators produce characteristically differentiated timbres or tones, then the dialectic of yin/yang reputed to go beyond mere biological constructs denoting masculinity and femininity is at risk of regress, especially when we consider the arguments advanced by pro-nandan critics like Wang Pinglin. To Wang, “obstetric delivery,” menstruation, lack of breath-support in the abdominal region, and “easy sentimentality” were only a few factors that made women unfit to play dan roles (quoted in Wu 2013, p. 198). The synchronic unity of the transcendental yin/yang in the nandan’s voice, broadly understood in this sense of the dialectic as a relational contrast between two qualities, is continually jeopardized by the surfacing of the third element that has always already been subsumed in it: the primal element of the male timbre waiting to be transformed by vocal virtuosity. Hence, because the aural dimension of fanchuan in jingju reveals most vividly an essentialism in process, that is, the very dynamic going on when the male falsetto is being beautified and endowed with a new symbolic status, the threat of the fanchuan aesthetic totality to collapse back into the crudest form of pseudo-binary gender reification has to be invariably redeemed by the shift of emphasis to the visual.

Kundan versus Nandan: female impersonation refigured

The intrinsic tensions between various forces—from the very divorce of jingju from realist art and the bracketing off of anatomical attributes in female impersonation, through the systematic recodification of dramaturgical signifiers in the service of exteriorizing emotional interiority, to the paradoxical insistence on the anatomical superiority of male performers over their female counterparts by pro-nandan critics—erupted with the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. If Mei was championed as the living embodiment of national essence which his art conveyed, Mei’s passing in 1961 and national commemoration in 1962 by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) heralded a decade-long demise of the nandan art. Officially sanctioned by Zhou Enlai (Li 2010, pp. 91–92) and ruthlessly executed by Jiang Qing, art censorship forestalled the production new “sensual” plays as well as the reenactment of traditional operas whose themes were condemned as disproportionately focused on love, sex, and decrepit dynastic ideologies (Kim 2006, p. 50). In their place, eight Communist-themed operas advocating class struggles, eradication of feudalistic residual in society, and glorification of peasants and workers were performed enforcedly (Lu 2004). Colin Mackerras (1981) characterizes the Cultural Revolution as a period when “prominence [was given] to the non-specialist in all areas of society. The ideologically motivated person was held to be more useful than the professional, even if his actual skill was somewhat slighter, because of his willingness to serve the masses of the peasants, workers, and soldiers and not to seek privilege or physical comfort” (pp. 25–26). What with the putative liberation of women from their patriarchal yokes (only to subject them to “heroic” reification, and thus, an annihilation of individual sexuality) and the insistence on heteronormativity for one—and the politicization of artistic media to both promote Communist ideology and uproot any lingering dynastic melancholy for another, the nandan art went into hibernation. Numerous female impersonators, including the other two of the four great dan, Xun Huisheng and Shang Xiaoyun, “were physically and mentally tortured and verbally humiliated, and both died during the Cultural Revolution,” according to an interview with Wen Ruhua and Sun Peihong (quoted in Huai 2015, p. 48). In brief, while enumerating the epistemological and physical violence of the Revolution is beyond the scope of my project, it is worth pointing out that the impacts of the ban on female impersonation deal a blow to the nandan from which he never fully recovers, even after the All-China Federation of Literature and Art Circles had convened in 1978 to restore artists wrongly called reactionaries to their pre-revolutionary fame (Mackerras 1981, pp. 55–56). As Huai (2015, p. 94) notes, despite concerted efforts to revive the traditional art of female impersonation over the years, the prestigious National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts still does not formally train nandan students; this clearly reflects the conservatism of state-sponsored institutions toward female impersonation as an official category. In Foucauldian terms, Huai encapsulates the victimization of female impersonators: “[t]o be a nandan performer by profession means having to take the risk of being associated with a male prostitute in the Republican era, a debauchee, a sodomist, a sissy man and an evil man during the Cultural Revolution, a psychopath and now a potentially HIV infected individual or an AIDS patient” (ibid., p. 57).

Interestingly, the eclipse of the nandan in jingju during the Cultural Revolution had given actresses, known as the kundan, a virtual monopoly over the role. Officially endorsed by governmental policy and seizing the chance to showcase how they, too, could secure artistic triumphs at a terrain heretofore patriarchal and misogynistic, these kundan actresses had added their own innovations to the role and established a unique performative mode that would later problematize the revival of female impersonation. Indeed, Li Yuru, Li Shengsu, Zhang Huoding, Shi Yihong (all from China), and Kuo Hsiao-chuang (from Taiwan) are but a few representatives of this new turn in the development of fanchuan as an established category. So unmatched are these kundan’s skills that jingju authority and professor Sun Peihong wondered at an interview:

If none of the nandan performers can surpass such female dan performers as Li Shengsu [the best performer of the Mei school (Meipai)], how can we justify and foresee the future of the revival of nandan? . . . Of all the currently active dan performers, only Li Shengsu and Zhang Huoding can be considered as [star performers], and they are both female. Audience members will line up to buy tickets to watch their shows, but none of the nandan performers I have known can compete. (quoted in Huai 2015, p. 98)

While Huai Bao’s (2015) argument in “Sexual Artifice through ‘Transgression’: The Revival of Cross-Gender Performance in Jingju” acknowledges the artistic accomplishment of the kundan while explaining how the revival of the nandan does not signal an ideological retrenchment as such, but is a willed transgressive move against the dominance of heteronormativity (p. 60), underpinning his logic is the assumption that the kundan somehow reduces the multidimensionality of the role-type. Yet, following from this is an equally applicable interpretation—one that has been made time and again in response to Shakespeare theatre critics who fear allowing women to play female roles in authentic renditions would diminish their complexity: the kundan now could be potentially perceived as trying to pull off a double impersonation, seeking to imitate a man who seeks to portray a symbolic and idealized image of femininity. This dialectical hermeneutic would not only exonerate the kundan from accusations of reductionism but also amplify the subtleties of her performance. If anything, the fact that the four great dan have left behind them schools of performing which strive to preserve and propagate their trademark styles confirms how the kundan also has to learn, internalize, and reinterpret the patriarchal conventions of jingju.

But such victory to the kundan may have been short-lived (and the misfortune of the nandan, prolonged), for when Deng Xiaoping announced “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as the new approach to China’s modernization process in 1984, what registered on the political scene as an open acknowledgment of capitalist modes of production in nation-building and a break from Maoist ideology (Ma 2015, p. 39) may have foreboded ill for the traditional performing arts. Li (2010) identifies several factors that contribute to the decline of interest in jingju, namely, the sudden releasing of the theatre from governmental control into the competitive market; the shrinking number of jingju audiences, most of whom are either too old or too poor to attend performances of their favorite plays, and their replacement by a young generation to whom memories of the Cultural Revolution seem more a nostalgic displacement than a historical nightmare; and the introduction of globalized forms of cultural goods that appeal to the urban elite through their contemporaneity. However, if the struggle of the previously state-controlled, ideologically dependent traditional performing arts to survive in the market means that they need to constantly distinguish their status apart from both commodified pop music and sophisticated Western operas and ballets, then this exclusionary discourse could only re-inscribe their genres as “outdatedly highbrow” and further ossify them—in which case jingju serves as an example. For yueju—a regional form of Cantonese opera which is performed by a majorly female cast and has garnered a national prominence only second to jingju—the situation seems no more optimistic; fanchuan encounters equally challenging setbacks in institutional management and social legitimacy (Ma 2015, pp. 39–57). The artistic innovations of the four great dan, beginning as invented traditions in their own right, came back to the psyche of the post-Cultural Revolution era as some distant memories, some eloquent codes whose method of deciphering it had already forgotten.

This resignification of the traditional performing arts has undermined their agility to accommodate the theatrical experience of the twenty-first-century Chinese audiences. Despite drastic efforts to reform and preserve these arts by Chinese communities in the United States, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, the introduction of new thematics and the fusion of postmodern stage technology with ancient exoskeletons to produce an alternative mode of performing—termed “performing zero” by Lei (2011)—seem to have cast meager influence on, or raised direct challenge to, the art of nandan in mainland China. Meanwhile, popular music has held sway of public attention, as Baranovitch (2003) explains in China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1987–1997:

Popular music is a multimedia phenomenon and a composite expressive art that not only combines sound, text, and visual aspects—in the form of cassette covers and video clips, for example—but that also can be performed, and not only by professionals but also by the so-called audiences. Popular music culture is a highly participatory domain, in which large numbers of people actively interact with one another and express themselves through words and also through song and dance. (p. 4)

It is no surprise that, to the discontented and disillusioned young generations of the late 1980s, conventionalized jingju, with its assertion of representing national essence—which is also its claim to cultural legitimacy and governmental support—becomes perceived as complicit with political hegemony and limited in its ability to articulate the lived experience of the individual subject. Meanwhile, the rise of popular, or liuxing music, engendered new sentiments—or perhaps directed attention to old aspects of the “bourgeois individual” that had been ignored for the sake of political expediency. Significantly, the soundscapes of China also registered another resignification in which, as critic Jin (1988) avers, music of the preceding periods was felt to be “lacking in yin and abundant in yang” (quoted in Baranovitch 2003, p. 12). Empowered by the disseminating capacity of tape recorders and cassettes, pop singers such as Deng Lijun and Liu Guyi, and rock singers such as Cui Jian used the very forms of their music, the texture of their voices to give people the freedom of choice in listening to what aligned with their tastes and beliefs (ibid., p. 13). In this regard, a juxtaposition of the nandan’s voice and that of Deng Lijun only marks more acutely the former’s penetrating pitch now recoded as the yang element as opposed to Deng’s yin—the “soft, sweet, often whispery and restrained” timbre, “[t] he sweet flavor of her voice … enhanced by gentle vibratos, coquettish nasal slides, and a moderate, relaxed tempo” (ibid., p. 11). As I argued above, the self-sufficient, all-encompassing yin/yang dialectic inherent in jingju faces subversive threats from its own concrete, individual components, especially when those components come from the anatomical basis which it claims to have transcended through formalist beautification.

In the context of China’s Open Door policy, the popularity of liuxing or gangtai music, and the rise and fall of female impersonation in tandem with the top-down ebb and flow of political ideology, how could the phenomenon of Li Yugang pertain to fanchuan’s revitalization? What strategies does Li use to navigate a social space in which popular conceptions of sex, sexuality, and gender remain little changed, and indigenous entertainment struggles to justify its importance to a young public increasingly mired in historical amnesia? How does his effort to pulsate with the throbbing of marketization and commodification in the twenty-first century restructure the ways in which female-impersonating aesthetics are perceived? In other words, what underlying principle runs through such aesthetics?

Li Yugang and the making of a postmodern female impersonation

Born into a farming family in Jilin province of northeastern China in 1978, Li Yugang was the first person in his village to pass the national university entrance exam, only to drop out of a local college in 1996 due to poverty. After leaving home and working various jobs—from waiting table, selling CDs, to singing at night bars—Li found out he could make more money singing both male and female parts, an accidental discovery made possible when his female partner at the bar was absent from a duet. As Li (2014) himself admitted in a CCTV lecture series, Kaijiangla (Voice), working at a CD store after the discovery further drew his attention to the fact that Mei Lanfang’s singing style is so qualitatively different from those of Li Guyi and Deng Lijun. To improve his female impersonation, Li then trained under jingju master Ma Hongcai of the Cheng school (Chengpai) and other professionals, practicing the fundamentals (jibengong) of Beijing opera performing and mixing traditional elements with pop music and dance.

Li’s rise to stardom did not come until 2006, when he participated in CCTV’s talent show, Star Avenue, and became a national sensation with his female impersonation, winning third place at the finale. Possessing a light, soprano-like timbre and elegant choreography, Li reinterpreted The Drunken Concubine and Farewell My Concubine—twentieth-century masterpieces of Mei Lanfang—to great applause from the popular-culture arena. This success gained Li entry into the prestigious China’s Opera and Dance Drama Theatre (Zhongguo geju wuju yuan) in 2009—the only admission of an artist without professional qualifications. According to Chen (2007), from then on, Li held the solo concert, Shengshi nishang (Imperial Splendor), at the Sydney Opera House in 2009; brought his one-man show, Jinghua shuiyue (Flowers in Mirror; Moon in Water), to eleven countries in 2010; appeared on CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala in 2012 and 2013 to perform “Xin guifei zuijiu” (“The New Drunken Concubine”) and “Chang’e” (“Goddess of the Moon”). Li reached the peak of his fanchuan career with the creation of Paintings of the Four Beauties (Si mei tu)—a ninety-minute, state-sponsored, one-man show in which Li impersonated four mythic Chinese beauties: Xi Shi of the Spring and Autumn Period (770–476 BC), Wang Zhaojun of the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 24), Diao Chan of the Three Kingdoms (AD 220–280), and Concubine Yang of the Tang Dynasty (AD 618–907) (see Fig. 3). Li’s 2019 opera, a reworking of his 2015 Zhaojun chusai (Zhaojun Heading out of the Frontier), marked the end of an intermission during which he mostly refurbished non-cross-dressing folk songs and toured the U.S and Canada.

Fig. 3

Li Yugang dressed as the four ancient beauties, with his offstage appearance at the center of the photo. In clockwise order are Wang Zhaojun (top left), Diao Chan, Xi Shi, and Concubine Yang Yuhuan. Courtesy of Li Yugang

The success story of Li Yugang, while indicating how multimedia recognition, profitability, and ensuing governmental endorsement often serve as the indices of an art form’s cultural legitimacy, also highlights the conflict between the performing arts (and perhaps between modernism and postmodernism). If Jameson’s theory of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism is to hold true for the contemporary Chinese context, the question of precise classification of a certain political regime in terms of its ideological orientation seems less pertinent to our discussion than the fact that China has become deeply implicated in the (re)production and circulation of multinational technology. Globalization, in addition, threatens the survival of self-proclaimed indigenous art forms with its homogenizing force, relentlessly transforming aspects of social life into simulacra ad infinitum, at the same time evoking yet more violent responses from the particular, the invented indigenous, the local. This self-willed, self-preserving division, a strategy executed with discursive finesse by theorists like Qi Rushan, now returns in the rebuke of Mei Baojiu—Mei Lanfang’s seventy-two-year-old son and artistic heir—at Star Avenue’s fans’ comparison that, “before, there was Mei Lanfang; now, there is Li Yugang” (“qian you Mei Lanfang, hou you Li Yugang”). Through his spokesperson, the enraged Mei Baojiu publicly condemned Li as a bra-wearing artist who thought he was a nandan but was in fact only distorting Beijing opera. In response, Li apologized to Mei on social media, praised the Meipai’s superiority, and insisted that his art was different from the former—an insistence that would forever change Li’s fanchuan aesthetic.

Flowers in mirror, moon in water: gratification of negated pastiche

The relationship between modernism and postmodernism, to adopt Jameson’s (1991) thesis, is one of “local reactions” against the various forms of high modernism rather than as a universal concept, and thus will necessarily take on a multivalent signifying function whose precise definition “has to come at the end, and not at the beginning, of our discussion of it” (pp. xxii-4). In the juxtaposition of Mei Lanfang’s and Li Yugang’s female-impersonating aesthetics, it is a relationship born when the latter invariably holds itself to, yet simultaneously differentiates itself from, the standards of its precursor, laying bare both their constructedness. We have only to watch any of Li’s one-man shows to realize how Harold Bloom’s (1973) poetic revisionary ratios could elucidate (and even qualify) symptoms of the anxiety of influence thought to have gone extinct in the postmodern pastiche—defined by Jameson as a neutral practice of imitation without parody’s mockery and implication of a certain “linguistic norm” (1991, p. 17). In Flowers in Mirror; Moon in Water, which marked the starting point of the postmodern fanchuan proper and would later be distilled to picturesque perfection in The New Flowers in Mirror; Moon in Water and Paintings of the Four Beauties, what appears before our eyes is no longer narrative coherence in its conventional sense. Instead, unfolding one after another are the unrequited maiden coquetry of Du Liniang from the kunqu play Mudan ting (The Peony Pavilion), her draped sensuality towering over invocations of spring superabundance and the ruined confines of her lonely garden; the loyal affection and charming sword-dance of Yu Ji in Mei Lanfang’s famous Farewell My Concubine, culminating in her tragic suicide; the numbing sorrow of the bejeweled Wang Zhaojun as she dances for the barbarians, knowing she could never return to her motherland, having been politically married to the chief of the Huns; and the regal delight and youthful arrogance of Concubine Yang Yuhuan of the Tang Dynasty, famous for her elegant rainbow-feather, silk-sleeve dance (nishang yuyi wu). Thematic coherence gives place to visual excellence. Emerging from the old ideological battle between realism (xieshi) and essentialism (xieyi), shorn of the institutional shield of an established jingju school that would grant him the cultural legitimacy to cross-dress without bordering on social taboo and irreverent mockery of the high arts, the postmodern fanchuan artist seems free to borrow, to assimilate without fear of self-contradiction.⁴ What the traditional nandan could not perform without violating the dress code of moral humility and the principle of aestheticism, the postmodern female impersonator acts out with joyful abandon. No longer using face-paint and pulling her eyes diagonally upward, the mythico-historical feminine figure appears onstage with unveiled sensuality, endowed with a new subjectivity. At the same time, it is also reproducing halfheartedly simulacra of the elegant orchid-fingered gestures, the dainty kite turn, the colorful rippling-water sleeves (Mei’s signature dance in The Heavenly Maiden Scatters Flowers, or Tiannu sanhua), the sword-dance, the intoxication of the concubine—which all point to the image of the Master himself and confirm the indebtedness of postmodern fanchuan to jingju. What is this genre? We may ask. Epic-collage? “Pop-cum-traditional” hybridity (Cai 2017)? Such an aesthetic may be rightfully called one that refuses to name itself.

Yet what we experience temporally says the opposite about indebtedness. The traditional Chinese percussion, string instruments, and woodwinds are now fused with and arranged on top of the subterranean flow of Western orchestral and traditional-themed pop music, preparing for and dramatizing what I suggest is the most prominent feature of Li’s female impersonation: the falsetto. If locating the voice “high in the head and forward in the face” (Wichmann 1991, p. 215) produces a semi-translucent, penetrating yet mellow, and controlled nasal tone characteristic of the Mei school, then Li’s falsetto signals a radical break. Perhaps it is an even more forward placement of the voice in the mask of the face (Daniels and LeBorgne 2014, p. 99), a focused use of the nasal resonating chamber, and a substitution of slow, wide-pitched tremors for faster vibrato that create a mellifluous, bright, light timbre somewhere in the order of Li Guyi and Deng Lijun’s murmuring sweetness and a coloratura soprano’s refreshing agility. Where the spatially experienced/visual in Li’s performance admits derivativeness, the self-naturalizing effortlessness of the temporally experienced/aural pits itself against jingju’s stylized singing, legitimizing every tone in such a way that each then becomes pure and transparent on an astonishing scale. No longer opting for highly melismatic and prolonged end-notes, Li forges resolute, yet low-contrastive, trimming of the notes, creating short interludes for his nimble, metallic end-syllables (weiyin) to gather dramatic force, shooting up into the soprano register like crests above the delicate waves of softened pitches—and in lieu of the solid column of breath tamed at will to effect an appearance of atomized discreteness or unmediated intensity as a constant reassertion of the totalizing aesthetic principle behind it, we find in Li’s falsetto a surface unity in which the neatly punctuated overtones sensually reach out to one another, demanding us to expect that they do so, and with such expectation gluing together the vocal fabric. At this point, with this intuitive impression of an acoustic feminine authenticity (an after-effect of pastiche, when we have coordinated the seen with the heard), a Bloomian “swerving” seems to have already happened: the precursor is exposed—not even by some legerdemain of qualitative comparison of technical authenticity, for the tonal difference is excessively reinforced in every note, every song—but in a way that seems to put the precursor’s creation on an equal footing with the postmodern impersonated female. The precursor is shown to have made undisputed progress in the visual aspect, but then should have adopted such and such singing style. Li’s fanchuan aesthetic is to Mei’s like a second possibility to a possible first, an alternative aesthetic whose relation to the former is maintained through a discourse of similarity and unity, but which itself is sustained and distinguished through constitutive difference⁵. Ironically, because replication of an artistic style also leads to its subversion, but subversion which could only come after legitimation, our Jamesonian pastiche now negates itself, passing over into postmodern parody, in Linda Hutcheon’s (1989) conception of the term (pp. 93–107).

Postmodern fanchuan entertains an ever-changing dual relationship with its modern precursors, tradition, and cultural essence on the one hand, and the culture of play, increasing impatience, and endless technological innovations, on the other (problems that Mei Lanfang had to deal with in the political zeitgeist of 1910s–1930s China). Even the deployment of protest strategies has to begin on a new discursive plane, shifting shapes to ingratiate itself with the spirals of fetishized popular music and mass production, as Adorno theorized; I suggest that we return to the problem of social legitimacy and respectability that the nandan faces, to see how it is addressed in Li’s performance. The above-mentioned criticism from Mei Baojiu of Li’s art, however, would not sound so gratuitous when we read it as a reflex, bred during the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution, that without the slightest hesitation would lawfully endorse and enforce compulsory heterosexuality while renouncing any association with the abnormal, the homosexual, and the reactionary. Having performed with his legendary father before the age of twenty and already winning stage acclaim for his acting, Mei Baojiu was demoted from jingju master to sound technician from 1965 to 1978, according to Beijing opera insiders He and Sun (quoted in Huai 2015, p. 48). How then could a newly exonerated citizen and respected leader of a major acting school risk the moral uprightness paid for through blood and tears of the four great dan—to be identified with a popular phenomenon, especially when he could never know whether it would degenerate into burlesque at best, and homosexual sensationalism, at worst? Still, this hypothetical explanation underscores the exclusionary logic of gender inequality in contemporary China as well as the limited strategies that female impersonators in particular could deploy to legitimize their arts. For Mei Lanfang, these strategies consisted of sporting a dense mustache during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) (Wu 2016, pp. 122–138) and building an offstage gentlemanly charisma that so forcefully disrupted his onstage illusion of symbolic womanhood as to leave no doubts about Mei’s sexuality. In this vein, it is worth noting that, like Mei, Li cross-dresses to show how aestheticized gender concepts are not locked in biological sex but can be performed, transformed, and deconstructed—yet still manifests that he is a straight man and a devout Buddhist in real life; meanwhile, because Chinese cultural history shows how rigid perceptions of gender binaries along the matrix of cultural intelligibility were uncommon in classical Chinese literature and hence a product of the Western hegemonic gaze, it would be unenlightening to borrow wholesale Butler’s gender theory to structure a hermeneutics of postmodern Chinese fanchuan. Otherwise, we would be left with two equally reductive readings, the former folding Li’s strategies back into the no longer autonomous aesthetic principle of Qi Rushan; the latter pitting postmodern fanchuan, now assumed as in league with the Western drag, against local gender politics in some perpetual antagonism. Qualifying Butler’s premise that (the drag’s) transgression ultimately questions and destabilizes all notions of authentic genders, He (2013) admits how Li’s phenomenon seems self-contradictory “from the perspective of gender performativity. On the one hand, it seems to suggest that gender is essential and that to cross-dress is to imitate preexisting gender types, which seems to oppose the theory of gender performativity; on the other hand, it still supports the idea that gender is performative” (p. 165). I would argue that, while the impression (created by deliberately leaving behind the xieshi-xieyi debate) of Li’s new femininity seems so convincing as to reify the latter to the level of the ontological, the epithet often used by the public to describe Li’s portrayal of female figures—bi nüren hai nüren de nan (“even-more-feminine-than-women-when-compared-to-women”)—seems to disprove the existence of such preexisting, ready-made gender types.⁶

Esther Newton (1972), in Mother Camp: Female-Impersonators in America, describes one of the strategies to which master drags often resort to create “impressions,” or mimetic replication of the voice and appearance of a famous female performer:

The art in these impressions depends on a sharply defined tension between maintaining the impersonation as exactly as possible and breaking it completely so as to force the audience to realize that the copy is being done by a man. A common method of doing this is to interject some aside in the deepest possible bass voice. A skilled performer can create the illusion, break it, and pick it up again several times during one song, and the effect can be extremely dramatic and comic. (p. 48)

This reliance on mutually exclusive vocals and intruding starkness—also a dominant feature of Li Yugang’s performances before and during the Star Avenue competition (e.g., “Velvet Flowers” (“Ronghua”), “Because of Whom?” (“Weile shei?”), etc.)—has given place to a different mode of deconstruction that stations itself like some inevitable denouement in Flowers in Mirror; Moon in Water. What follows Empress Yang’s magnificent rainbow-colored, feather-dance (see Fig. 4)—her effortless whirling amid a vortex of a twenty-four-meter silk ribbon,⁷ in front of a dancing cast of onlooking court servants—is the gradual un-donning of glamor itself. The ever more claustrophobic compression of mythico-historical scene-distillations—polishing individual parts to surreal immediacy and eliciting unreined rapture—turns out to be an illusion from which kings and courts, swords and flowers fade, and the only abiding constant is the selfsame feminine figure, who, in resplendent imperial garment, is now stripped bare of her imaginary brilliance as the mise-en-scene changes its substance before our very eyes to the radio tune of “Burying Heart” (“Zangxin”)—a song from the 1991 movie, Center Stage (Ruan lingyu), which recounts the tragic life of Ruan Lingyu, China’s first silver-screen prima donna:

Butterflies fly away; my heart is also gone,

Who would come in this cold, dreary night?—I wipe swelling tears from my cheeks.

Just a little craving for dependence, just a little craving for love,

But predestined-relationship has proven too hurtful, leaving my heart filled with grief.

For heaven-inflicted misery, for unbeknown disaster, I will blame none:

Youthfulness should never have feared solitude.

A forest of flowers has already fallen, thus buried will this heart be.

Some spring day when the swallows return, where is my life? (translations are mine unless otherwise noted)

Fig. 4

Li Yugang performs Empress Yang’s rainbow-colored-feather-dance (nishang yuyi wu). Courtesy of Li Yugang

The plaintive voice of the recent past, accentuating violin music, and focused lighting command our attention to the stage center, where on a raised spot remain an old table, a decrepit chair, and an engraved bronze mirror. Sitting on the chair and observing herself with resignation, the figure slowly takes off her earrings, loosens her embellished coiffure, unhooks her sparkling necklace, and finally stands up and steps out from her pink dress to reveal her plain white clothes. Pondering her reflection one more time, the figure steps down and picks up from where the radio tune has stopped unnoticed, reiterating the lyrics with overflowing-withheld, heart-broken pain, which weighs/wears down the female voice to almost masculine breathiness (see Fig. 5).

Fig. 5

Scenes from Li’s performance of “Burying Heart” (“Zangxin”). Courtesy of Li Yugang

The emotion has proven too much to contain; the figure holds her head, tears off the last layer of thin wig that structures his feminine face, reveals his spiky crop before disappearing behind the white curtains. A few minutes of disorientation pass. The curtain lifts. Li steps forward, dressed in a traditional, silk, male long-gown (changshan), and with his pop male voice finishes the remaining lines. The most radical swerving of postmodern female impersonation perhaps lies in how it navigates this graduated closure. By appropriating and recycling pop music, by recoding it in the grammar of the newly forged aesthetic of transitionality, Li’s androgyny effects what now seems like a reversal of temporal priority, such that the wafting and surreal lyrics of “Burying Heart” are conditioned to lament the plight of some primordial suffering, some unjust fate of the existential female impersonator of whom the restrained pathos of the present figure is just an instance. Fed up with the high seriousness of the traditional and eager to escape from mass culture’s superficial obsession with shock values, fanchuan instead scaffolds and gradually releases its audiences along a scripted path that it knows will surely lead to acceptance and naturalization of the androgyny; it now foregrounds and aestheticizes the very process of reversion (as in Flowers in Mirror; Moon in Water) and that of transformation (as in Li’s Ten-Year Classics Anniversary Tour, which I will discuss later). As I have just brought up the pop male voice, it seems necessary, before analyzing in detail this element, to sketch the intersection and interaction of the aural and the visual in Li’s fanchuan  (see Fig. 6):

Fig. 6

A mapping of the visual and the aural in Li’s aesthetic. Source: Author’s own elaboration based on analyses of Li Yugang’s past performances

Poetics of the deployed murmuring male

“The New Drunken Concubine” (“Xin guifei zuijiu”), released in music-video format, represents another direction in fanchuan where the masculine secures a performative ground proportional to that of the feminine. Opening with a meandering melody of the bamboo flute (dizi) followed by a cantering tune of the Chinese zither (guzheng) and using short-shifting film shots that home in on the very mechanism behind the dan’s artistic production with peculiarly postmodern nostalgia, “The New Drunken Concubine” traces two main lines of interweaving relationships between five characters along the orders of the visual and the aural: a nandan figure; Li’s offstage personality; a little boy (in flashback); a kundan artist, apparently the boy’s mother (?) (also in black-and-white flashback); and the invoked image of Empress Yang herself. We learn—but only through making continual changes to an incoherent mental narrative with each incoming visual chunk—that even though the first character to appear is the kundan (painting her lips and finetuning her right eyebrow before a show), the then transformed, fully dressed dan character is Li Yugang the nandan who is performing the Concubine’s silk-sleeve dance on an empty traditional stage whose dominant hue of foxed paper hints at a total absence of audiences in a slice of some blurred and indeterminable past. Ensuing the dance, Li’s male figure, clad in a contemporary casual outfit, commences a trans-generational reflection on the tragedy of Yang Yuhuan—which then blooms into what seems like a veritable sequel to Mei Lanfang’s Guifei zuijiu.⁸ Li’s pop male voice—already dispensing with the enforced strength of the quasi-classical in favor of lyrical conversationality—sings of how.

That year, snowflakes drifted faintly; plum blossoms were out on the branches.

That year, by Huaqing Lake, remained too much sorrow.

There’s no need to say who’s right who’s wrong in love—sentiments right and sentiments wrong:

I just want to drink one more cup with you in my dream.

The golden-sparrow jade hairpin was your gift to me,

The rainbow-feather dance for you I still perform life after life.

At Jianmen Pass, you pined after me,

Under Mawei Slope, the ill-fated beauty died for true love.

Meanwhile, overlaying posterity’s rueful sighs at the unwavering faithfulness and time-defying devotion of the ancient beauty to her lover, our visual narrative-collage seems to tell of another bonding: A boy, around ten to thirteen years old, comes in from behind the curtain, sees his mother’s make-up ritual, becomes inspired, and starts pondering the beauty of the embroidered robe she is about to wear; she pats him on the shaved head. The mother having disappeared, the boy engages in practicing body-twisting acrobatics, such as the split and the nose-touching high kick, the pain brought on by which has now been suppressed and diluted by the hardened will. Following in his mother’s footsteps, he applies paint to half of his face. His androgynization begins. A tear falls. (The scenes quicken; the music comes to a second-fraction halt; the breathy male voice has reached its ultra-reflective, trancelike inarticulateness; the flute ejects a short piercing that breaks down even the thickest temporal cell wall). The climactic feminine has come back from its pseudo-dormant history to reciprocate the calling of the present with its high-pitched yet dainty, bright yet mournful, resonance:

Love and hate in one eye-blink abide,

Raising my glass to the moon: passion runs sky-high.

Love and hate both are borderless—

When would the Emperor long for me?

Over the chrysanthemum terrace inverts the bright moon’s reflection

Who will know that my heart’s core is freezing?

Drunk in the Emperor’s arms,

I dream of the beloved Great Tang!

Reflection evolves into a multitemporal dialogue. Relations between the male and the female, the masculine and the feminine in “The New Drunken Concubine” transcend that between a master and a subordinate: artistic genealogy, the narrative implies, no longer remains one of father to son or male master to male disciple, but it becomes a flesh-and-bone maternal relation, an emotional preservation of the Mother’s image in and by the Son. The source of admiration for the little boy is a woman figure—a feminine Muse, a subtle subversion of paternalistic aesthetics by a rewriting of dramatic historiography, an unreserved embracing of displaced feminine inheritance by giving it back its due inspirational value. Li’s nandan figure by this logic of revision becomes a natural development from the young dan-to-be, and the Mother-Muse vanishes into her abstract sphere of feminine idealism. At this point, paradoxically but perhaps unsurprisingly, the female-impersonating aesthetic of transitionality has reworked the pop male voice (now cleansed of its yang timbre) into the ostensibly purified substance of the feminine; thus, in a cumulative configuring of the song’s narrative coherence, Li’s male voice seems divested of its contrastive power and demoted to an empty signifier waiting to be retrospectively conjured up by its female counterpart; the former is not so willed to act as an ontological category but made to sound like a differentiated component of the latter, both of which are now subsumed in a larger aesthetic continuum. If the nandan’s art—internalizing premeditated symbolic signifiers in hope of reaching some unconscious onstage spontaneity, which must still be governed by wholeness, roundness, and essentialism—renders unnecessary any rupture within, or venturing forth from, the semiautonomous system to embody the quotidian (which move would then reduce the system to a mere “female” subsystem contiguous to the “male” and subsumed in yet another whole whose contours it is not the interest of the jingju nandan to chart), the postmodern female impersonator is only too happy to incorporate the quotidian into the mosaic of his aesthetic continuum and insist that it is a seamless product of the continuum’s own re-deployment. Instead of seeking to shun the mundane (as Qi Rushan did), the artist strives to internalize, showcasing a gamut of potentialities for the co-existence of the quotidian, the pop baritone, and the refined falsetto, the feminine. However, that state of co-existence connotes not respectful tolerance but a necessary mutual arising wherein one constituent triggers response from another—a fundamental dialectic of the androgyny. With nonchalance, the postmodern fanchuan artist admits, accepts, and adapts to the fact that his female impersonation must involve by its very constitutive nature what is not feminine.

This tentative fusion of the quotidian empathetic masculine with the elevated feminine on the level of individual songs matures into a structuring poetics in Paintings of the Four Ancient Beauties (Si mei tu). With generous funding from China’s Opera and Dance Drama Theatre (Zhongguo geju wuju yuan) and under the acclaimed directorship of Tong Ruirui, Paintings of the Four Ancient Beauties combines state-of-the-art dramaturgical technology with an impressive dance cast, and features Li Yugang as the four beauties as well as their backstage costume designer. This ninety-minute one-man Original Song-Dance-Poem Drama (Yuanchuang gewushi ju)—which premiered at Beijing’s National Grand Theatre in September 2011 and is still considered to be the apogee of Li’s fanchuan career—merges the glossy visual consummation of Flowers in Mirror; Moon in Water with the aural seamlessness of “The New Drunken Concubine,” released earlier that same year. Paintings of the Four Ancient Beauties unfolds as many phantasmagoric frames within a man’s dream. In such an infinite realm of the unconscious, the illusion of a stable self raises a series of existential questions that contest the boundary of cross-dressing, female impersonation, or any form of fanchuan itself:

The shoreless sea of human faces changes in the blink of an eye.

In this interlacing and vanishing of light and shadow, each of us is looking for an Other-Self.

Who am I?

Where do I come from?

Where should I go to find the beauty that belongs to me?

Am I impersonating a beauty, or is the story of some ancient beauty’s fate already blurring my identity?

This Zhuangzi-like conundrum, while almost inverting the normative value of truth and fiction, also paves the way for four consecutive portrayals of Xi Shi of the Spring and Autumn Period, Wang Zhaojun of the Western Han Dynasty, Diao Chan of the Three Kingdoms, and Concubine Yang of the Tang Dynasty. The gentle whispering of the poetic masculine takes on an incantatory function, not merely proffering a pretext to induce some apostrophic feminine spirit to sing of its life, but providing the very diachronic connection among what otherwise would seem like substantively disparate historical scenes. Hence, despite the glossy quality of the simulacra, the surreal picturesqueness of endless visual feasts and excessive aural gratification, we do not experience the present “re-enactment” of history in its breathless sweep from one frame to the next—as if historical significance were deferred while we were in the process of its unfoldment, or as if the tragic erupted in bursts which then seemed like some tantalizing possibility beyond recall when we found ourselves already in the next scene. A common reading of Paintings could demonstrate how the four beauties were victims of political machinations⁹; how they were mere tools of one state to wield influence over others; how, with or without them, the nation would still come to its own eventual demise. Such interpretation would indicate that Li’s impersonating aesthetic, similar to his predecessor’s, works through a revisionary lens to evoke empathy for characters long forgotten or unduly blamed as femmes fatales; that the difference between them is, unlike Mei, who under the ideological constraint of the PRC had to purge his plays of any feudalistic residual or prurience, Li enjoys more freedom to design his own costumes and portray what he imagines to be the characteristics of the beauties. I am more interested in a second reading, according to which Paintings is not a wholesale imposition of some politically correct, or revolutionary agency onto the individual subject as such (although undeniably there is still a lingering sense of agency in it), but a strategic shifting of emphasis, a single-handed re-centering of the mythico-historical subject in its very plight by recourse to elements heretofore believed to take away or divert attention from it, which thereby elevates the illusive subject to the top of power-relations.

Resuscitating self-mutilation: deconstruction à la mode

Indeed, my elaboration on a few strategies of female impersonation in Li’s art comes with the implication that, at a certain point, the postmodern fanchuan would reach its alternative high-modern peak and begin an unavoidable spiral down to the hardest bedrock of ossification. An irruption, however, has already taken place before it could even diagnose its own dilemma. On the practical side, Li’s decision to leave the haven of China’s Opera and Dance Drama Theatre in 2012, shortly after a global touring of Paintings to focus on his private company, The Oriental Jade (Yuze dongfang wenhua chuanmei youxianggongsi)—due to conflicts over production rights and artistic license—means that producing new fanchuan shows in the scope of Paintings could be a potential risk at best, and a financial drain at worst. Further, the lesson of appealing to a wider fanbase that the older jingju had paid too high a price to learn—only after its largest group of supporters had become too frail to frequent the theatre—hangs like some ominous writing on the wall that the contemporary artist cannot afford to ignore. Supposing self-contradiction is the very nature of a postmodern fanchuan, then it may be apt to suggest that the aesthetic experience is not to be located in some intrinsic unifying principles enumerable all at once, and that any modifications or revolutions in female-impersonating thematics, techniques and technology, message and subtext—as if they existed teleologically—need to be seen as taking shape as the retrospectively defined female impersonator mutilates his identity to expand along the nodes of marketization with embodied liminality. Such constant self-deconstruction and self-resuscitation comprise the cycle of birth and death, or self-renewal in renewal, to which the female impersonator subjects himself—however paradoxical it may seem—for survival in the new logic of a market economy inured even to the latest marvels, to the newest fun.

The first demonstration of self-appropriation by self-mutilation can be seen where the process of reversion in Flowers in Mirror; Moon in Water flips itself in chronological arrangement to become one of transformation. Li’s Ten-Year Classics Anniversary Tour (VancouverHarborTV 2018) in Canada consists of three parts possibly named “Gentle Greeting from a Traditional Chinese Culture,”¹⁰ “Miracle in Jaded Disbelief,” and “The Epiphany.” The second part, which I have called “Miracle in Jaded Disbelief,” features Li Yugang stepping out to a stage that has three exquisite embroidered robes, a chair, a table, and an orchestra of two. With a visage sporting partial makeup and in backstage robe, Li sits at the table, holds up the mirror, and begins demonstrating in stylized gestures the acts through which an artist transforms himself into a beautiful woman (see Fig. 7). Two stage assistants, dressed in black, come out to help him put on Empress Yang’s red imperial robe and a fifteen-pound, pearl-clad headpiece. Drumbeats hasten. The now fully adorned Yang Guifei elegantly moves to the stage center, treating her audiences to Mei’s classic aria and symbolic flower-picking dance from The Drunken Concubine, which are then mixed with Li’s own rotating silk-ribbon dance. Yet, what is significant about the whole scene is not so much the singing or the dancing, for “Miracle in Jaded Disbelief” marks Li’s first attempt to bring onstage by means of stylization the very process of transformation—transforming as a state. This making explicit the tricks of the trade, or rather, the giving away of surprise as part of a supposedly surprise-giving process, has gestured a change in fanchuan aesthetic. By foregrounding the last means of preparation appropriable, by parading before our eyes what had been artfully concealed, the female impersonator demands our acceptance of the excessive commodification of the anti-aesthetic. We are to move to the next scene—in which Yu Ji in Farewell My Concubine slits her own throat to spare herself the fate of a sex slave when her king nears his fatal defeat in battle—with the constant self-reminder that we are seeing a man, who transforms himself under our gaze into a woman, simultaneously courting suspension of disbelief by revealing the workings of its inducement.

Fig. 7

Li Yugang transforming himself into Empress Yang onstage in 10-Year Classics Anniversary Canada Tour. Courtesy of Carmen Lee

But even the dynamics of self-repetition and self-renewal—which by necessity involve a re-interpretation and re-inscription of conventional aesthetics and established cultural values in the ever-expanding field of the postmodern androgyny—are to come to their final resolution, that is, their eventual deconstruction. Where the yin/yang dialectic highlights the mutually inclusive nature of phenomena normally perceived in binary pairs,¹¹ the Buddhist epiphany becomes the androgyny’s newfound sublimation. Thus, fast as could be the scene shifts from Yu Ji’s death to a projected black-and-white clip of Li Yugang standing, face upward, under the rain. There is no sound except for the downpouring of droplets, to which Li opens up his palm to catch, lifts his face to feel—as if to revel in the cleansing of some thick makeup or some residual of androgynous constructedness, and lightly does a cast of white-dressed, emotionless-faced dancers tread a post-apocalyptic stage (one where mountains and rivers, dreams and dejections, warriors and poets, spring blossoms and eternal regret were one after another conjured up), and sonorous is the paced ringing of some monumental Buddhist bronze bell. Coming out from the curtain, Li intones: “All conditioned dharmas/Are like dreams, illusions bubbles, shadows,/Like dew drops and a lightning flash:/Contemplate them thus” (trans. Chih 1974);¹² he then sings the Buddhist-themed song, “Lotus” (“Lianhua”), to end the show. In what now becomes a radical break from both the subversive cross-dressing of the drag and the abstract embodiment of emotional interiority by the nandan, the androgyny deconstructs itself by a transcendental refutation of the authenticity and therefore ultimate existence of any self-proclaimed ontologies. The androgyny is not only relationally dependent; it is also empty of self-nature and sexual libido.¹³

Interestingly, nothing could serve as a better comparison to the self-deconstruction of female impersonation via sublimation in religious piety than fanchuan’s witting descent from its high-cultural realm into the playground of secular pop music. This experimental foray—unlike what it has just expressed about the empty nature of all conditioning and conditioned phenomena—constitutes a renewal of postmodern fanchuan aesthetics in a work that tests the waters of a mass culture to which Buddhist enlightenment is but another commodified idyllic platitude. Written by the young vocalist Xu (2018), who also co-performed the song with Li Yugang, “Queen of Flowers” (“Huakui”) brings together unlikely bedfellows—uncouth vernacular and classical literature, rap and neo-jingju, heartfelt sentiments and learned simulation—to construct, through the very texture of the human voices alone, a complex narrative of a scholar’s relationship with a high-class courtesan at a brothel in the past. Let us peruse a translation of the lyrics:

Queen of Flowers

Xu:

I heated a pot of wine—

half-raw, half-cooked.

Dreary autumn air locked deep in the courtyard,¹⁴

I alone ascended the blue mansion,

Where girls—lacking in satin,

profuse in flesh,

their jade thighs lush with oil—

lay unabashed.

I became your dog,¹⁵

with romance playing fast and loose,¹⁶

(though when clutching at my front lapel, my elbows showed through the holes)

And getting juiced.

I stole away at midnight,¹⁷

leaving a verse saying,

“I’ll return to marry you out. Thanks for the romance.”

Li: (x)

Dabbed were plum blossoms with powder pink;

Frolicsome were spring zephyrs outside the brocade windows.

Her visage still evinced full lightheart’dness,

But in had slipped uninvited idle sorrows.

Xu: (y)

Together, we competed in poetry,

ate with ivory chopsticks, drank from jade cups.

None needed sleep

—only puffing clouds and thudding rain under the mandarin-duck quilt.

You said birds flew away,

heavy snow

melted,

our love was not a fault,

but our case, helpless.

So hollowed did my promise ring.

What else could I do

but languish in lovesickness, convulse with parting sorrow—

till I grew frailer than a cucumber.¹⁸

Sitting alone above mortals’ hustle, sipping wine under the bright moon:

A thousand cups were but a play.

The course of time hardly selfsame stayed;

Powder-pink blossoms day by day darkened.

Why need thou mark the aging seasons?

Li: (x’)

Who was she that under charming candlelight undraped?

Who was she that drinking happy coyness feigned?

And yet, flourishing green and withering pink¹⁹

Haitang flowers’ fragrance recurred several autumns

Only to leave behind a strand of frost hair

leaning against the blue mansion’s railing.

Xu:

In a tipsy rage, I wanted to take you away.

To cover up my shame, you sold your given tenderness, gulping

down liquor, bending your

knees and begging for forgiveness;

then, bursting into cackles, next to that dog you lay supine!

Such pencil’d brows, such fine eyes!

Overcome with rage,

I recited a poem,

Then gave a wrathful howl.

I channeled my pains into the poem,

Hot tears overflowing: a scholar’s life is worthless indeed.

Gentle breeze playing silver bells—like thus you spoke,

comforting me and patting my head.

Li: (x) (repeat)

Xu: (y) (repeat)

Li: (x’) (repeat)

On the surface of the lyrics is the old trope of love between the scholar (caizi) and the fated beauty (jiaren) that runs through such classical literary works as Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio and Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber. The absence of the visual, however, demands an entirely different mode of reception in which binary pairs of masculine and feminine, vulgarity and elegance are temporally played out in what at first seems like a dialogic arrangement on the soundscapes of Chinese temple blocks, maracas, guzheng, rap vocals, and refined falsetto rhymes—but which then turn out to be alternating lyrical soliloquies. Through these interior snippets, we hear a penurious scholar, who, out of boredom and gloom, seeks out a pleasure house for a moment’s escape from his desperate circumstance. Luckily for him, the most beautiful and precious courtesan at the blue mansion has taken a fancy to his intellectual prowess and granted him her company for a while. But both parties have no illusion about the sort of romantic game they are playing, for the scholar admits with black-humored candor his subordinate economic status in his relationship with the huakui, and what he says in one line (e.g., bailing his girl out of the blue mansion), he undermines in another (e.g., his patched robe). So hopeless is the scholar’s life that uttering compulsive lies which he knows neither himself nor his courtesan would believe and parodying his learning only for the enhancement of self-mockery have become a palliative for grim reality.

The huakui is no less cognizant of the ephemeral nature of her privilege, which would last so long as her beauty remains—and of the inevitable fate that awaits her: “a strand of frost hair/leaning against the blue mansion’s railing.” She knows too well that she is performing a role at the brothel, and the she that performs, too, is alienated from some other self behind such desensitized facade like a product of schizophrenic repetition.

Given these general characterizations, questions about the narrative reliability of the scholar or the reciprocity of his and the huakui’s love may yield fewer insights into the complexity of “Queen of Flowers” than those about its formal structure. What I want to briefly emphasize here, before concluding, are the postmodern ambiguity and apathy that pervade the song, to which the function of the courtesan’s voice-impression contributes: Xu Liang’s drained rapping—with its self-deprecating humor, its occasional rakish elongation of rhyming end-vowels, and its excessive, semi-narcissistic re-narrativization—seems at the very moment that Li Yugang’s falsetto (which is now deliberately replicating jingju’s word-enunciation) registers to be all the more licentious not because of itself, but rather because the masculine rapping has unfolded first in time—as if in anticipation of the feminine falsetto, whose fragile sensuality and jaded knowingness would give a defining form to its antecedent and restructure the whole vocal apparatus around itself. The huakui’s timbre, her soft and elegant enunciation, her poetic allusions, her self-alienation (alienated self-totalization?)—all these come together to conjure up the impression of an endowed courtesan, who, due to some fateful tragedy, was thrust into a brothel and had since grown used to the vicissitudes of life. Through structural and aesthetic necessity, the fanchuan-huakui is uplifted above and given control of the musical restructuration, punctuating the influx of the diachronic quotidian with its refined presence in the form of predictable vocal melody and supporting harmony layers. Neither sentimental nor moralizing in its invocation of the helpless beauty at the blue mansion, postmodern fanchuan hinges on its very desensitization, its apparent boredom with pleasure play, and its carefree pretense to go along with the system—not to garner some agency for itself through the act (now that self is already shown to be a performative and deconstructible construct), but to unsettle the normalizing power of mass, automated music by the latter’s very terms. Such a strategy, admittedly, comes across as an odd and belated fulfillment of the Brechtian prophecy of the Verfremdungseffeckt.

What could be a proper conclusion to an inconclusive female-impersonating aesthetic? It would hardly be sufficient to note that, despite Mei Lanfang’s elitist training and Li Yugang’s grass-roots eclecticism, they both encountered acerbic criticisms when trying to promote female impersonation and contested established modes of jingju performing. The multivalence of Mei’s aesthetic emerges when we reconsider the lens through which we view it as a modernism “in the rival stories of the different modernisms,” which would “attest to the polemical character of every claim to modernity” (Saussy 2006, p. 25). With the passing away of the bourgeois monad and of the political zeitgeist that necessitated decisive action during the representational crisis, Li’s aesthetic—as a local reaction to, and witting inheritor of, the various discursive practices bred from the early-twentieth-century East-meets-West rendezvous—opts for what may be called multidirectional liminality. And rather than representing exclusive aesthetics, Mei and Li successively fulfilled the politicized role of cultural ambassador as it shifted from the laosheng through the dan, to the postmodern, category-busting androgyny—a role that demands relentless remobilization of soft power resources. Hence, while Li’s fanchuan strategies signify changes at a time when institutional support aligns with marketability and when the nandan art has been canonized and trapped in the dilemma of guarding its ground against the advance of new forms of global entertainment, they also remind us of the very old vitality that had iconized Mei: his familiarity with the latest social trends and willingness to adapt to market demands.²⁰ What new relationships would emerge when fanchuan cohabits with other forms of popular music? How would it deal with the backfiring of deconstruction when even this, too, teeters on familiarization? Under what circumstances would it be vital for female impersonation to self-problematize, through a willed forgetfulness and resolute periodization, so that it could freely (re)visit this or that part of its own history as an archeologist would, upon any recent excavation? Perhaps these are questions that we could only answer with time.