Anna May Wong: Ornamentalism and Modern Celebrity

Anna May Wong: Ornamentalism and Modern Celebrity

The chapter focuses on Anna May Wong, a prominent Asian American figure, to explore the intersection of cinematic technology, celebrity culture, and the embodiment (and disembodiment) of Asiatic female personhood during American modernism.

Wong's Complicated Relationship with Fame

Wong's fame is paradoxical: she is internationally recognized yet relatively unknown in American cultural memory. She's both praised as an "Oriental Beauty" and reduced to stereotypes like the Dragon Lady or Lotus Blossom. Walter Benjamin described her as a "moon" and a "porcelain bowl," highlighting the entanglement of her corporeality with ornamental aesthetics.

Ornament and Essence

Wong's relationship with sartorial extravagance challenges the separation between body and costume, raising philosophical questions about biological essence versus artificial enhancement. The central question becomes: What happens when the human merges with design?

The Allure of the Supplement

The focus shifts from the physical body to the appeal of the supplement – the marginal, tactile, and artificially gorgeous "thing-person". While this could be seen as Orientalism, it provides an opportunity to examine the convergence of Asiatic femininity, cinema, and modern celebrity and the creation of alternative ontologies.

Celebrity as Transmutation

The status of celebrity, already a blend of object and subject, has the potential to produce an uncanny figure, one whose condition challenges the definition of "human."

The Absence of Race in Beauty Studies

Studies of celebrity and beauty often overlook race. Foundational texts tend not to address how euphoric beauty intersects with dysphoric, racialized bodies. This omission is understandable given the historical divergence of idealization and racial difference in Western thought, where convergence often leads to fetishization.

Beyond Fetishization

The text questions whether fetishization is the only way to understand the relationship between race and celebrity, or the ornamental objectification of figures like Wong. Current discourses often link the raced body to its visibility and materiality, treating racial difference as “disabling overvisibility.”

Re-evaluating Visibility

The text challenges the terms of presumed visibility, particularly in the context of early 20th-century cinema. It suggests that film should raise questions about the connection between surface and embodiment, rather than solidify it. Dichotomies like authenticity vs. artificiality and interiority vs. surface are inadequate for addressing the materialization of race and gender in visual mediums.

The Synthetic Self

The emergence of internationally renowned "race beauties" in the early 20th century both reinforced and destabilized racial embodiment. Women such as Anna May Wong and Josephine Baker constructed iconic images that were both synthetic and organic, crafting the self as art and product.

Agency and Commodity

The success of these women as agents and commodities necessitates a nuanced understanding of celebrity and glamour for women of color. How does modern celebrity, tied to self-production and commodity culture, affect someone seen as both too much and not at all? The text grapples with issues of agency, consent, and embodiment within a mediated context.

Violence and Aesthetics

The celebrity of the raced female body offers a tangible example of the intersection of violence and aesthetics. Embodiment becomes a ground for both denigration and affirmation. Discussing celebrity and glamour for women of color requires confronting the conflict between the violence of impersonality and the violence of personality.

Wong as Foil to Baker

Wong is presented as a counterpoint to Josephine Baker, representing the sartorial elegance of Orientalism versus the animalistic primitivism of Baker. However, both figures reveal the complexities of racial identity in the early 20th century, involving nostalgia, repulsion, and the translation of flesh into aesthetic objectness.

Ornamentalism and the Cinema

Ornamentalism, as a process of ornamenting and Orientalizing, raises questions about racial embodiment that cinema amplifies. Wong's cinematic presence is defined by her negotiation with her own "thingness," moving beyond stereotypes of decadent Asiatic female flesh.

Wong's Subjunctive Presence

The analysis focuses on Wong's "subjunctive" presence—projected and conditional—on and off-screen, exploring the tension between presence and absence, embodiment and abstraction. Wong mobilized a passionate international fan base, despite being relatively unknown in America. Her career spanned various mediums and languages, influencing modern artists and photographers.

"Piccadilly" and the Making of Celebrity

The British film Piccadilly (1929) serves as a key example of Wong's appeal. In the film, Wong plays Shosho, a Chinese dishwasher who rises to stardom. The film meditates on the making of celebrity, aligning Wong with her character.

Shosho's Breakout Performance

The breakout performance scene in Piccadilly is a metareflection on celebrity making. Despite being devoid of color, the film is filled with light and affect. Strobe lights create a chromatic ring around Wong, who is clad in metal, both drawing and deflecting the gaze. The light unites the dancer and spectators in a moment of visual trance.

Shine, Fetishism, and Commodification

The scene's attention to "bling" can be interpreted through the lens of fetishism. Orientalized femininity relies on spectacular ornamentation rather than nakedness. Drawing on Freud and Marx, the text links shine to both psychical substitution and commodity fetishism, epitomizing the commodification of the feminized Asiatic.

Beyond Fetishistic Readings

The analysis goes beyond these interpretations, questioning the affective impact of the scene and the consternation it provokes. It asks who is watching whom and whether the light signals plenitude or blindness.

The Gaze and Self-Objectification

Shosho's costume reflects light back with violence and indifference. The scene encompasses multiple layers of gazes, with the camera sometimes adopting Shosho's perspective. The audience is placed on display, and Shosho's shining body acts as a mirror, suspending the audience in a state of self-arrest.

Fascination and Glamour

The text explores the anatomy of fascination, suggesting that it allows contact with objectness and enables empathy for self-objectification. Glamour facilitates a state of objectness that seduces. The true object of fascination in cinema is light, leading to a fantasy of fusing eyes to light.

Vision and Blindness

Piccadilly forces a confrontation with the passage between vision and blindness. A dark blank screen precedes Shosho's performance, underscoring the connection between light, visuality, and cinematic creation. The female body stands in for light, becoming a precondition for cinematic vision rather than psychical blindness.

Shosho's Body as Light

The text considers Shosho's body as surprisingly light, contrasting it with Mabel's Rubenesque figure. Shosho's movements are cool and ephemeral, offering a formal reverie instead of showbiz frenzy. Shosho wins the competition not through availability but through constraint.

Interiorization and Impersonality

Shosho's moments of exhibitionism are presented as moments of interiorization. The extradiegetic music creates a sense of privacy, positioning Shosho outside of the plot's time. Her self-absorption creates an aggressive impersonality, as if she is always elsewhere. This performance of withdrawal produces a fantasy of interiority for the audience to witness.

Theatricality and Solipsism

The scene dramatizes the construction of celebrity by unpacking the theatrical process of public interiority. Shosho's solipsism, rather than erotic provocation, invites the audience to plunge into a flat, reflective interiority. She assumes a resistant objectness.

The Importance of Costume

The film's sartorial focus exceeds its corporeal obsession. The camera lingers on details like a run in Shosho's stocking, questioning the integrity of her "epidermal schema." Valentine worries about Shosho's costume, and Shosho dictates the terms of her dress, choosing an armored costume. This scene reveals Wong assuming multiple roles: star, costume designer, director, and producer.

Critiquing Subjecthood

The portrait of sartorial dictate is ambiguous about the body issuing commands. The erotic charge comes from the fantasized, not exposed, body. Shosho has Jim try on the costume instead, resulting in a homoerotic exchange. In this racialized and gendered moment, skein replaces skin, and Shosho offers herself by displacing herself.

Skin as Covering

The fantasy of "skin" is indebted to fantasies of covering. Seeing racial and gender difference becomes possible through the impossibility of seeing. Star quality insists on its own superficiality. Instead of idealizing yellow skin, Shosho replaces it with a metallic shield.

Hard Diva Photography

Shosho's shine is neither animalistic nor soft, differentiating it from idealized white femininity. Instead, it aligns with "hard diva photography," akin to Jean Harlow, Gloria Swanson, and Marlene Dietrich. Wong's armor emits an aggressively inorganic quality.

Cellophane Glamour

Wong transforms the "moribund aesthetics" of cellophane by mobilizing plasticity in a vitally inorganic way. Plastics represented transformation and malleability, which Wong enacts through her glamour and shine. Her "thingness" differs from the corporeality associated with Oriental beauty.

Glamour and Personhood

Glamour's shellacked beauty highlights the coexistence of self-presentation as an object with the rendering of that self as indigestible. The cult of personality exemplifies the ambivalence of personhood. "It", the vernacular term for ultrapersonality, is also a pronoun designating nonpersonhood. Glamour provides relief from the burdens of personhood and visibility, offering a peculiar form of agency developed through surrogacy.

Substitution and Agency

Substitution is present whenever authentic personhood is supposed to be witnessed. Shosho signs her contract in Chinese, invalidating it diegetically. This act signifies both Wong's identification with and distancing from Shosho, enacting the politics of recognition. Agency appears as a potential that hovers between person and thing.

The Shimmering Life of Things

Agency is displaced onto the surfaces surrounding Shosho. Light, animate inanimateness, facilitates the transfer to another realm of seeing and feeling. The discourse of shine and sculptural surfaces in the 1920s and 1930s should be considered.

Shine as Ethical Immateriality

Shine presents a means through which materiality might be released rather than reified. It imputes motion and sound to inanimate objects, embodying auratic potential. Philosophers have attributed to shine an inherent aesthetic quality that allows art to escape its materiality, signaling an ethical dimension.

Shine as Fugitive Surrogacy

Shine derealizes the Oriental woman as an object. It's an active mode of relationality through which the organic and inorganic fuse. The pleasure derives from the eruption of the visual into other realms, where shine links the visual to the haptic, transporting Shosho between flesh and object.

The Animated Ornament

Shininess animates and extends Shosho's body. By cladding her in gold, the mis-en-scène produces a multisensorial surface that decorporealizes her. The audience is glued to the seductive agency of living on the surface of ornaments. The woman as ornament is alive.

Worlds and World-Making

The ballroom itself is an ornament, referencing geography, mapping, and geometry. Shosho's body redraws and remapping the space, questioning what her dance and its cartography are saying about imperialism.

Light and Imperialism

The Piccadilly ballroom instantiates an imperial geography, with Shosho as the "Eastern jewel" that crowns British imperialism. While light is often seen as a symptom of commodity culture, Shosho's performance can also be seen as reactivating colonial objects in ways that remap imperialism.

Ornament as World Order

Gottfried Semper reminds us that "kosmos," the ancient Greek word for adornment, means both "decoration" and "world order." Ornament aims to align itself with cosmic laws, remap space, and expand bodily periphery with inanimate objects.

Pan-Asian Geography

Shosho's costume generates a map of its own, alluding to various stylistic elements from Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, and Indonesian cultures. This hybrid Orient questions authenticity and rearranges fragments of pan-Asian geography in the face of Western imperial expansion. The fragmented world of Shosho's Orient records loss and relocates transplanted ecologies.

Spectatorship and Ownership

Shosho speaks to the world as the fragmented world, articulating through her objectness. Through light and the life of the object, this performance realigns notions of spectatorship, ownership, and geographic centrality. Shosho, the exotic import, calls out to the world, rotating and relocating the audience.

The Power of the Circle

The trope of the circle dominates the scene, emitting symbolic power as a microcosmic shape. It confers the forces of the universe on the body it adorns, enabling self-expansion and self-containment. The diegetic audience enjoys being an object under her sway.

Shosho as Venus

The scene is likened to a revision of the birth of Venus, with Shosho as the still-yet-moving center of a brewing storm. The ballroom is a microcosm of the universe, with Shosho emitting and drawing in light. The scene transforms from a display of Western conquest into a moment of ascent, with Wong remapping the universe with herself as the axis.

Aesthetic Authority

The scene rehearses self-origination against imperial time. This emergence of aesthetic authority can be likened to Botticelli's painting as an allegory of art's birth from originary loss. Wong also negotiates lack and compensation by turning her own ruptured thingness into plenitude, offering herself as the referent. This scene presents an Asiatic Venus mediating between luminance and defilement.

The Performative Impact of Aesthetic Force

For the duration of the performance, Shosho is more than just another dancing Chinese girl; she wields the auratic power of signs. The text emphasizes the performative impact of her aesthetic force.

Wong as "World's Best Dressed Woman"

The Mayfair Mannequin Society of New York named Wong “the World’s Best Dressed Woman” in 1934. Wong observed that “you can forgive a woman for a face that is not beautiful more easily than for a dress that isn’t,” highlighting the interdependence between subjecthood and surrogacy. These women's work involved constant negotiation with the symptom that was their bodies.

The Politics of Personhood and Recognition

Wong's disappearance into appearance reveals both the politics of personhood and recognition. The euphoric politics of redemptive personhood requires engagement with dysphoric alternatives. Wong's glamour is not a denial of racial injury but an affirmation of subjecthood’s indeterminacy. Her objectness compels us to confront the intimacy between being a thing and a person.

Disembodiment and Freedom

This is a tale about race, style, and a dream of subjecthood indebted to objecthood. Wong sustains imagination through her paradoxical staging and erasure of her body. Ornamentalism offers an opportunity for disembodiment for racialized subjects. The overcorporealized body may find freedom in dematerialization or synthetic self-extension.

A Materiality both Imagined and Conditional

This early-twentieth-century beauty pauses the politics of celebrity and race by asking us to consider how a body might operate subjunctively—a materiality both imagined and conditional. Ornamentalism, rather than embodiment, becomes the source of Wong’s enduring, enticing refusal.