The Return of Magic

Body — a fragile, limited, but powerful object. The phenomenon of bodily transformation has occurred in Chinese cinema from the early phase of the twentieth century until today. The recurrence of transforming bodies reifies the shifting boundaries between normality and abnormality, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, remembering and forgetting that are mapped in social discourse. At the core of this research lies the question of how films concerning transforming bodies could be treated as a dispositif to shape and evoke the cultural memory of China.