Liew Kai Khiun | Hong Kong Metropolitan University (original) (raw)

Journal Papers by Liew Kai Khiun

Television and New Media , 2019

Through the ethnographic survey of the ownership, use, and display of television-related devices ... more Through the ethnographic survey of the ownership, use, and display of television-related devices of forty households in Singapore, this article frames the concept of Skeuomorphic Domestic Television. This term describes the continued centrality of the traditional "living room television" amid digital media's portability. Results from the stocktaking of the ownership of television-related devices in the surveyed households point to the narrowing of the digital divide arising from the greater affordability of media technologies. However, within the highly densely populated city-state, it was found that social distinctions from television cultures were maintained in the skeuomorphic luxury of the "TV-Sofa space" in living rooms of surveyed households. Such a space that distinguishes individuals watching television in cluttered rooms against the more communal viewing practices in designated spacious living rooms characterizes the "Analog Spatial Divide" of skeuomorphic domestic television cultures.

Global Media and China 4(4): 419-436, 2019

This article will revisit the beginnings of the spread of Korean popular entertainment in China i... more This article will revisit the beginnings of the spread of Korean popular entertainment in China in the mid-1990s to early 2000s by examining the contents of previously untapped Chinese language popular entertainment magazines and public recollections on internet forums. Considered here as critical archival resources, the authors argue that these materials are instrumental in offering both new chronologies and insights to the circulatory process of the regionalization of Korean popular cultures or Hallyu. Korean popular music (hereafter K-pop) entered China after the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Instead of the often singularized, culturalist argument of "shared traditions," this article offers a more dynamic historiography of the Korean Wave in China that is termed here as "Analog Hallyu."

Continuum, 34:5, 647-650, 2020

This special issue focuses on television productions under specific political economies in China,... more This special issue focuses on television productions under specific political economies in China, Taiwan, and Singapore for furthering the scholarship on East Asian Television. Since the 1990s, the significance of these national television networks has increasingly magnified from their domestic role in forming national identities to the transnational
projection of ‘soft power’. Yet these globalizing television productions are crossing diverse cultures embedded in temporal-spatially specific value-laden societies, in the case of East Asia, in varying degrees, the persistent attributions to Confucianism seeping down to the mediascapes of television.

This paper seeks to discuss the ecology of memories in contemporary Singapore as reflective of eme... more This paper seeks to discuss the ecology of memories in contemporary Singapore as reflective of emerging tensions between the state and civil society in remembering the development of the nation-state for close to about five decades of independence. At the core of the tension are competing efforts to curate public memories through traditional and new media. As the state establishes a nostalgic community that sentimentalizes the dominant narrative of development in the Singapore Memory Project, alternative campaigns emerge to remember a more troubled past of arbitrary detention of political activists. Using the metaphors of ‘fumigating’ and ‘fuming’ to frame the staging of a more reified reminiscence of the past against the resurfacing a more traumatized history, the authors seek to position the recent contestations as the beginnings of a new chapter of communicating and personalizing history in the republic

She acquired her doctorate from Monash University, Australia, where her thesis involving the stud... more She acquired her doctorate from Monash University, Australia, where her thesis involving the study of participatory design and common pool resources in cultural institutions received two awards. Her current programme of research involves participatory archives and engagement in cultural institutions, and the relationship between message design and information-seeking behaviour in participatory contexts.

The soft-authoritarian and severe image of contemporary Singapore has often been associated with ... more The soft-authoritarian and severe image of contemporary Singapore has often been associated with the
imposing and paternalistic presence of Lee Kuan Yew who has overseen the city-state as prime minister
and subsequently, senior statesman since 1959. Unlike the statues and street-names dedicated to other
founding leaders in newly decolonized countries, Lee has consciously discouraged any public portraitures
of himself in Singapore. However, as his presence fades with ailing health in the recent years, his
images are beginning to surface in figurines, coffee table books and even street art. Over in the social
and alternative media, there is an increasingly more irreverent use of the Hokkien/Minan term ‘limpeh’
or ‘your father’ as parodies of Lee’s unyielding paternalism. As a masculinistic self-assertion of one’s
authority, ‘limpeh’ is often crudely associated with the Hokkien/Minan-speaking ethnic Singaporean
Chinese working class. Singaporeans have also recognized the characteristics of ‘limpeh’ with the
authoritarian legacy of Lee who had displayed little mercy in crushing his political rivals and pushing
his social vision to society. In this respect, these popular communications can be seen as the cacophony
of emerging voices of the city-state in a late authoritarian phase.

Chow Hin Wah, age 16 is a St John's Ambulance Brigade nurse. She lives opposite her first aid pos... more Chow Hin Wah, age 16 is a St John's Ambulance Brigade nurse. She lives opposite her first aid post. She is wearing her white nurse uniform when I saw her and was on duty in spite of a bandaged head and badly shaken nerves when her house was razed to the ground. Hers is the spirit of the women and children of Singapore's diverse population which proved last night that it could take whatever was coming.

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2011

This special issue brings together a range of articles exploring the changing trends of televisio... more This special issue brings together a range of articles exploring the changing trends of television cultures in contemporary Asia over the past decade. With the process of deregulation and privatization of national broadcasting rights, coupled with the intensification of the rate of penetration of cable, satellite and digital communicative technologies; the experience of television viewing is becoming increasingly diffused and pluralized. The impact has been particularly accelerated in Asia, as evinced by the rapid liberalization of its media industries over the last two decades and the manner in which it has significantly freed up its airspace. Increasingly, private and even state broadcasters are compelled to fill the time slots with more programmes so as to generate revenues from advertisements. As broadcasting stations compete in importing external contents from popular American productions and other regional productions, locally made productions no longer define a country's televisionscape.

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 2009

The print and broadcast media are traditionally vital vehicles for both the transmission of infor... more The print and broadcast media are traditionally vital vehicles for both the transmission of information and framing of discussion on health, medicine, and diseases. However, their roles have been largely peripheral in medical historiography. In this respect, this paper explores the position of English language newspapers in colonial Malaya in identifying and disseminating epidemiological data as well as commentaries on public health issues and policies. These discussions provided a crucial platform in linking public health discourses to a more literate and influential lay public and adding to broader debates on the governance of the colony. Collectively, the articles and editorials of the print media in British Malaya were not only indicative of the extent of involvement of colonial civil society in public health. Their narratives also reflected underlying tensions between state and society in addition to sociocultural anxieties over the fluid labor and capital flows of the colonial political economy.

Inter-asia Cultural Studies, 2006

The evolution of moral panics is dependent on the particular social context and the ability of ce... more The evolution of moral panics is dependent on the particular social context and the ability of certain issues to trigger concern within society. In this paper, the authors have employed a cross-comparative study of the heavy metal music subcultures in Singapore and Malaysia to understand the differences in the issues that generate such panics based on the socio-political context of each country and its current concerns. Although the youth involved in both cases are marginalised male Malays, the framing of their alleged deviance and criminality permits, in the case of Singapore, only a limited possibility for moral panic creation given the conservative socio-political governance that limits allegations such as 'Satanism'. In the case of Malaysia, where a 'large-scale' moral panic involving black metal emerged in 2001, the recent trend towards Islamisation gave fodder for the condemnation of black metal based on the allegations of the anti-Islamic behaviour of Muslim youth involved in the black metal scene. In both cases, such groups were exploited by parties claiming to defend the social fabric of the moral majority, but in the latter case it took on grave implications due to the extent of the state and public response. This paper thus argues that the framing of these moral panics is an important component determining the relative 'success' of the panic or its ability to capture public and state imaginings.

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2011

Between 2003 and 2007, three versions of the Japanese novel, Shiroi Kyotou (The Great White Tower... more Between 2003 and 2007, three versions of the Japanese novel, Shiroi Kyotou (The Great White Tower) were screened as television drama serials in Japan , Taiwan (2006) and South Korea (2007). The phenomenon of White Tower reflects the vibrant multiculturality and transnationality of East Asian television dramas. Accordingly, this article seeks to use the various narratives of White Tower as manifestations of the underlying tensions of post-authoritarian and post-miracle economies of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. While audiences are awed by the technologically sophisticated hospital settings and the rigidly disciplined health professionals in the productions, they are also exposed to the ugly realities of cronyism, neglect and arrogance of the predominantly male medical elite. Given the conservatism of most mainstream television dramas, the challenge here is to determine how to interpret the latest versions of White Tower as simultaneously exhibitions and critiques of Asian modernity.

Posted mostly by consumers rather than industry players, music videos on video-sharing websites l... more Posted mostly by consumers rather than industry players, music videos on video-sharing websites like YouTube have been instrumental in expanding the circulation of audio-visual materials in cyberspace. In transnational Chinese pop music, with shared memories engendered by viewers' nostalgic comments on clips, particularly the older ones, uploads promise the possibilities of transcending existing geopolitical divides between Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora. However, as evinced in this case study of video clips featuring prominent Taiwanese female singer Teresa Teng, the uploaders are divided between advocates for a 'Greater China' and detractors seeking a more indigenised Taiwanese identity. Analysis of some of Teng's more politically contentious music videos in the highly networked and circulatory media context, this article advocates looking beyond the immediate sensory audio-projections of the music videos to better understand them as historical and ideological texts. To engage with the posted texts, a set of cultural literacies, including prior historical awareness of the posted music video as well as the geo-cultural contexts of the multilingual and gendered responses in the viewers' comments, is needed. Placed on the seemingly more open platform of YouTube, Teng's music videos have become part of the broader attempts of her viewers to re-appropriate and re-territorialise her legacy according to new cultural imaginations and desires.

International Review of Social History, 2006

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2009

This article explores the treatment of the issues of disability and healing in the films of Hong ... more This article explores the treatment of the issues of disability and healing in the films of Hong Kong's independent filmmaker, Fruit Chan, between the years 1997 and 2004. These films include: Made in Hong Kong, Little Cheung, Longest Summer, Hollywood Hong-Kong, Durian Durian, Public Toilet and Dumplings. Distinguished by his efforts to forefront subaltern subjects in the city, Chan's films highlight the complexities of the relationship between social marginality and disability, as well as the medical market and healing cultures. By contrasting diverse forms of healing in his highly hybridized and transnational vernacular medical marketplace, Chan's films are instrumental in displaying the underlying tensions of bio-politics on screen. The film is about . . . growing old, sickness and death. It is about how Asian people are always in search of some magic portions or elixir of life to make them better. (Berry 2005: 480) (Fruit Chan on his film Public Toilet) 209 NCJCF 6 (3) 209-225

This article samples several television serials from Hong Kong and Japan to examine trends in Eas... more This article samples several television serials from Hong Kong and Japan to examine trends in East Asian television dramas' portrayal of discourses on health, illness, and disability. Such portrayals are a response to an increasingly literate publics' demands for less explicitly instructional health narratives and for dramatic demonstration of knowledge through para-performances in television serials. Accompanying these health messages are exhibitions of positive psycho-behavioral mechanisms for coping with disability or disease that typify the ideal sociocultural traits of the individual. East Asian dramas have defined many trends of modern living for transnational and regional viewers, and the health discourses in these productions are similarly likely to significantly shape notions of modernity and urbanity in regional contexts. Using an "informatization-dramatization" analytical framework, this article seeks to conceptualize the narrative structures behind the presentation of these health-related messages.

Television and New Media , 2019

Through the ethnographic survey of the ownership, use, and display of television-related devices ... more Through the ethnographic survey of the ownership, use, and display of television-related devices of forty households in Singapore, this article frames the concept of Skeuomorphic Domestic Television. This term describes the continued centrality of the traditional "living room television" amid digital media's portability. Results from the stocktaking of the ownership of television-related devices in the surveyed households point to the narrowing of the digital divide arising from the greater affordability of media technologies. However, within the highly densely populated city-state, it was found that social distinctions from television cultures were maintained in the skeuomorphic luxury of the "TV-Sofa space" in living rooms of surveyed households. Such a space that distinguishes individuals watching television in cluttered rooms against the more communal viewing practices in designated spacious living rooms characterizes the "Analog Spatial Divide" of skeuomorphic domestic television cultures.

Global Media and China 4(4): 419-436, 2019

This article will revisit the beginnings of the spread of Korean popular entertainment in China i... more This article will revisit the beginnings of the spread of Korean popular entertainment in China in the mid-1990s to early 2000s by examining the contents of previously untapped Chinese language popular entertainment magazines and public recollections on internet forums. Considered here as critical archival resources, the authors argue that these materials are instrumental in offering both new chronologies and insights to the circulatory process of the regionalization of Korean popular cultures or Hallyu. Korean popular music (hereafter K-pop) entered China after the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Instead of the often singularized, culturalist argument of "shared traditions," this article offers a more dynamic historiography of the Korean Wave in China that is termed here as "Analog Hallyu."

Continuum, 34:5, 647-650, 2020

This special issue focuses on television productions under specific political economies in China,... more This special issue focuses on television productions under specific political economies in China, Taiwan, and Singapore for furthering the scholarship on East Asian Television. Since the 1990s, the significance of these national television networks has increasingly magnified from their domestic role in forming national identities to the transnational
projection of ‘soft power’. Yet these globalizing television productions are crossing diverse cultures embedded in temporal-spatially specific value-laden societies, in the case of East Asia, in varying degrees, the persistent attributions to Confucianism seeping down to the mediascapes of television.

This paper seeks to discuss the ecology of memories in contemporary Singapore as reflective of eme... more This paper seeks to discuss the ecology of memories in contemporary Singapore as reflective of emerging tensions between the state and civil society in remembering the development of the nation-state for close to about five decades of independence. At the core of the tension are competing efforts to curate public memories through traditional and new media. As the state establishes a nostalgic community that sentimentalizes the dominant narrative of development in the Singapore Memory Project, alternative campaigns emerge to remember a more troubled past of arbitrary detention of political activists. Using the metaphors of ‘fumigating’ and ‘fuming’ to frame the staging of a more reified reminiscence of the past against the resurfacing a more traumatized history, the authors seek to position the recent contestations as the beginnings of a new chapter of communicating and personalizing history in the republic

She acquired her doctorate from Monash University, Australia, where her thesis involving the stud... more She acquired her doctorate from Monash University, Australia, where her thesis involving the study of participatory design and common pool resources in cultural institutions received two awards. Her current programme of research involves participatory archives and engagement in cultural institutions, and the relationship between message design and information-seeking behaviour in participatory contexts.

The soft-authoritarian and severe image of contemporary Singapore has often been associated with ... more The soft-authoritarian and severe image of contemporary Singapore has often been associated with the
imposing and paternalistic presence of Lee Kuan Yew who has overseen the city-state as prime minister
and subsequently, senior statesman since 1959. Unlike the statues and street-names dedicated to other
founding leaders in newly decolonized countries, Lee has consciously discouraged any public portraitures
of himself in Singapore. However, as his presence fades with ailing health in the recent years, his
images are beginning to surface in figurines, coffee table books and even street art. Over in the social
and alternative media, there is an increasingly more irreverent use of the Hokkien/Minan term ‘limpeh’
or ‘your father’ as parodies of Lee’s unyielding paternalism. As a masculinistic self-assertion of one’s
authority, ‘limpeh’ is often crudely associated with the Hokkien/Minan-speaking ethnic Singaporean
Chinese working class. Singaporeans have also recognized the characteristics of ‘limpeh’ with the
authoritarian legacy of Lee who had displayed little mercy in crushing his political rivals and pushing
his social vision to society. In this respect, these popular communications can be seen as the cacophony
of emerging voices of the city-state in a late authoritarian phase.

Chow Hin Wah, age 16 is a St John's Ambulance Brigade nurse. She lives opposite her first aid pos... more Chow Hin Wah, age 16 is a St John's Ambulance Brigade nurse. She lives opposite her first aid post. She is wearing her white nurse uniform when I saw her and was on duty in spite of a bandaged head and badly shaken nerves when her house was razed to the ground. Hers is the spirit of the women and children of Singapore's diverse population which proved last night that it could take whatever was coming.

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2011

This special issue brings together a range of articles exploring the changing trends of televisio... more This special issue brings together a range of articles exploring the changing trends of television cultures in contemporary Asia over the past decade. With the process of deregulation and privatization of national broadcasting rights, coupled with the intensification of the rate of penetration of cable, satellite and digital communicative technologies; the experience of television viewing is becoming increasingly diffused and pluralized. The impact has been particularly accelerated in Asia, as evinced by the rapid liberalization of its media industries over the last two decades and the manner in which it has significantly freed up its airspace. Increasingly, private and even state broadcasters are compelled to fill the time slots with more programmes so as to generate revenues from advertisements. As broadcasting stations compete in importing external contents from popular American productions and other regional productions, locally made productions no longer define a country's televisionscape.

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 2009

The print and broadcast media are traditionally vital vehicles for both the transmission of infor... more The print and broadcast media are traditionally vital vehicles for both the transmission of information and framing of discussion on health, medicine, and diseases. However, their roles have been largely peripheral in medical historiography. In this respect, this paper explores the position of English language newspapers in colonial Malaya in identifying and disseminating epidemiological data as well as commentaries on public health issues and policies. These discussions provided a crucial platform in linking public health discourses to a more literate and influential lay public and adding to broader debates on the governance of the colony. Collectively, the articles and editorials of the print media in British Malaya were not only indicative of the extent of involvement of colonial civil society in public health. Their narratives also reflected underlying tensions between state and society in addition to sociocultural anxieties over the fluid labor and capital flows of the colonial political economy.

Inter-asia Cultural Studies, 2006

The evolution of moral panics is dependent on the particular social context and the ability of ce... more The evolution of moral panics is dependent on the particular social context and the ability of certain issues to trigger concern within society. In this paper, the authors have employed a cross-comparative study of the heavy metal music subcultures in Singapore and Malaysia to understand the differences in the issues that generate such panics based on the socio-political context of each country and its current concerns. Although the youth involved in both cases are marginalised male Malays, the framing of their alleged deviance and criminality permits, in the case of Singapore, only a limited possibility for moral panic creation given the conservative socio-political governance that limits allegations such as 'Satanism'. In the case of Malaysia, where a 'large-scale' moral panic involving black metal emerged in 2001, the recent trend towards Islamisation gave fodder for the condemnation of black metal based on the allegations of the anti-Islamic behaviour of Muslim youth involved in the black metal scene. In both cases, such groups were exploited by parties claiming to defend the social fabric of the moral majority, but in the latter case it took on grave implications due to the extent of the state and public response. This paper thus argues that the framing of these moral panics is an important component determining the relative 'success' of the panic or its ability to capture public and state imaginings.

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2011

Between 2003 and 2007, three versions of the Japanese novel, Shiroi Kyotou (The Great White Tower... more Between 2003 and 2007, three versions of the Japanese novel, Shiroi Kyotou (The Great White Tower) were screened as television drama serials in Japan , Taiwan (2006) and South Korea (2007). The phenomenon of White Tower reflects the vibrant multiculturality and transnationality of East Asian television dramas. Accordingly, this article seeks to use the various narratives of White Tower as manifestations of the underlying tensions of post-authoritarian and post-miracle economies of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. While audiences are awed by the technologically sophisticated hospital settings and the rigidly disciplined health professionals in the productions, they are also exposed to the ugly realities of cronyism, neglect and arrogance of the predominantly male medical elite. Given the conservatism of most mainstream television dramas, the challenge here is to determine how to interpret the latest versions of White Tower as simultaneously exhibitions and critiques of Asian modernity.

Posted mostly by consumers rather than industry players, music videos on video-sharing websites l... more Posted mostly by consumers rather than industry players, music videos on video-sharing websites like YouTube have been instrumental in expanding the circulation of audio-visual materials in cyberspace. In transnational Chinese pop music, with shared memories engendered by viewers' nostalgic comments on clips, particularly the older ones, uploads promise the possibilities of transcending existing geopolitical divides between Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora. However, as evinced in this case study of video clips featuring prominent Taiwanese female singer Teresa Teng, the uploaders are divided between advocates for a 'Greater China' and detractors seeking a more indigenised Taiwanese identity. Analysis of some of Teng's more politically contentious music videos in the highly networked and circulatory media context, this article advocates looking beyond the immediate sensory audio-projections of the music videos to better understand them as historical and ideological texts. To engage with the posted texts, a set of cultural literacies, including prior historical awareness of the posted music video as well as the geo-cultural contexts of the multilingual and gendered responses in the viewers' comments, is needed. Placed on the seemingly more open platform of YouTube, Teng's music videos have become part of the broader attempts of her viewers to re-appropriate and re-territorialise her legacy according to new cultural imaginations and desires.

International Review of Social History, 2006

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2009

This article explores the treatment of the issues of disability and healing in the films of Hong ... more This article explores the treatment of the issues of disability and healing in the films of Hong Kong's independent filmmaker, Fruit Chan, between the years 1997 and 2004. These films include: Made in Hong Kong, Little Cheung, Longest Summer, Hollywood Hong-Kong, Durian Durian, Public Toilet and Dumplings. Distinguished by his efforts to forefront subaltern subjects in the city, Chan's films highlight the complexities of the relationship between social marginality and disability, as well as the medical market and healing cultures. By contrasting diverse forms of healing in his highly hybridized and transnational vernacular medical marketplace, Chan's films are instrumental in displaying the underlying tensions of bio-politics on screen. The film is about . . . growing old, sickness and death. It is about how Asian people are always in search of some magic portions or elixir of life to make them better. (Berry 2005: 480) (Fruit Chan on his film Public Toilet) 209 NCJCF 6 (3) 209-225

This article samples several television serials from Hong Kong and Japan to examine trends in Eas... more This article samples several television serials from Hong Kong and Japan to examine trends in East Asian television dramas' portrayal of discourses on health, illness, and disability. Such portrayals are a response to an increasingly literate publics' demands for less explicitly instructional health narratives and for dramatic demonstration of knowledge through para-performances in television serials. Accompanying these health messages are exhibitions of positive psycho-behavioral mechanisms for coping with disability or disease that typify the ideal sociocultural traits of the individual. East Asian dramas have defined many trends of modern living for transnational and regional viewers, and the health discourses in these productions are similarly likely to significantly shape notions of modernity and urbanity in regional contexts. Using an "informatization-dramatization" analytical framework, this article seeks to conceptualize the narrative structures behind the presentation of these health-related messages.

Women We Love: Femininities and the Korean Wave, 2023

Leong-Salobir, C. (Ed.). Routledge Handbook on Food in Asia(176-192). London: Routledge. , 2019

The Hard State, Soft City of Singapore, 2020

This chapter seeks to illustrate the authors’ initiative of deploying mobile communication techno... more This chapter seeks to illustrate the authors’ initiative of deploying mobile
communication technologies through the ‘iBBC’ app to locate and reference tombstones of prominent historical personalities in Singapore’s Bukit Brown Cemetery. The densely vegetated, 80-year-old former Chinese municipal cemetery filled with more than a hundred thousand graves has been largely neglected, and the traditional Chinese inscriptions written on many of the tombstones are inscrutable to many contemporary visitors. As part of the process of digital interventions, iBBC helps visitors obtain encyclopedic information immediately on-site by using Augmented Reality (AR) to recognize selected tomb monuments. Such interventions are critical in sensitizing the public to the cemetery’s cultural heritage.

USA: Greenword Press, 2008., 2008

A family oriented beach resort, by any standards, was an unusual location for a Heavy Metal gig (... more A family oriented beach resort, by any standards, was an unusual location for a Heavy Metal gig (live performance). Yet, for several months, this venue played host to two worlds-families with children and Malay youths suited in their trademark black t-shirts bearing emblems of morbidity and malevolence. The inevitable collision of these two worlds and the interactions that followed were not all shock and awe. Metallers with their painted faces and metal studs regularly patronised the stall selling beverages. In one instance, a stout performer with corpse-paint on spiked breast-plates addressed the middle age ethnic Chinese owner as 'uncle' (the respectful term for male elders, the female equivalent being 'auntie'), as he proceeded to purchase a bottle of mineral water. Accustomed to such sights after several weekends, the 'uncle' teased some of the youths, asking if they were truly 'dead' as their customs and attire suggested.

Using the Chinese cosmological understanding of “shadow and soul” or ying hun (影魂), this chapter ... more Using the Chinese cosmological understanding of “shadow and soul” or ying hun (影魂), this chapter seeks to frame innovations in holographic technologies that facilitate the stereoscopic re-projections of departed Hong Kong- and Taiwan-based transnational Chinese celebrities such as Bruce Lee, Wong Kar Kui and Teresa Teng. It argues that the rising popularity of such presentations in concerts and advertisements stems not just from the visual spectacle of these unprecedented animated holograms. Instead, audiences may be held by latent beliefs of the immanence of departed stars whose presences have been maintained by media technologies from the analogue phonogram of the past, to the digital performance capture and holographic representation of contemporary convergent media. Such developments provide new platforms for the ying hun of these personalities to be replayed and resurrected.

In Fung, A (Ed). Made in Hong Kong. Studies in Popular Music(33-43). London, New York: Routledge., 2020

Hong Kong and South Korea’s edge in the entertainment industries in recent decades have projected... more Hong Kong and South Korea’s edge in the entertainment industries in recent decades have projected the otherwise historically peripheral territories significantly more visible regional and global presence. Along with film and television, popular music, namely Hong Kong’s Cantopop and Korean pop (Kpop) have gained transnational popularity, a trend that points evidently to the regional circulation of regional Asian popular entertainment along the popular culture nodal points along Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei and Hong Kong. Cantopop’s regional ascendency came separately in the 1970s, two decades before K-pop. Its popularity has now been eclipsed by its Korean counterpart. Nonetheless, instead of narratives of “rise and fall” and asymmetrical “sender and recipient” relations within the boundaries of “national music” of the nation-state, Cantopop-Kpop interactions entails a more sustained history of intercultural referencing and collaborations as well as nostalgic retrospections. Such activities constitutes the fluid cosmopolitan transnationality of Inter-Asia Pop Culture mobilities.

. In Ng, K.H (Ed). They told us to move: Dakota-Cassia(pp.211-219)., 2019

USA: GreenWood Press , 2008

Co-productions of Historical Fiction television dramas started in the 1980s, due to a then strugg... more Co-productions of Historical Fiction television dramas started in the 1980s, due to a then struggling post-Mao China leveraging upon overseas ethnic Chinese media networks in Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Singapore’s predominantly ethnic Chinese society did not automatically take to these historical fictions, as it took the country nearly a decade to be acculturalized to the production techniques of these genres, and for them to appeal to local contemporary audiences. The co-production of ‘swordsplay’ historical fictional dramas was engendered by the Chinese television producers’ eagerness to access the dramatic expertise, local popularity, locations, audiences and talent of the overseas Chinese artistes, as well as their overseas counterparts’ keenness to tap into the huge China market. This trend waned at the turn of the 2000s, as the matured and confident Chinese television industry had little incentive in continuing co-productions with its overseas Chinese counterparts. Thus, Singapore’s television industry experience and exposure to this genre dwindled, resulting in a televisual de-sinicization. Through the case study on the rise and decline of Singapore-China co-productions of Historical Fiction dramas, this topic cautions against the linear treatment of transnational and regional media collaborations as evidence of cosmopolitan convergence.

With Sorry, Sarangheyo (2010) and Hello Stranger (2010) as a case study, this paper discusses the... more With Sorry, Sarangheyo (2010) and Hello Stranger (2010) as a case study, this paper discusses the more active attempts by Southeast Asian cinema in negotiating these otherwise highly asymmetrical and essentializing global and regional cinematic flows that have scopophilicaly reduced countries like Thailand into an exotic pre-modern spectacle. Directed by Bajong Pisanthankun, the romantic comedy revolves around the realities of the encounters of two Thai nationals in their holidays to South Korea. With not just many scenes shot at locations made famous by Korean dramas, but also the parodying of its conventional dramaturgical styles, Hello Stranger stages a multiple engagement with the both the screen fetish for East Asian modernity embodied in Korean pop culture. Filmed almost completely in South Korea, the production represents not only the current commercial confidence of Thai cinema in projecting its imaginaries directly back to the First World, and in the process, sailing against the currents of the circulation of regional popular cultural flows. At another level, this cinematic projection also becomes a more subtle displaced signifier of the disillusionment with the current political uncertainties in the Kingdom. The question to be raise here in both films is whether this shift represents efforts to be an active and autonomous participant of the regionalization of Asian popular culture; As the protagonists start to put on stylish and layered winter clothes, it remains to be seen whether such participation would mean moving the dreams of Thai cinema in constructing youthful cosmopolitan urbanity and modernity from the Chao Praya River to the Han River of Seoul in the Heart of the Korean Wave.
Keywords: Thai Cinema, Korean Wave, Popular Culture Flows, Asian Modernity, Identity,Media and Society, Culture & Representation, Thai Urbanism

From content classification to official financial support and grants, tensions arising between th... more From content classification to official financial support and grants, tensions arising between the managerial efforts of the state in establishing an economically vibrant “world class” yet ideologically-neutered screen infrastructure against that of filmmakers to carve out a more, indigenous and autonomous expressive space through the moving image. In many ways, such negotiations are largely rendered irrelevant in the cyberspace of video-sharing sites, particularly YouTube where countless videos are uploaded, disseminated, commented on and even parodied in a new circulatory network and paradigm. In this respect, for the case of Singapore, the ubiquity of YouTube as a new digital tool of viewership and expression has vernacularised and de-formalised the art and politics of filmmaking. In certain areas, the formal and the informal spheres converge when traditional independent films have found new platforms for exhibition and circulation in the video-sharing sites, while the user generated content of an emerging group of casual amateur YouTube vloggers and commentaries have gained greater public limelight in the mainstream media. As this chapter would argue, not only have such quantitatively more voluminous materials overwhelmed the monitoring mechanisms of the state, more importantly, the multiplication of traditional and new media film materials in more varied platforms have inevitably been redefining film as a singular medium confined to that of the big screen.

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2010

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2004

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002

Armed Forces & Society, 2003

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society Volume 92, Part 1, No. 316, June 2019 pp. 118-119, 2019

Television & New Media, 2019

Through the ethnographic survey of the ownership, use, and display of television-related devices ... more Through the ethnographic survey of the ownership, use, and display of television-related devices of forty households in Singapore, this article frames the concept of Skeuomorphic Domestic Television. This term describes the continued centrality of the traditional “living room television” amid digital media’s portability. Results from the stocktaking of the ownership of television-related devices in the surveyed households point to the narrowing of the digital divide arising from the greater affordability of media technologies. However, within the highly densely populated city-state, it was found that social distinctions from television cultures were maintained in the skeuomorphic luxury of the “TV-Sofa space” in living rooms of surveyed households. Such a space that distinguishes individuals watching television in cluttered rooms against the more communal viewing practices in designated spacious living rooms characterizes the “Analog Spatial Divide” of skeuomorphic domestic televisi...

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Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia, 2019

The Hard State, Soft City of Singapore, 2020

This chapter seeks to illustrate the authors’ initiative of deploying mobile communication techno... more This chapter seeks to illustrate the authors’ initiative of deploying mobile communication technologies through the ‘iBBC’ app to locate and reference tombstones of prominent historical personalities in Singapore’s Bukit Brown Cemetery. The densely vegetated, 80-year-old former Chinese municipal cemetery filled with more than a hundred thousand graves has been largely neglected, and the traditional Chinese inscriptions written on many of the tombstones are inscrutable to many contemporary visitors. As part of the process of digital interventions, iBBC helps visitors obtain encyclopedic information immediately on-site by using Augmented Reality (AR) to recognize selected tomb monuments. Such interventions are critical in sensitizing the public to the cemetery’s cultural heritage.

Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, 2018

in/appropriate, ir/retrievable: dragging out singapore's queer televisual archives abstra... more in/appropriate, ir/retrievable: dragging out singapore's queer televisual archives abstract The sketch comedies Ra Ra Show (1993–1994) and the character of Liang Ximei of Comedy Night (1993–2000), performed by cross-dressing male entertainers, were prominent on Singapore television during the 1990s. However, the former was cancelled following complaints about its sexual innuendos and non-standard colloquial English or Singlis. The latter, caricaturing the desexualized 'wholesome' middle-aged housewife (commonly addressed as 'auntie' in Singapore), continues to endear the public. Two decades later, as television archives, the contrast between the two productions can be seen in the extent of their availability to the broader public. Unlike the continued ubiquity of Liang Ximei, Ra Ra Show remains largely unavailable despite fond collective memories. Against this backdrop is that of a highly interventionist state active in maintaining heteronormative ideals on the small screen. Through the study of the trajectories of these two productions, this article draws out the trajectory of televisual queer texts in Singapore from the in/appropriate stages of screenings to their ir/retrievability as queer archives.

Contents: Introduction, Liew Kai Khiun Part 1 Liberalizing Health: Mediations of health and the d... more Contents: Introduction, Liew Kai Khiun Part 1 Liberalizing Health: Mediations of health and the development of a nation: late Suharto and late modernity, Steve Ferzacca Reporting HIV and its broader impact in Asia: the case of Papua New Guinea, Trevor Cullen Reading HIV/AIDS in the Indian media: social, cultural and economic constructions, Shaunak Sastry and Mohan J. Dutta Press coverage of bird flu epidemic in Vietnam, Annick GuA(c)nel and Sylvia Klingberg. Part 2 Feminizing Health: Caesarean birth, media, motherhood and nation in Taiwan, Chen-I Kuan Information and decision making among women with breast cancer: constraints on the informed decision, Khor Yoke Lim and Gerald Goh Guan Gan Making the oral contraceptive 'for me' in Japan: managing the semiotics of reproductive health in virtual space, Kathryn Goldfarb. Part 3 Popularizing Health: the radio communication project in Nepal: culture, power and meaning in constructions of health, Mohan J. Dutta and Iccha Basnyat Of plastic beauties and flower boys: representations of cosmetic surgery in South Korean films, Kelly Fu When distortion is normal: the media and body image disturbance among young people in Hong Kong, Annisa Lee Lai How to live: reading China's popular health media, Judith Farquhar Index.

Asian Cinema, 2020

Review of: Celluloid Singapore: Cinema, Performance and the National, Edna Lim (2018)Edinburgh: E... more Review of: Celluloid Singapore: Cinema, Performance and the National, Edna Lim (2018)Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 201 pp.,ISBN 978-1-47440-289-7, PDF, £70

Asiascape: Digital Asia, 2019

This paper explores episodes of provocative online articulations and the accompanying angry publi... more This paper explores episodes of provocative online articulations and the accompanying angry public reactions as part of the cultural politics of juvenile online resistance in contemporary Singapore. Rather than viewing such delinquency as ‘youth deficits’, this paper seeks a literary-culturalist standpoint in exploring the uninhibited audacity of these public online displays. We perceive such performances as reflecting the critical and socially unrestrained emotional subjectivities of ‘youth mirroring deficits’ of the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’. The authors propose to appropriate the colloquial Singaporean Chinese Hokkien term of Si Geena (brat), a label commonly used to describe these offending personalities, to frame the dynamics of youth resistance, and new media in Singapore. Si Geena are often un-social digital juvenile provocateurs baiting moral outrage and public indignation. In turn, societal responses to the Si Geena’s episodic resistance reveal the contradictions, insecuritie...

Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2019

Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, 2016

Drawing on two beauty contests Ratu Suria (2012) and Miss Vasantham (2004-present) from the minor... more Drawing on two beauty contests Ratu Suria (2012) and Miss Vasantham (2004-present) from the minority Malay and Tamil television stations in Singapore as case studies, this article seeks to map out the contours of ethnocultural scripting of gender and femininity. Rather than finding idealized beauties, these contests have brought to the surface anxieties of ethnocultural incompleteness. More importantly, they also reveal the extent of ethnocultural mobility in the contestants negotiating the ideological contours required by the state-supported minority television stations towards an idealized multicultural minority beauty.

Journal of Creative Communications, 2015

The soft-authoritarian and severe image of contemporary Singapore has often been associated with ... more The soft-authoritarian and severe image of contemporary Singapore has often been associated with the imposing and paternalistic presence of Lee Kuan Yew who has overseen the city-state as prime minister and subsequently, senior statesman since 1959. Unlike the statues and street-names dedicated to other founding leaders in newly decolonized countries, Lee has consciously discouraged any public portraitures of himself in Singapore. However, as his presence fades with ailing health in the recent years, his images are beginning to surface in figurines, coffee table books and even street art. Over in the social and alternative media, there is an increasingly more irreverent use of the Hokkien/Minan term ‘limpeh’ or ‘your father’ as parodies of Lee’s unyielding paternalism. As a masculinistic self-assertion of one’s authority, ‘limpeh’ is often crudely associated with the Hokkien/Minan-speaking ethnic Singaporean Chinese working class. Singaporeans have also recognized the characteristic...

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2013

Posted mostly by consumers rather than industry players, music videos on video-sharing websites l... more Posted mostly by consumers rather than industry players, music videos on video-sharing websites like YouTube have been instrumental in expanding the circulation of audio-visual materials in cyberspace. In transnational Chinese pop music, with shared memories engendered by viewers’ nostalgic comments on clips, particularly the older ones, uploads promise the possibilities of transcending existing geopolitical divides between Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora. However, as evinced in this case study of video clips featuring prominent Taiwanese female singer Teresa Teng, the uploaders are divided between advocates for a ‘Greater China’ and detractors seeking a more indigenised Taiwanese identity. Analysis of some of Teng’s more politically contentious music videos in the highly networked and circulatory media context, this article advocates looking beyond the immediate sensory audio-projections of the music videos to better understand them as historical and ideo...

Population Dynamics and Infectious Diseases in Asia, 2006

Archives and Manuscripts, 2014

ABSTRACT

Archives and Manuscripts, 2014

I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the t... more I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasimonopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent ‘bad’ information from invading and suffocating the ‘good’. Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings.

Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 2013

ABSTRACT

Modern Asian Studies, 2007

The influenza epidemic swept through our midst in September and October, unhappily with fatal con... more The influenza epidemic swept through our midst in September and October, unhappily with fatal consequences to a number of friends in the Tamil community. We are glad to say that though terribly severe while it lasted, its duration was mercifully short. On the other hand, the great news that the armistice has been signed filled us with unaccustomed joy.