I just gave a talk at UC Berkeley, my alma mater, on China and sex and body image. It’s based on a piece i wrote for California magazine in its May-June issue which focused on China and the Olympics.

Hindsight: It Looks Like a Landscape created a misty mountain scene from rear ends. Liu Wei’s 2004

Here are some tantalizing graphs:

As the Olympic Games draw near, it is not ideology or collective yearning that asserts itself in the Middle Kingdom, but the physical self coming to full consciousness. The civilization known for Confucian morals, Taoist mysticism, acupuncture, tai chi, martial arts—radically different ways of looking at the self in relationship with the cosmos—has wholeheartedly embraced Western culture and mores. “Economic and educational opportunities, readily available telecommunications and the Internet have made the people of China highly mobile, and quite well informed,” says Wang, but also “more individual-centered and therefore, less committed to traditional extended family and Confucian social ethics.” Ancestral worship, though allowed under communism, is on the wane as many now flock to the temple of the body. The We of the old traditional world of clanship, of self defined by proper behavior and relationships within the collective, is ceding to the Me of the new generation, one defined by sex.

... Those who seek to change the old world order, on the other hand, learn to be shameless. Lewis Hyde, in his book Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, noted that artists who seek to change the conversation of the culture refuse “their elders’ sense of where speech and silence belong, they do not so much erase the categories as redraw the lines.”

Ang Lee’s movie Lust, Caution is a good example of this realignment. In it Tony Leung, a merciless Japanese informant in World War II Shanghai, begins his relationship with Tang Wei, a nationalist, by whipping and raping her. She, in turn, uses her body to get at him. Theirs is a carnal dance toward the gates of hell. Sex is as much the story’s forward arc as the movie’s assassination plot. Some movie critics have cattily renamed the movie “Caution: Lust!” but that is the warning that Ang Lee’s movie propounds. Both insider and outsider, an émigré from Taiwan to the United States, Lee has a vision that encompasses the Far East and the Wild West, the sacred and profane. He reimagines the past with his movies; he shows copulating bodies to the masses and at the same time warns them against unchecked passions. On top of it all, he spurs the conversation in China about obscenity and about what is and isn’t proper behavior.
...

check it out:
http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/California/200805/lam.asp

Andrew Lam is author of “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora”