The Hong Kong Response to "Boudoir Realism" From Erotic Masterpieces to D-I-Y Porn

The part focuses on Chinese responses to sexual representation and graphic sex scenes in Ang lee’s movie Lust, Caution.(2007) It will show how people were unusually aroused by the movie and the media circus around it, resulting in unusual box office figures and debating mobs on the web. The sex scenes were ruthlessly torn out of the movie, not only by the censorship board in Mainland China, but also by paparazzi, online gossip channels and the by public at large. The sex scenes provided a new kind of erotic and sexually explicit cinema that has had a deep effect on art and sex politics. The reactions also somewhat reflect historical responses to the work of Eileen Chang, the author of the novel Lust, Caution. Chang was a highly criticized figure in literary Shanghai of the mid 1940s for being an author of “banal boudoir realism.” Her interest in dark and sentimental sex stories and her antipathy towards the strident aesthetics of socialist realism caused her exclusion from the Maoist literary canon and compelled her to leave China in 1952.