In the previous chapters, I put the conception of Chineseness in the new frame of participatory cyberspace by examining five cases of transnational Chinese stars. Chineseness becomes a destabilised notion with the plurality and volatility embraced in the cyber sett ing. I argue that it becomes a kind of imaginary that lies on the verge of cinematic culture and cyberculture, or simply called cine-cyber imaginary, which is a de-essentialised entity resulting from the fan-powered remaking of star personae. Fans gain the capacity to generate or even reinvent stars’ virtual bodies by incessantly poaching, copying, editing, and posting images. In this respect, Chineseness, along with the star image, is always on the make, with no closure possible. Moreover, fans from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds negotiate their own relations to Chineseness, often arguing among themselves as to what Chineseness is about, and negotiating a blurred space between the virtual and the real. The outcome is a collaborative eff ort wherein fans participate in the meaning-making process. In this process, Chineseness is an open signifier in which various interests with regard to star power, martial arts skills, and cinephilia may be anchored. It may still evoke ethnicity, albeit with an abstract quality resulting from the abstraction of the cyber image itself. This performative aspect is dissimilar to the outcome shaped by previous conditions in cinema, where Chineseness has usually been fixed in a context, through which viewers come to realise what it is intended to mean. Beforehand, viewers are informed by symbolic referents whose meanings are enclosed within the films. The open signifier in cyberspace is a novelty that does not necessarily endorse previous readings, and thus potentially undermines any hint of hermeneutic directionality. The outcome, I argue, is a peculiar making as if the star body is incapable of being fixed into a definite cultural essence.

My arguments have developed upon David Rodowick's analysis of ‘new media’ images to inform my discussion of star images and virtual bodies in cyberspace. In his seminal book The Virtual Life of Film (2007), Rodowick explores the problematic nature of filmic images that, defined in the visual culture of the twentieth century, has moved from the age of celluloid to the age of digital.