The Flowing West

One of the notable advantages of contemporary Chinese culture study is that every partial problem is connected with the big essential problems in various ways. In general, it seems that the culture of the west part of China hasn't important academic value because it's in the fringe of Chinese contemporary culture. But after researching the development of contemporary literature, art, especially the movies, we find that the artists always used the west as an image to produce and express their thought about culture. The image of west, as a poetic expression of culture, is an important case in Chinese contemporary culture and art. This paper will deal with the connection between the establishment of the west space in the movies produced from 1980 to 2006 and contemporary cultural propositions. According to the close reading of the texts, this paper try to analysis the image logic, aesthetic particularity, and production and circulation of the west space in movies of recent twenty years. Besides that, the paper will discuss the connection between propositions of identification, urban imagination, globalization, marketing and consumption and establishment of the west space in the movies, and its poetic expression. Furthermore, The paper also extends to analysis the series transformations of ideology and cultural paradigm behind the case of the west.