Stephen Teo

CORE MEMBER
BRIEF BIO

Stephen Teo was awarded his PhD from RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia in 2003. In 2005, he began a stint as senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute in the National University of Singapore (NUS). Since 2008 has been associate professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His writing has focused mainly on Asian cinema and he has published widely in journals and book anthologies. He is the author of many books on Asian cinema, including Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997), Wong Kar-wai (British Film Institute, 2005), King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (Hong Kong University Press, 2007), Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film (Hong Kong University Press, 2007), Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 2009; expanded edition 2016), The Asian Cinema Experience: Styles, Spaces, Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), Eastern Westerns: Film and Genre Inside and Outside Hollywood (Routledge, 2017), Singapore Cinema, New Perspectives, as co-editor (Routledge, 2017), and Eastern Approaches to Western Film: Asian Reception and Aesthetics in Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2019). His newest book is Chinese Martial Arts Film and the Philosophy of Action, to be published by Routledge in 2021.

CURRENT AND FUTURE PROJECTS
 
Current and future projects include further research into an Asian aesthetic of cinema based on Eastern philosophical concepts such as Rasa, Daoism, Chan Buddhism, and Mohism. How do such philosophical premises constitute an Asian aesthetic and how may they be universally applied to film? Teo remains preoccupied with genre studies in the Asian tradition, and is contemplating possible books on the epic, melodrama, and the opera film. One pet project is to write a book on the wuxia films produced by the Cathay studio. Close to retirement, Teo is also planning to write a novel tentatively titled Last Cinema set in an indeterminate place in the not-too-distant future.
RECENT REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS

 

1. Eastern Approaches to Western Film (Bloomsbury, 2019)

2. Chinese Martial Arts Film: The Wuxia Tradition (2016 expanded edition, EUP)

3. Wong Kar-wai (Chinese translation, expanded edition, 2020, published by Peking University Press)

4. Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (Chinese translation, expanded edition, 2017, published by Peking University Press)

5. “The Chinese Film Market and the ‘Wolf Warrior 2’ Phenomenon”, Screen, 60 (2), 2019, 1-10.