Erasing Fan Bingbing
Here’s a wild story out of China’s entertainment industry: Fàn Bīngbīng 范冰冰, a superstar actress who fell out of favor in the past year due to a tax evasion scandal, is being “digitally scrubbed” from a TV drama in which she stars. One of her co-stars, Gāo Yúnxiáng 高云翔, who was accused of sexual assault in Australia, is also being retroactively replaced.
Here’s a wild story out of China’s entertainment industry: Fàn Bīngbīng 范冰冰, a superstar actress who fell out of favor in the past year due to a tax evasion scandal, is being “digitally scrubbed” from a TV drama in which she stars. One of her co-stars, Gāo Yúnxiáng 高云翔, who was accused of sexual assault in Australia, is also being retroactively replaced.
Two scandal-struck megastars in the long-delayed costume drama “Win the World” are being digitally scrubbed from the show, according to its producers.
In a statement [in Chinese] Tuesday, Talent Television and Film Co. Ltd. said it had enlisted Tmall Technology, a company under ecommerce giant Alibaba, to replace Gao Yunxiang and Fan Bingbing with as-yet-unnamed “top-tier actors” by means of “scene refilming, technological tools, audio re-recording, etc.” The studio also assured potential viewers that the estimated 60 million yuan ($8.4 million) in changes, slated to be completed by the end of this year, would not adversely affect the quality or integrity of the show.
See also our previous Weekly Briefing story on a “deepfake” face-swapping app that went viral a month ago: Zao! Your face is now in a Chinese server.
