Certainly my teachers shaped me, but I’m developing ever further away from this painting technique. I am concerned with the beauty of the people I paint, their erotic charisma. And it’s not just any random model, but I have a personal connection to the women. We set up the scenes together (Ibid).

Ma’s work builds upon the past at the same time as it removes the power held by now out-dated conventions. She embraces the daintier and prettier aspects of femininity, but her work here is not critiqued for being a return to antiquated ideals (as the femininity in Nuxing Yishu (“woman’s art”) categorized work has been). Instead, it is portrayed as being a natural part of her creativity and personality; and part of her generation’s freedom. On this point, the authors recall a common thread that ties the return to femininity among women in post-Mao China to the unisex egalitarianism of the Cultural Revolution:

Today’s women of urban China seize upon the same right to femininity that their parents’ generation, embroiled in the androgenic policies of the Cultural Revolution, considered morally reprehensible (Ibid).

The androgenic nature of the Cultural Revolution gender roles is not a point that needs debating. The use of the feminine to form a cohesive female voice among artists is also not a new theme within China’s modern art critics. What is interesting here is that the authors portray this return to the feminine as a positive development, whereas critics of the Nuxing Yishi era used the return to the feminine as an illustration of past repression, never pointing to the potential empowerment involved. Surely, both viewpoints are valid, but I wonder why the narrative has changed in so relatively short a time period.

Ma is compared to her female teacher (Yu Hong) who is 14 years her senior, yet Yu’s work was received in a different light that included the negatively connoted domestic/feminine aspects related to the Nuxing Yishu category. One is tempted to make the argument that both generations of women were reacting to the past in a manner that felt empowering, and the different interpretations of this reaction were colored by the dialogue manufactured through and around the development of Nuxing Yishu as a definite category.

Ma’s work is also know for its frank portrayal of the female body in scantily clad scenes that are sometimes incredibly intimate, and at other times force the viewer into an uncomfortable confrontation. The nude in China (particularly the female nude) has its own narrative that Ma both seems to react to and diffuse.

Nudity in China’s art emerged as a “naughty kind of cultural dissent in 1979” and became increasingly politicized amidst the tense cultural conflict between intellectuals and the government that led to the violent protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 (Kraus, 2004, 98). Mao declared the necessity of nude studies for scientific and artistic development, but during much of the 1980s, nude art shows—featuring nudes different in both form and intention—drew sensation and censure, as well as also significant amounts of money for the artists and organizers (female nude models were not included among the lucky recipients of this market, receiving only social denigration and very little other compensation). This growth was not limited to painting as “nude paintings were merely the most refined manifestation of a decade’s movement toward greater sexual explicitness” (Ibid, 91).

Anti-pornography campaigns during the mid 1980s threatened to derail nude painting, but these were primarily veiled attempts at overarching political repression, and the issue paled in comparison to the matters at hand by the end of the decade. Ultimately, nudes in art have prevailed through the ability of the genre to generate market value, especially after Deng Xiaoping’s “southern inspection” in 1992 during which he visited major southern economic sectors to legitimize profit seeking in the market (Ibid, 96). The bumpy progress of the 80s and 90s helped to vindicate one of China’s most prominent female artists, Pan Yuliang (b.1895-d.1977) who lived in Paris for much of her life as a result of the clash between the socially conservative Chinese art world of the 1930s and 1940s, and her unabashedly bold paintings (Kraus, 2004, 96; China Daily, 2006). Her works have been shown widely across the world including exhibitions in the U.S., Japan, and several European nations.

The great acclaim she garnered abroad during her lifetime was legitimated in China both during her life and after her death when her paintings were repatriated in 1985 (they are now held by the China National Art Gallery and Anhui Provincial Museum). Though she lived most of her career Paris, she had five solo shows in China from 1929 to 1936; and at a solo exhibition in Shanghai in 1926, was declared to be China’s first female western style painting artist. After this string of shows, she settled in Paris in 1937 amidst uncomfortable pressures in China including an incident in 1935 in which an audience member of her solo show tore up one of the pieces, and left behind the message, “This is a prostitute’s carol to a whoremonger” as justification (China Daily, 2007). The main contention with her work was its frequent portrayal of female nudity, and she is especially well-known for her depiction of women bathing in nature. “By 2002 a Beijing art exhibition featured nudes that Pan created in Paris suggesting how normal nude painting had become” (Kraus, 2004, 96).

Today, it is even trendy for young women to commission nude portraits of themselves in commemoration of their youth (People’s Daily, 2000). This development and the use of nude self-portraiture is not looked upon approvingly by older generations of Chinese, accustomed to the social mores of the not too distant past that resulted in nude models during the 1980s finding divorce and family estrangement to be the primary reward for their contributions to art. While it will not result in a life of exile for contemporary artists, it certainly pushes social and generational boundaries to not only include graphic representations of the female nude, but to include graphic representations of one’s own female body naked. Scholars argue that neither the government, nor the artistic community has ever resolved the unfair gender relationships innate to the genre of nude painting: “men remained the viewers, and women remained the viewed” (Kraus, 2004, 98). But women are making strides in this direction by reclaiming female nudity as means of personal and social expression.

Cui Xiuwen, whose daring documentary Ladies Room led her to be called a feminist artist by critics is a good example of this development. In 2000, Cui hid a camcorder inside the ladies’ room of a posh Beijing hotel. The image focused on a limited area of mirror in front of which young prostitutes are seen stopping. They adjust their bras, fix their make-up, emotionlessly readying themselves for their evening of work. “Although some art critics have praised “Ladies Room” as a social critique of commercial sex in today’s China, Cui Xiuwen’s interest lies in representing a social space which is both public and secret, and which belongs to women alone” (Grosenick & Schübbe, 2007, 75). Her work is strongly autobiographical, evoking “the artist’s memory of her mixed beliefs, hopes, dreams, and fears” in a public manner that allows for interaction with the viewer (Ibid, 77). Cui incorporates autobiographical depiction using models that resemble herself in youth, and also powerful cultural images that define the life of modern China.

Ma Yanhong’s work shows a similar interaction between history and present, female and artist, and woman and individual. Through a very personal process, she produces intimate portraits that capture a country in this particular time.

As the only woman among the founding artists in the Stars (Xingxing) group that self-assembled during 1979 in an attempt to shake loose the stranglehold of the government on China’s artistic communities, Shuang is a powerful figure in the story of contemporary female artists. Imprisoned for living in Beijing with her French fiancé, diplomat Emmanuel Bellefroid, Shuang was freed at the request of future French president Francois Mitterand in a meeting with Deng Xiaoping, and moved to France to marry Bellefoid. Her paintings now include portraits of characters with Buddha-like features and titles that play on traditional Chinese thees, such as Pine Tree & Crane (image below, Oil on canvas, 195 x 130 cm, 2007, ArtZine).

It is difficult to categorize this work within the restrictive descriptions of women’s artwork previously mentioned. Her earlier works during the late 1970s and 1980s are murky and abstract; and do appear to show a development akin to that described by the scholars cited above. She includes increasingly feminine characters, and in 2001, suggests a direct communication between the feminine and the masculine that shows the feminine as passive perhaps, but persistent and numerous.

Dialogue, Oil on Canvas, 116 X 81cm, 2001, ArtZine

Overall , her work shows traits of the characteristics of the 1980s and 1990s, but it also is haunting in its rich colors combined with icey, half-god stares. She is proof that the broad sweeps that were used to define modern female artists passed over many women with too much haste.

Could this be true, or do views such as this represent a misconception of the development / language of female artists? Of socialist painting in China?

Similar statements about female artwork can be found within Chinese discourse as well. Take for example the following statement from artist/critic Liao Wen that appears in Wu Hung’s 2002 text, The First Guangzhou Triennal–Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000):

“Unfortunately, within the mainstream women’s art served only as a feminine ornament on the broad sweep of government ideology and had little to do with women’s perspective or existence in contemporary China” (p. 61).

Liao, a woman, has written a good deal on the development of female artists in China. Her views are well-informed, yet echo statements that women’s artwork turned to antiquated, safe, paths just as their male contemporaries branched out into untested waters:

Phobic of utilitarianism, they were similarly wary of societal topics. Now more than ever before without a model or a safe harbor, women either consciously or subconsciously returned to the garden of traditional art. Feminist art from this period is almost entirely comprised of women, children, mothers and their children, flowers and scenery. (see Yan Ping ‘s “Mother and Child” and Jiang Caiping ‘s “Tibetan Opera Actress”).

Yan Ping
“Mother and Child”
1990
Oil on Canvas

Jiang Caiping
“Tibetan Opera Actress”
1991
“Gong Bi” Ink on Paper

Even if the works from this period employ a variety of different techniques, nonetheless painting seemed to be nothing more than a modern version of parlor painting and linked neither to Chinese contemporary culture, much less feminist culture (“Tumultuous History of China’s Feminist Values and Art“).

The subjects of women’s artwork in China during the late 1970s through the 1980s may have been similar to those parlor painting (images of home, flowers, portraits of women, etc.), but the style and story seems highly subjective, and the storyteller wields great influence. An exhibit promoted as an Olympic venue attraction by the “Official Website of the Chinese Government” portrayed female artists of the 20th century as wielding unique insights and subtle stylistic linguistics that show them being proactive commentators on the social and political developments of the period.

The exhibit announcement tells us that during the recent Olympics, visitors to the Beijing Fine Art Academy were be greeted by an exhibit of “12 eminent women painters of 20th century China.”

The 50 selected works on show adopted typical subjects in traditional Chinese ink and brush paintings, such as landscapes, flowers-and-birds, and portraits. They were composed by such eminent female painters as He Xiangning, Pu Yunyu, Xiao Shufang and Zhou Sicong between the 1950s and the 1980s.

The show’s organizer says that the female artists have an edge over their male counterparts in terms of artistic expression.

Gao Yuan from Beijing Fine Art Academy said, “Female artists tend to be more keen to discover the hidden beauty in life. They are also more perceptive to changes happening in their surrounding environments. From these paintings, you can see that they have a more serene state of mind.”

The announcement makes special note of the inclusion of Zhou Sicong (1939-1996), whose work is described as significant to nationalistic and feminist causes: “Many of her 1950s’ works reflect how women were actively involved in the construction of socialism.”

Zhou’s work is described by an Italian gallery as significant in contemporary social and feminist discourse:

ZHOU SICONG (1939 – 1996)

Zhou Sicong was born in 1939. As a prominent and influential Chinese artist during the mid to late 20th Century, Zhou was perhaps one of the first to express deep concern for, and doubt over, the fate of Chinese women from a feminist perspective. She once said, “”I always feel that women are too tired, without any rest.” In her painting, ‘Yi women’, Zhou depicts her concerns by portraying two women of Yi ethnicity carring almost overbearing heavy bundles of firewood – a recurring theme in her work. Other more abstract pieces demonstrate Zhou Sicongs mastery of ink and her innovative ink techniques. Zhou died in 1996 at the age of 57.

Several of China’s female artists of the 2oth century showed their work in Europe, and opinions about the development of a modern female visual language are somewhat disparate, but not in strictly geographical terms. Perhaps ideology from multiple channels has impacted this discourse in a different way dependent upon domestic discourse. A survey of artwork in the mid-twentieth century will likely reveal multiple discourses, and women who’s work does not fit the restrictive descriptions above.

a presence in much of her work, both as antagonist and accomplice (Noe, Piëch, Steiner, 143).

The dust storms that blanket Beijing in an orange dust during March and April change her partner in crime, extending the hours of dusk-like light, and casting the buildings in an otherworldly haze.

Liang Yue 'Morse Code 12' from the series 'Several Dusks' 2003 C-type print Width 120 cm x height 80 cm Collection of Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation, Switzerland © Liang Yue

Liang Yue 'Morse Code 10 ' from the series 'Several Dusks' 2003 C-type print Width 120 cm x height 80 cm Collection of Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation, Switzerland © Liang Yue

According to Noe et al., Liang’s work is an expression of something deeply personal and internal, yet she captures people, places, and activities that reflect the larger community of urban Chinese. Even when striving to capture the relatively quiet city at night, Liang portrays a broader story:

as much as these works are based in peace and quiet, they are simultaneously filled with the traces of humanity. The drawn curtains and distant lights on the highway suggest a multitude of lives and stories unfolding (Ibid).

Her photography and video work follows friends and strangers in routine / mundane activities, bringing everyday moments into an exaggerated light, and highlighting the publicity of intimacy in crowded urban centers. Traveling Day (2005/6) documents a trip taken with friends from Shanghai to a little town in Zhejiang province, and has been praised as “a subtle portrait of everyday things in the life of ordinary young people.” Lady Lady (2007), which follows Liang’s friend shopping in Hong Kong, where she buys extreme amounts of cosmetics. This film was featured at the China Independent Film Festival in 1999. The  schedule helpfully points out the fact that Liang is a female.

Liang’s ability to portray the mingling of public and personal that occurs in modern urban China is something she shares with contemporary female artists, such as Ciu Xiuwen (b. 1970), whose video Underground 2, captures a woman on the subway, tearing dead skin off her lips, temporarily unaware or uncaring of the public space she has chosen for this action.

I think that ultimately, Liang provides a lifeline to the individual to prevent loss in the drone of the city. Take the photograph below in which:

…the figure is shown standing in the distance on a pedestrian footbridge. People pass by and traffic can be seen rushing beneath. The scene is a blur of movement and activity except for the tiny beam of the flashlight that fives an intimate point of contact across space and time and suggests sympathy for individual consciousness within an indifferent environment (Ibid).

From Noe, et. al., page 145.

More on Liang Yue can be found at:

http://chngyaohong.com/blog/photography/liang-yue/

http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/photography/past_exhns/twilight/yue/index.html

http://china.shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/archives/id/330

http://www.shanghart.com/exhibitions/liangyue.htm

http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/photography+%2526+film/art40915

Han Yajuan uses cartoonish playfulness in her paintings to express a fascination for high fashion and celebrity culture that is increasingly prevalent in China’s rapidly growing urban centers. She portrays the fantasy life of young Chinese women reflecting the rising economy’s promises of wealth, luxury, and new options of consumerism. ‘They are like my idols. They can be fashionable, but also brave. They can be really free and easy, fearlessly driving off in a VW Beetle, or being really successful. In short they can do lots of things I could not do (Noe, Piëch, Steiner, p. 97).

Han Yajuan, My Life in Bobo's Kingdom No. 8, 2006 Oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm.

Noe et. al. make point of the pervasive nature of cartoon imagery in modern Chinese art as a result of the importation of western cartoon shows during the childhood of the post 1975 generation. The authors highlight a significant outgrowth of this cross-cultural influence that marks the power of silent translation that is imbued in the communal charge of visual culture:

…using a comic-inspired imaginary that already has an established international and intercultural visual diction enables Han Yajuan’s generation to communicate their ideas and feeligns to a global audience (Ibid).

Han employs elite brand logos in the global conversation about luxury and peerless drive. She seems also to bring this terminology into the titles of her pieces, such as the 2007 painting, Blue Fly, which evokes the designer online shopping site: BlueFly.com.

Han Yajuan Bluefly Oil on Canvas 150 x 150 cm 2007

Upon first glance, this picture resemble an actual fly, made up of beautiful girls with a penchant for blue. Han has woven in many icons of material culture, however. Laptops have VAIO, netscape, and oddly, prada labels. Chanel, Dolce Gabbana, and Gucci are inscribed on books and apparel, and iPods/cell phones are a given. In general, I did not notice these details in my initial viewings of Han’s work. I was struck by the faces of the women portrayed. Their isolation, and their thick skin. Their blatant symbol status. The official, publicly recognized symbols, are only the icing on Han’s cake of superficial stature.

Karen Smith has said that Han’s characters are representative of China’s modern only children: coddled but expected to care for their parents, they face difficult realities without the past experience to indicate that they can rise to the challenge.

Han’s work was included in 2006 exhibition, Fancy Dream, curated by Zhu Tong and Eleonora Battiston. This exhibit portrayed the dreams and realities of China’s economic and cultural boom as expressed by the youth whose lives were shaped by these changes. Han Yajuan’s installation takes over the space of transition between other installations and floors of the Marella Gallery in the 798 Art District of Beijing.

Passing through the stairs of the main hall across the way, you enter in the “illusion” exhibit. From the stairwell all the way to the second floor exhibit hall is the entire image of the artist Han Yajuan. A three-segment projection from different directions portrays the entire image upon a wall, where the work of art apperas as one. As the spectators walk up to the next floor, they themselves, at times, will feel the process of the art itself, like being in a dreamland. This exhibit emerges beautifully, definitely making up for any of the previous exhibits’ shortcomings. Han Yajuan is an extremely sensitive artist, very adept at combining open spaces with her art and connecting the viewer as well (Fancy Dream, p. 10).

Han Yajuan’s video installation in this exhibit, Flash was heralded by the artist Zhang Xiaotao as being:

the “correction” of young Chinese female artists for a current meaningless and incomplete language…Through the video language she presents a varied but disordered working status; the noises stimulate our psychological and mental reaction…Han Yajuan’s series of oil paintings “Cow Kingdom” with their superb and coquettish colors appear very palatable and, at the same time, they create pets and pretty girls which double on the canvases. The pretty little cow figures and the Audi and BMW cars in the piece “Luxuries” are just a daydream, or are they reality? (Ibid, p. 78).

Han’s artist statement for Fancy Dream reveals that this sense of wonder at reality and illusion melded together is exactly the reaction she desires:

Often in our memory, we have sudden flashbacks of some shocking scenes, like falling into a pond when we were children, thrashing about and eventually standing up again. However, every time I have mentioned this to my mum, she always said no such things happened to me. Later, even I started to doubt it. These kind facts are so important and related to our destiny, that I wonder whether they are something minted somewhere.

The work Flash Memory attempts to exaggerate, with a group of suggestive images, a kind of concern about consistency and persistence of the clue about human existence. In fact, the expansion of this clue is a process of searching, locating and revising, and it is likely to lead to senseless lost [sic], or to the deletion of tracks due to an accident in our memory, or maybe has been distorted, or even being bluntly disordered by “external forces.” No person would like to accept such a result. The process of research and revision is something full of efforts and sightlessness, it is vulnerable and I thought it would as well [have] been real and interesting (Ibid).

Han may be solidifying her own language, however while her symbols are most often very feminine, the story she tells is of her generation, not her gender. She does not seem bound to the characteristics of Nuxing Yishu, and she does not seem to be reacting to female predecessors. Her motivations may stem primarily from an internal struggle with her place in the external world of modern Chinese youth, and a desire to make clear the blur between imagination, fate, and fact.

More can be found on Han Yajuan at:

http://www.kerseboom.com/hanyajuan/hanyajuanpage.html

http://www.chinesecontemporary.com/han_yajuan_cv.htm

http://www.artnet.com/artist/424888223/han-yajuan.html

http://oneartworld.com/artists/H/Han+Yajuan.html

http://www.beyondartspace.com/en/artistSpace.asp?artistID=40

http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2009/93FA

http://www.artfacts.net/en/artist/han-yajuan-82777/profile.html

http://www.oneinchpunch.net/2007/06/27/chinese-shopaholics-in-chinese-artist-han-yajuans-cute-paintings/

More on Zhang Yue can be found at:

The Artist’s website

Saatchi Gallery

Perceptual Art Machine

Her installation of tofu alongside a new road in the lush Sichuan countryside is a work filled with reminders of tradition and of people who populate that tradition. The tofu characters are the one hundred most common Chinese family surnames. This element of the work is packed with significance. First of all, these are names, names of people, families found all over China.

Almost everyone will be able to identify with these names. If they do not find their own name among these one hundred they will find the name of their neighbours, their classmates or their friends.

In Farewell Poem, 2002/2003, Chen crafts her own visual language of historical allegory and mourning physical ties to the past. This fourteen-minute video shows:

documentary footage of the demolition process (of her own hometown and the towns that surrounded it) interchanges with segments of the Peking opera Farewell My Concubine staged on the ruin of a tradition opera theater. Dressed up as Concubine Yu herself, Chen Qiulin transforms the ill-fated opera character into an allegorical figure in memory of the lost cultural tradition of her hometown (Noe, Piëch, Steiner, 2009, 67).

Chen Qiulin, "Farewell Poem," 2002/2003, Video.

For more on Chen Qiulin, see (from artnet.com):

2008 Cate McQuaid, Flooded land Common Ground: Painting and Video Focus on China’s Three Gorges, The Boston Globe, (March 30).

2007 Debra Singer, On the Ground: New York, Artforum, (December): p. 284-289.

2007 Samir S. Patel, Chen Qiulin at Max Protetch, ArtAsiaPacific, (September – October).

2007 Migration, NY Arts, (vol. II no. 11/12).

2006 James Meyer, The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, Artforum, (April): p. 238-239.

2005 Minglu Gao, The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

The nineties was the decade in which Chinese female artists became the most dynamic. Since 1990 [when] eight young female painters united to begin an exhibition, female artists have become increasingly active. In1995 this practice became a hot trend: in Beijing alone, the quantity of female artists’ exhibitions was not less than twenty or more. Until 1998, female artists were involved in an expansion of exhibitions: in March in Beijing “Shi ji–Nu Xing Yi Shu Zhan” (Century Woman Artist Exhibition), in April in Taibei, “Taiwanese Female Artist’s Exhibition,” and in June in Berlin, Germany, “Half of the Sky.” Exhibitions of Chinese female artists — the line up and powerful academic research that each of these three exhibits possess — they are the important landscape at the turn of the century of Chinese contemporary art. Therefore recall the previous nine years, and the “Chinese Modern Art Exhibition,” which was the last [exhibition] to cause a temporary sensation: the “gun attack incident.” Unavoidably, this gave way to people sighing with deep feeling over one of the deeper implications hinted at: the curtain on new art closes, female artists are brought on stage. Since the individual who opened fire was a young female artist.

Women’s Art: New Theme of Conversation in the Nineties

Female art was the new topic of conversation during the decade of the nineties. It was also a popular topic within the [discussion of] China’s “post modern” and the contemporary art. Speaking like this is not to imply a denial of the accomplishments of previous female artists, it is merely to say that former female artwork certainly did not have convex displays of a type of clear female characteristic, therefore it is extremely difficult to judge their work in terms of gender. Nevertheless, coming into the nineties, the creative work of female artists appeared to more advantage, as distinctive from that of male artists. Female artists no longer needed male standards and male creative processes in order to paint. They began to establish a type of self-study and consciousness of the particular [and] recognizable similarities of their own gender, leading to gender specific discrepancies discovered within the value of their own selves. Once women attempted to use personal experience and “women’s perspective” to interpret this century, women’s creative works were not only different from male artists, but also different from the work of any former era of women. Therefore this singular practice embodied “women’s art,” and the advance of these concepts composed the topical content of “women’s art” and its “post-modern” overtones.

Once we had the one “coupled artist” age of collaboration. When men and women are equal in theory (as in couple collaborations), it keeps women from their sense of self-exploration, so the meaning of equal transforms into women’s effemulation. Under these conditions, female artist’s work can only represent one type of characteristic: “non-sexual” [by means of] anti-feminine intentions during the time of this trend. However, today the couple artist age of collaboration has passed, the “wife’s” paintings already differ from “husband’s” paintings. And this sort of difference stems from these women’s realization of their “womanhood;” and also the realization that they have their own perspective. They have their own experiences and standards of judgment. Additionally, the way that [women] feel and experience the world, and the way that they think, is different from men. It is these gender differences that are the foundation for the construction of female art. It is on top of this “corner stone” that female art can reveal a unique aesthetic, a moral character, and a spirit of direction.

Women’s Art and Male Art

When we try to distinguish art in terms of gender and confirm the concept of “women’s art,” theoretically there is a very complicated condition: if we declare that all art created by women is “women’s art,” then it means that we have to agree on an extension of the concept at the same time: all art created by men is “male art.” If we agree on that concept and take it a step further: it raises the question, what distinguishes male art from female art. How can we answer that? If there is no gender-based distinction in art, then why should we define gender-based categories in art?

Actually, within the art produced by humankind, the greater part of it is distinguished as belonging to “neutral” [art], the primary method stems from distinct gender-based perspective, so [in the category of neutral art] there is no need to make these sorts of distinctions. If we put artists into classes based on uncomplicated divisions of male artists and female artists, then it’s as if we place previous artists in the place of the bourgeoisie like the supreme class, we could cave into a theory of a type of dualism. Nevertheless, within this artistic category there is certainly a group that possesses a clear divergence based on gender, and gender-based characteristics. Thus, in regarding this section of art [one is] supplied with that particular viewpoint. We test this sort of situation below with a graph that shows:

(*Apologies for the lack of a graph here–chalk it up to technical difficulties. Imagine two overlapping circles. The one on the left is labeled, “male art,” and the one on the right, “female art.” The area in which they overlap is labeled, “gender neutral art.”*)

Male Art                                                                                             Women’s Art

1                 2

Gender Neutral Art

Circle one indicates all male artists’ artistic productions;

Circle two indicates all female artist’s artistic productions;

The value of the intersection of circle one and circle two is the portion of artists whose gender-based distinction diverges from these groups, namely “gender neutral art.” The portion of both circles that does not overlap, equals the portion where the existing group’s sexual distinction diverges, this could also be called “male art” or “women’s art” to take into account that group’s inclusion.

The differences between female art and male art are produced by [the artists’] experience based on respective differences of sexual distinction. From this deep layer of sexual distinction, the heart’s resources are triggered. As a result of having male gender and female gender, there exist divergent parts from physiology to mentality. Due to the long term of the father’s power over the consciousness of women, [the father figure] exerts influence that determines their art from its starting point to its style of presentation, [so] in this sector there can exist differences. It is also from these types of differences, female art can reveal unique/personal value. Therefore the meaning of using gender distinction in the process of [this discussion]: female art’s appearance and development filled out an empty space of art history—the prior version of art history is basically the history of the male visual experience. The development of the female visual experience makes this history complete. This is where the real value of using gender distinction in the discussion of art and the advocacy of women’s art lies.

Furthermore, from the perspective of art history, women’s art could be broadly defined as being the entirety of women’s creative works. Due to [the fact that] they as a group are constantly being stifled, and being placed in the periphery of art history. Therefore when we historically, and completely settle accounts [regarding] only their art productions, it is very natural to broadly use the concept of “women’s art.”

The Basic Characteristics of Women’s Art

Since “women’s art” is an independently existing [category] separate from male art, then it is supposed to be describable and also have its own relatively stable characteristics and appearance. However, due to its plentiful, colorful, and various orientations, and due to its being located in an actively changing process, it is not possible to attempt to describe it. Nevertheless, we try to include the following points based on the current status of the development of female art:

1. They don’t care anything about things outside of themselves, things not related to their personal emotional life. Further, [they] emphasize the excavation of their heart’s resources, and from personal experience attain the body language from which [they] obtain inspiration. The works of art include the trends of unique personal features and aspects of privacy.
2. They very rarely use rational angles of analyses to involve a subject matter and grasp a theme. But rather emphasize the emotional characteristics of their artwork, and emphasize the importance of direct feeling, enabling base physical senses to emerge. [Their] creative works are more like childish illusions, like stealing things as one pleases, expressive in the unreasonable blurred appearance. This is to say that a clear path is not readily visible from [their] physiological to mental reaction.
3. They are not interested in politics, history, philosophy, but express a special concern for nature, life, humanity, and the question of existence. So much so that a dull ordinary life is paid close attention to, [as if] something surpassing lofty [ideals], and the pursuit of glory.
4. They universally lack interest toward the world of men. They barely use male figures in their art (perhaps this is the thing that inhibits [their] deepest parts). The biggest difference here is that male artists usually use female figures in their art. Questions that are personal to women are paid increasingly close attention to by female artists. They face their own egos, which allows them to explore and open an area of “art expansion.” This art stems from never exploring the knowledge outside their field of experience, which provides valiantly for female artist’s success.
5. The linguistic style of this art developed from traditional hand-worked arts [handicrafts]. In the paired skills held by men and women, the division of labor practices was such that men tilled [the soil], and women spun [cloth]. There then appeared the innate ability [of women] to build a nest, to sew, weave, knit, and handwork embroidery. Even though modern era women have already lost this relationship, contrary [to modern times] the artistry seems to have already enabled the peaceful production of a natural accumulation [of skills]. In the arts, women naturally maintained interests in the artistry of sewing, weaving, knitting. [These skills and related media] simultaneously became one special type of female linguistic style. This linguistic style is analogous to weaving, or the language of sewing. Even though it is not widespread, it does exist within female artwork, however it is a specialty contained in female art.
6. Mediums of art are selected from the last life transformed [i.e. traditional feminine culture] and the close feelings [toward that life]. Female artists not only have one type of particular partiality for the traditional skills of weaving, moreover the related materials of these skills possesses an especially sensitive type of feeling. Material selected for art installations express distinct female characteristics: needles, thread, cotton, silk, gauze, various types of fiber and light/gauzy material. These everyday ordinary materials transform technique via female artist’s deployment outside [the home], and changes in tradition, which were agents of change for certain concepts. In other words, using women’s inner wisdom to conceptualize and analyze daily life brings ordinary feminine material into technique and transforms art.

In summation, today’s female art is already far from traditional female artist’s expressions, which were of a slender and reserved type, clearly beautiful as if inviting a singular unique style [parlor art]. We can already use a traditional appreciation of beauty to look within women’s creative productions, but [female artists] also have the power of expressing visual intensity, in this they are almost on par with male artists, and are not below them. From poetic atmosphere, that conveys one’s emotions, of illusion, romance, aesthetic importance, ideals, [the art] transforms into a type of mysterious, crazy, strangeness, with an abundance of ideological language and a spirit of visual sense motivating it. This type of [art] is directly practical, directly from human life, directly of the self. Contemporary female artists display for us what is one horizon within the vast scenery of art. However, even though there are numerous different concepts and various techniques, we can still see some common qualities. It is precisely in these common qualities that “women’s art” becomes something worth discussing.

**Thank you to Dr. Deborah Porter and Fiona Meng-Fan Lu for invaluable assistance and consultation on this translation!**

…the curator Hans Ulrich-Obrist says the young supergirl ‘has developed an expansive oeuvre of theatrical performance, photography, writing, sound pieces, short film and even a feature length production” that reminds him of a young Robert Rauschenberg.’

Art:21 blog reports that the October 14th episode of the PBS series, Art: 21 — Art in the Twenty-first Century, will be titled “Fantasy,” and will feature Cao, along with three other artists:

Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen — whose hallucinatory, irreverent, and sublime works transport us to imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness.

The editors of Young Chinese Artists describe the varied mediums and socially conscious viewpoint that have made up her work in the last decade, as well as the dark, introspective piece, Room 807 (2002), which they rightly point out is seldom included in surveys of her work.

Cao Fei, "Room 807," 2002.

Cao Fei, "Room 807, No. 5," Photograph, 84 x 112 cm.

Unfortunately, there is no interview included in their portrait of Cao, so the editors include quotes from other interviews with the artist. Still, the interviews they include are notable (e.g. a 2007 interview with curator Hou Hanru). It would have been interesting to see what this poster child of generational talent would say in a body of work full of the words and works of her generation, especially since she often has a critical eye on the construction of realities among the techno-centric youth of China’s rapidly altered urban environments.

Cao Fei, "Yanmy at Home (CosPlayers Series)," 2004, C-print.

Cao Fei, "Nada at Home (CosPlayers Series)," 2004, Digital C-print.

The editors sum up her work clearly and concisely (something which is sometimes lacking in the flourishes of art criticism):

Cao Fei’s art has become increasingly challenging, demanding, and socially engaging over the past ten years of her career. Her playful joggling of realistic fantasies and fantastic realities makes her work most pertinent to actual life experiences in contemporary China, something often lost in the staggering numbers of economic growth and the cant governmental promises of an Utopian future where everyone’s life will be better the next day.

Cao Fei, "RMB City 2," 2007, Digital C-print.

This afternoon, I saw Cao’s video triptych, Whose Utopia at the Henry Art Gallery. The twenty minute piece is incredibly moving (also great to sit in a dark air-conditioned room during the heatwave that has been raging in Seattle). I watched it twice, and not just for the free a/c. The first part, Imagination is Product, is visually interesting, but topically numbing, which is an appropriate portrait of the mechanical repitition required in professional factory life. Countless identical light bulbs get produced largely by machines. Then the human workers–mostly young, mostly female–take over to perform those tasks that are not well suited to machines. The central aspect of this labor seems to be quality control. One worker pushes bulb after bulb onto a conduit to test them. Cao shows her face lit up over and over again, as the woman stares into the light. One can only imagine the headaches that this induces. The sequence title is fitting since it was imagination that resulted in machinized labor, and it was imagination that led Deng Xiaoping to open China to commercial possibilities and to build large factories on which the world would come to rely. In the end, imagination turned into products, in this case lightbulbs, sent abroad by the boatload to light homes, businesses, and cars. These young workers traded rigid tradition and parental supervision, for a lonely sort of freedom as cogs inside of concrete buildings. Cao was born in Guangzhou, the capital city of the province in which the OSRAM lighting factory sits. This area had one of the first of China’s national economic developments zones: the Guangzhou Economic and Technological Development Zone. As such, this city and the surrounding towns are intimately connected to the social instability that accompanies China’s rapid economic growth. Cao has rythmically portrayed the disconnect between the dreams of youth looking to factory jobs for economic and social freedom, and the true quality of life that these workers experience.

Cao Fei, "Whose Utopia?" 2006, Video Installation.

Cao Fei, "Whose Utopia?" 2006, Installation View, Tate Liverpool.

The band of the same name, who's members are featured in the video, wear t-shirts that spell out the title of the piece: "My future is not a dream."

I must also make a note particular to the Henry set-up: the designers chose two facing galleries to present Cao’s video and that of her co-artist in this exhibit, Yang Fudong. This layout is ideal since the co-curators of the exhibit, Heather Lineberry and Marylin Zeitlin, chose the two partly because the artists are different enough in style, age, and gender to represent the spectrum of contemporary Chinese art. However, the speakers in both galleries were placed just inside the door so that sounds from the opposing gallery constantly leaked into the other, and could be heard even when one was not near the entrance. This may have been caused by differences between what Henry staff wanted to accomplish, and what building and budget conditions enabled them to accomplish, and I am not meaning to criticise without some understanding. It really is a shame, however, because the simple presentation of the videos–one screen, one bench, no text inside the room–was perfect, and perfectly spoiled by the noise pollution.

Among the 13 artists featured as the future of abstract painting in China, PIFO includes at least two women.

Huang Jia, who is preparing for a solo show in December, features her monochramatic color pallettes with plate-like dimpled images, the “circular shapes (of which, she says) reflect her temperament and her reflections on traditional Chinese culture.”

Huang Jia, "August 16th, 2008," Oil on Canvas, diameter 50 cm.

Huang Jia, "August 21st, 2008, Oil on Canvas, 120 x 210 cm.

Zhang Xuerui uses delicate alterations in color to create calming, fluid effects accross straight-forward grid patterns. The artist is among the post-1975 generation (she was born in 1979),

Zhang Xuerui is a young artist, born in 1979, who currently lives in Beijing. Her paintings feature hundreds of grids covered and filled with gradated colors. Her inspiration comes from a desire to as she says, “express (her) understanding of our changing life in a rationalist manner.” According to an intereview with China.org.cn, her motivation in this direction was spurred on by the philosophical quote: “the only thing that does not change is change itself.”

Zhang Xuerui, "260 Squares - Grey Green," Acrylic on Canvas, 40 x 130 cm, 2008.

Zhang Xuerui, "598 Squares - From Grey Green to Purple," Acrylic on Canvas, 92 x 130 cm, 2008.

Zhang Xuerui, "225 Squares - Green," Acrylic on Canvas, 60 x 60 cm., 2008.

All images are from PIFO’s exhibit website.