THE LATEST F WORD

UNDERCURRENTS OF FEMINISM IN THE
PRACTICES OF FOUR CHINESE WOMEN ARTISTS

RELUCTANT FEMINISM

I recently undertook a casual survey, asking Chinese artists in Shanghai if they would participate in a feminist exhibition. The answer was a unanimous ‘no,’ from not only male artists but also female artists. The male artists were straightforward. Most recused themselves without hesitation and stated they were not interested, while others politely stated they were quite busy. Most of the female artists cringed a bit at the word and stated they disliked such labels or categorizations, although a few casually asked, ‘Which museum is doing this show?’

The word ‘feminism’ often has an unsavory connotation in Asia, especially in China. Merely bringing up this topic is considered impolite conversation not only within conservative groups but even within art circles. Tragically, this can be attributed to misperceptions by both men and women who view feminists as forceful, antagonistic women who do not conform to the biologically determined stereotypes of the beguiling, often passive women portrayed in mainstream Chinese movies, literature, and fashion magazines. There is a gaping chasm of understanding and an even greater misunderstanding about the meaning of the word feminism not only between China and the west but even within China amongst the general populace by men as well as women. Perhaps the main reason is that the word has been lost in translation. According to the UN definition, ‘feminism is a movement advocating for women’s social, political, legal and economic rights equal to those of men.’ The Chinese online dictionary Pleco defines feminism as nuquan zhuyi (女权主义), the doctrine of female power, authority, rights, or advantageous position. Chinese scholars based in the US such as Angela Xiao Wu and Yige Dong (董一格) have observed the downright dirty connotations circulating in popular discourse that condemn empowered Chinese women as ‘feminist whores’ (nuquanbiao) and ‘feminist cancer’ (nuquan’ai). 2 These derogatory referents are paradoxical in a Communist nation where Mao Zedong proclaimed that women held up ‘half the sky,’ a rallying call to bring them into the labour force and encourage their loyalty to the party. Even in recent years, the cause for promoting women’s rights was hampered when the All-China Women’s Federation harshly condemned the Feminist Five, a group of five young female Chinese protestors who were arrested for handing out stickers to raise awareness about sexual harassment on public transportation on the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015.

Despite deeply entrenched traditional customs including foot binding that forced proper ‘noble’ women to remain secluded within inner chambers, Chinese women have been able to witness more advancements in their freedom and social status than women in other East Asian countries. For example, female participation in the workforce and political arena in China remains greater than Korea and Japan. 4 Chinese women are no longer bound to the same social or economic con-straints as their grandmothers and their mothers. The generation of Chinese girls born after 1980, in the era of the One Child Policy, have greater access to higher education, family support, and even opportunities to study abroad and enter the workforce along with their male colleagues, thereby accumulating enough financial security to continue their careers without the need of marriage. 5 The number of single women who choose to remain unmarried in urban centres such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou has risen tenfold since the 1990s, whether voluntarily or because of difficulties of finding a desirable match.

Historical hindsight reveals that the state-enforced One Child Policy led to female infanticide and biased gender selection, resulting in a surplus of men in China’s rural provinces. According to Leta Hong Fincher, the foremost scholar on the topic of gender imbalance in China, the term ‘leftover women,’ which pejoratively defines unmarried women over the age of 27, was conceived as a nationwide campaign to alleviate this crisis of gender disparity that still ensues. Undaunted, profession-al women with financial means are finding ways to take control of their reproductive rights by opting to freeze their eggs or finding surrogates to give birth to their child. However, both practices (egg freezing and surrogate pregnancy) are currently illegal in China if a woman is unmarried and does not provide a government granted marriage certificate, which means she must possess not only the economic means to carry out her decision outside of China, but also have the unwavering courage to live outside the socially accepted mores of a traditional heterosexual family unit.

If contemporary art is supposed to reflect current social conditions, what expressions are being envisioned by artists about the status of women and gender rights in China? In a patrilineal society where the upper echelons of power are still overwhelmingly male-centric, what voices and messages are being articulated and generated by the women artists? 8 In an attempt to interrogate these power structures, my interest in this study was to seek out Chinese female artists who operate in their own independent sphere of influence, removed from blue chip galleries, and have received minimal attention from mainstream art publications. While there was not a strict set of criteria, it mattered that the focus was on women who hold firm to their own unique vision and ways of communicating to express their core selves through very personalized artistic practices.

My purpose is to create a snapshot of a particular perspective in 2021 and to examine how the dialectics of this discourse could be launched and expanded in the years to come. This article does not propose to be a comprehensive study but rather the beginnings of a new set of ensuing conversations. While protests and marches for social justice are taking place in many cities around the world, contesting voices are promptly silenced in China. Yet, a lack of mass rallies does not indicate the absence of contrarian views. In fact, some of the distinctive voices emerging from the realm of contemporary Chinese art are those artists who feel they have been silenced without due cause.

WHERE ARE CHINA’S QUEER WOMEN ARTISTS?

Homosexuality in China was illegal up until 1997 and was not taken off the Chinese version of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) as a mental illness until 2001. Unlike other countries where LGBTQ activism and awareness have a much longer history, in China, the freedom of expression through film, visual arts, and public displays of queerness continue to remain under high surveillance, subject to bureau-cratic interception through censorship. Despite such challenges, the earliest proponents who cleared the way for exploring topics of gender identity and sexual orientation have been male gay artists. Upon his graduation from the Central of Academy of Arts in Beijing in 2005, Chi Peng (迟鹏) received critical attention for his photo-graphic works that did not shy away from themes and images focusing on homosexuality. Works by other gay Chinese artists such as Yan Xing (鄢醒), Tao Hui (陶輝), Wang Haiyang (王海洋), and the late Ren Hang (任航) have been openly embraced by international curators, especially those seek-ing to promote non-Western artists working on the periphery of a predominantly heterosexual art world. Spectrosynthesis—Asian LGBTQ2+ Issues in Art Now, an exhibition at MOCA Taipei held in celebration of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan in 2017, attracted a significant number of international collectors and curators, but the offerings were unequivocally dominated by male Taiwanese artists. Out of the 22 artists represented, only three were female, and only one was a transgender artist.

While gay Chinese male artists might have garnered attention, opportunities, and gallery representation, most of the small population of lesbian Chinese artists work in relative obscurity. Moreover, they tend to keep their sexual orientation anonymous or discreet, such that there is often little, or no queer reference embedded in their works. Initially, the disconnect seems incongruent because ‘queer’ and ‘feminism’ are at times enmeshed in many societies outside of China. Ap-art from the acclaimed rising star Shen Xin (沈莘), most lesbian artists in mainland China tend to distance themselves from any labels that could set them apart. While the current practice preferred by Western feminist artists is to go out of their way to defy mainstream culture, I have found that most Chinese female artists strive to assert their rights by being on equal footing with male colleagues so as to be a participatory member within the arts circle. Rather than standing apart and consolidat-ing through a unified queer voice, many Chinese lesbian artists seek to take part in mainstream exhibitions. The main reason is to avoid discrimination and backlash. But another reason is related to events in recent history regarding women’s rights that are unique to China. The impetus for fomenting feminist movements, especially in most Western countries, has been grassroots efforts by women for women’s causes. 10 However, in China, the feminist movement emerged in a radically different context, formulated and directed by male Nationalist and Communist intellectuals who sought to frame women’s liberation discourse to fulfill the aims of their respective political agendas.

Perhaps this explains, in part, why a critical mass of contesting forces of ‘us’ (female) vs ‘them’ (male) is lacking. Since the early days of the movement, women were not yet empowered, let alone educated, enough to helm the incipient women’s rights movement in China that initiated modernity. Whether the strategy of the male intellectuals was self-serving or mutually beneficial for women, the appearance of a united front for championing female causes gave Chinese women few reasons to oppose and resist. In a similar trajectory, for many prominent female contemporary artists who began their practice in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and during China’s Economic Reform, their connections and thereby entry into male-dominated circles was through their husbands. The generation of older female artists who have gained global prominence and market success are in many cases married to pioneering and globally renowned male artists. Most notable are Yu Hong(喻红) and Liu Xiaodong (刘小东), Lin Tianmiao (林天苗) and Wang Gongxin (王功新), and Shen Yuan (沈远)and her late husband Huang Yongping (黄永砯). It is also revealing that collaborating couples such as Song Dong (宋冬) and Yin Xiuzhen(尹秀珍), as well as the artist duo Sun Yuan (孙愿) and Peng Yu (彭禹), which is always referred to with the husband’s name coming first and the wife’s name second. The rhetoric of partnership is also conveyed as mutually supportive based on cooperative harmony, without any mention of competing interests.

RUYA QIAN:

AM I SOMEBODY?

It is precisely because Ruya Qian (钱儒雅) opposes such traditionalist viewpoints and grounds her practice within the realities affecting contemporary society that she immediately caught my attention. Born 1987 in Suzhou, Qian discovered her interest in photography while she was an undergraduate at Jiaotong University in Shanghai. She went on to earn her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied under Hou Hanru (侯瀚如). Upon her return to Shanghai, she took upon various stints as a commercial photographer to make ends meet and to save up to embark on a series of artist residencies throughout China. Qian is currently one of China’s only openly bisexual artists. Working in self portraiture and video, she is the principal subject of her photographs, pushing herself beyond her own mental and physical limits. ‘My self-portraits initially evolved out of a lack of finances. I couldn’t afford a model,’ Qian candidly admits. 13 Over time, however, her images began to tackle deeply personal and autobiographical anxieties that mined loneliness, depression, and suicidal thoughts, as well as her longing for women, even while she was in a committed relationship with a boyfriend.

I first encountered Qian’s work when she was selected as one of the twenty finalists in the 8th Three Shadows Photography Award in 2016. The series Project Us (2012–ongoing), which she had submitted for the competition, is composed of figuratively and metaphorically conflicted self portraits produced through double exposures to convey varying degrees of psychological tension.

Carefully constructed black and white vignettes, these images are a hypnotic and mesmerizing juxtaposition of attraction and abjection. The meticulous staging of self-isolation in Qian’s photographs symbolizes the exponentially growing but little regarded symptom of the self-induced isolation afflicting large population of youths in China. First gaining attention in Japan in the early 1980s as hikikomori, this condition has been found by researchers to be most prevalent in children of the one-child policy generation. ‘My childhood was very unusual,’ says Qian:

‘I was separated from my parents to live with my strict uncle who was to groom me into a model student. He never touched me physically, but he abused me emotionally and mentally. My only solace during that time was my vast collection of dolls who were my only friends. They breathed life into my imagination.’

The aspect of intense loneliness is captured in Project ‘Us’—6 (2012) where Qian’s sense of excruciating solitary confinement is portrayed with palpable agony. The images in this series bear witness to a vicious cycle of self-loathing that is followed by moments of respite in the instinct to survive with the attempt to self-love. Ruya Qian explains:

‘I took a lot of self-portraits. I just had to do it; otherwise, I felt my anger would accumlate throughout the years, leading to terrible consequences. I’m glad to have found an outlet. . . . Usually for one single image, the shooting process lasted 4–9 hours and [required] several boxes of film. For example, in one photo, I hug my crying self. I was crying while shooting, [this crying was induced] by having a friend continue to swear and shout at me like how my parents treated me when I was a little girl. So, in each shot, my friend would shout at me—I cried—one exposure—cleaned my face—then another exposure, [and so] on and on until I was able to capture the image I wanted. [For] another shooting, I screamed at myself for a couple of hours. This turned out to be a healing process. I had to face what frightened me most as well as my ugliest emotions again and again until I was able to get over it.’

Torn between the urge to surrender and the will to survive, Ruya’s carefully constructed images reveal the impulse to clutch onto the comforting habits of consumption, whether of sex, food, shopping, or self torment. The insatiable need for over-compulsion is both the cure and disease that delineates the tenuous divide between life and death—a dark reflection of contemporary society in China.

While Project Us helped her forge an intuitive coming to terms with her personal depression, Fragile (2018–present), a continuing series which began at the Qinglianlong Temple Female Artist Residency in rural Shanxi, explores the intimacy of Qian’s relationship with other women. Connecting on erotic terms with other female artists both emotionally and physically, the artist tests the notion of propinquity and the sense of carnal attraction that is aroused when standing or sitting close to a person one desires. The forces of natural gravitational pull are simultaneously potent and fragile to exemplify the mysterious ways in which chemical forces create an intense field of attraction as well as the opposing power to dispel, replicating the heartbreaking cycles of being together and breaking up.

The Fragile series is composed of reflective mirrors affixed on the surface of the photograph. The collage plays upon the idea of refractions and questions the photographic medium’s premise of documentation and ‘truth,’ asking if our reality is really true and if our truth is truly real. Can our inner essence ever be reflected by our exterior? Ruya Qian may be the first openly bisexual Chinese artists, but hopefully she will not be the only one. Possessing dual sexualities, Qian’s images prompt our reflection to consider what it means to be an embodiment of the dual forces of nature. In Daoism, the basic tenets of yin and yang are the fundamental forces of nature. Knowingly or unknowingly, each of us possesses this paradoxical yet complimentary unity.

Qian’s Fragile series further exposes the mundane ways in which simple acts such as holding hands and kissing, especially in public spaces, are considered socially accepted only for heterosexual couples but not for the gender fluid. In present day China, where the ‘LG’ of lesbian and gay communities are generally finding greater acceptance, the ‘BTQ’ bisexual, transgender and queer still face a far more difficult path toward inclusion. Through images, gestures personal poems, and the reexamination of socially entrenched acts, Qian’s practice brings the margins into the center. Unobtrusively yet seamlessly, she subverts the notion of fixed biological determinism to expand our understanding of what constitutes humanity.

LIU XI:

ARE WOMEN ANY BODY?

While the younger generation of urbanized men in China tend to uphold more progressive views on gender, these values are not reflected in rural China. While urban women are choosing to marry late or not at all, marriage rates for women under the age of 20 in rural China are on the rise, as are rates of rural domestic abuse. 17 Liu Xi (柳溪)has personally born witness to gender discrimination growing up in rural Shandong province. This has galvanized her position as an advocate of women’s rights and feminist discourse. Born in 1986 in Zibo, a prefecture city in central Shandong province, Liu Xi studied sculpture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Upon graduation, she established a studio in the famed ceramics capital of Jingdezhen, where she produces sculptures that return the female gaze in bold, unexpected ways.

Liu Xi’s ceramic sculptures underscore the poetic dichotomy between the permanent and ephemeral aspects of our society through the use of the wet, malleable clay that can be fired into solid objects, which, are still prone to damage and obliteration. She manifests this precariousness in Low to Earth (2018), where crumpled objects resembling deflated organic forms dominate the expanse of the exhibition floor. As the viewers attempt to walk about in the tightly filled space, they are bound to inadvertently step on some of the pieces. When this occurs, they are reassured by the art center volunteers that the artist had intended for these missteps to occur. At the end of the exhibi-tion cycle, while some forms may remain intact, most will be crushed into tiny shards to reveal the contradictions of the whole and fractured states that individuals must navigate through in life.

Liu Xi’s glazed forms have the appearance of sensuous wetness that arouse the impulse to touch. Evoking the essence of female sexual organ, Liu Xi’s meticulous handmade sculptures of petal-like curls and curves create an expansive body of 52 porcelain vulval forms in various shapes and sizes. The series title Our God is Great (2018–19) immediately conjures the Christian Genesis story, in which God created Adam in His own image out of earth. Using clay, a component of earth, Liu Xi, as a creator herself, breathes life into not one but a vast multitude of female genitals in unique sizes and shapes. As if to assert that Adam does not and cannot singularly embody all of humankind, Liu Xi presents female forms in multiple versions. Moreover, this installation poignantly disrupts the male dominated practice of ceramic production in pre modern China and displaces the historic hierarchies of power when Jingdezhen wares were monopolized and controlled for the sole use by the emperor.

Compared to feminists such as the Guerilla Girls, who can stage boisterous performances and in-your-face protests about the unequal treatment of female artists, Chinese artists face far greater challenges in expressing feminist ideas under the tightly monitored conditions by the authoritarian government. They face the dual demands of navigating the ever constant surveillance of censorship as well as capturing the attention of a culturally conservative populace who is likely to turn away from overtly feminist content.

According to Liu Xi, feminism is ‘breaking through various restrictions to be a free person and to respect the instincts of nature and the body.’ 18 She observes, ‘Different countries, regions, histories, and cultures have their particularities and, oftentimes, these culturally specific conditions limit the development of women. The term feminism should not be confrontational; [rather, it is] about equal coexistence, [about] lifting prejudiced restrictions [that constrict] the status of women.’ Having travelled outside of China for artist residencies and to participate in exhibitions, Liu Xi has become more sensitive to social issues in China. Regarding the status of women’s rights in China, she believes,

‘There still is a long way to go. The [free-doms of] women in Shanghai and Beijing do not represent [the whole] of China. We have far greater percentages of women living in small cities and undeveloped areas. Although senior scholars in China have been working hard to advocate for wom-en’s rights for years, due to deep rooted thinking that has been promulgated through China’s long history, the fight for women’s rights is just beginning.’

Liu Xi’s series Mama (2015–16) distills some of her feelings about her own mother into concrete forms. ‘When I was a child, my mother was the first figure who inspired me. She is strong, hardworking, kind, innocent, and generous. She is a great woman; even in a tough environment, she has maintained her kind heartedness when dealing with malice. Yet life didn’t treat her well. There are millions of women like my mother in small cities. Such tragedies are a constant reminder to me that such injustices should not repeat. It is my hope to advance this cause. Just like a mirror, I want the uniqueness of my per-sonal growth to [be] reflected through... art.’ The artist’s quietly rendered washboards in pristine white ceramics become powerful epitaphs for the often invisible women of rural societies, many who live without the conveniences of washing machines and still do their laundry by the river. Assembled as a collective, the boards are visual markers of female manual labor. Cast in porcelain from old, salvaged washboards, the glazed sculptures confer renewed awareness on the daily activity of washing and laundering—a vital aspect of domestic hygiene and health. The broken and chipped elements on the original wooden boards that have deteriorated over time, underscore the juncture where time has converged with the exertion of the hand.

LI TINGWEI:

ARE WOMEN
EVERY BODY?

The body as a sexualized entity, often tangled in the discourse of the search for self identity, is a focus shared by many Chinese female artists.

One such artist is Li Tingwei (李亭崴), born in 1989 in Yantai, China. Li studied at Tongji University in Shanghai and went on to receive her MFA at Hunter College in the US. Afterward she completed another master’s degree at Universität der Künste Berlin and has been dividing her time between Berlin and Shanghai. Fluent in English, German, and Mandarin, Li Tingwei has been interested in the effects of health on the status of bodies.

Li Tingwei explores the ways the human body can be reimagined and physically altered in the digital age, a complex theme she has been investigating since 2017. Her immersive solo exhibition Feeling Good? at J Gallery in Shanghai (2017) stressed the importance of inner well-being and challenged the viewer’s perceptions of fitness and beauty. Li explores the disjunction of the mindbody connection through catchy, kitschy images and psychedelic music in video works such as YOU CAN SAY THAT YOU CAN DO THIS (2016) and BE BETTER, BE STRONGER (2016) as well as the self-hypnosis YOU CAN SAY THAT YOU ARE HAPPY (2017). These iterations are biting parodies of self-help promotional videos, calling into question how wellness has become com-modified and transformed into a major industry. Li’s sharp and witty videos explore these vital issues by employing a hip visual rhetoric. The videos follow patterns of engagement employed by popular cooking channels and even porn sites with embedded messages of subliminal images, texts and music. In what seems to be a meditative video, YOU CAN SAY THAT YOU CAN BE HAPPY, the calming voiceover and the Gregorian chants give way to eventual annoyance upon the realiza-tion that the song is being played backwards like a record on reverse mode.

Moreover, Li’s artistic practice interrogates the very ground on which Chinese beauty is framed and constructed by popular culture, specifically by young women who exploit other young women for profit. In an appearance conscious society that lays heavy emphasis on trends promoting beauty, Li’s practice critiques the accelerating rise of social media in China that is driving the uninterrupted cycles of addictive enticement and consumption.

The nexus that binds and sequences Li Tingwei’s video series hints at the social conditioning of contemporary culture’s often-blind acceptance of health, exercise and nutrition—or, at least, the signaling of these as prudent lifestyle choices, despite the fact that some products can be harmful to the body. Yet despite various and dedicated efforts to prolong life, no amount of health supplements, kilometers logged on a treadmill, or hours in the yoga studio change the reality that each day we move a step closer to our demise. When viewed independently, Li’s video serves as a chapter in a greater tome of existential musings on the mind-body relationship and our inability to solve the problem of the aging body.

Perhaps it is because Li’s practice focuses on the conditions of well and the unwell-being of the human body, even her early drawings and prints portend like an augury of the pandemic that devasted the world in 2020. In the series of black and white abstract charcoal drawings and woodcut prints, the images of entangled masses of unidentifiable forms are envisioned as organic bodily part. The starkness of the black and white contrast are reminiscent of Albrecht Dürer’s famous woodcut print Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1497/98), which contemplates the themes of death, famine, war, and plague. For Li, ‘infectious disease has been a constant part of human history. It will never go away.’

Along with viruses, infections, and plagues, Li Tingwei believes the technology of the digital age is also affecting the transformation of the human body. For Li, the hand is a sacred symbolic representation of how certain parts of our body can become increasingly atrophied through disuse in the increasingly digitalized world. Li states:

‘Vilém Flusser claimed that today’s human beings, equipped with digital apparatuses, are already living the ‘immaterial life’ of tomorrow. ‘Manual atrophy’ characterizes such an existence. [In my opinion] digital technology is making human hands waste away. It means liberation from the burden of matter. The term ‘digital’ itself references the finger, and [the act of] counting. In the future, humankind will no longer need hands. [Only a few] fingers will take the place of hands.’

In her most recent video, Digitus Digitalis (2020), Li Tingwei observes how our bodies may mutate over time due to our constant reliance on electronic devices, most poignantly the handheld devices such as the smartphone. The artist erases the tenuous divide between the real physical finger and the forefinger icon finger found on our screens. This virtual finger is able to perform all the necessary commands digitally with a simple click of a forefinger. Hands are no longer required to harvest fields, feed chickens, and toil at manual labor as these tasks can now be mechanically accomplished with a click of a mouse or the pressing of a button with our index finger. Just as past species have become extinct and bodies have transformed through evolution (as shown, for instance, by vestigial structures), perhaps our constant use, or the lack thereof, of certain limbs and digits will lead to degeneration as humans continue to evolve over time.

HUANG HAI-HSIN:

LMAO

Other Chinese female artists concerned with the effects of mind-body connection are not limited to those residing in mainland China. In her own off-beat way, the Taipei-based Huang Hai-hsin deploys parody and wit to subvert the ways we think we understand the relationship between thoughts and actions. Born in 1984 in Taipei and a graduate of National Taipei University of Education, Huang Hai-hsin (黄海欣) studied art and art education, but she admits that she did not create many paintings in Taipei, beyond what was mandatory for assignments and for building a portfolio for applying to graduate schools. 21 It was only when she attended the School of Visual Arts in New York for her MFA that Huang found her unique visual voice. While most people spend time in museums to view works of art, Huang became fascinated by the visitors and their individual idiosyncrasies, enacted like private rituals in liminal spaces.

Huang uses her distinctive candor and keen sense of observation to capture and translate into visual language what most people may have seen but might have failed to notice. The countless hours she spent in museums in New York can be likened to the practice of a social anthropologist conducting field work on her subjects. By stripping art of its elite status, she reveals the essence of the viewers, and their varied motivations for visiting the museum.

The artist’s highly colourful, flat renderings are accessible, with the power to draw and engage people of all ages. Many of her images are flooded with references and memories of childhood. Subsequently, in Huang’s paintings and drawings, there are indeed children at play as well as adults going about their daily lives with carefree ease as if the world had not yet invented systems of surveillance cameras and facial recognition software. In Huang’s world, there is thus little division between children and adults, and all men and women are idiosyncratic. She observes, ‘We are not athletes competing in sports in which obvious biological structural differences are a major factor. We make art with our brains and eyes and hands, so we don’t want to be treated and seen differently as if the female gender is a weaker kind! Male artists have no problems because the stages have always been for them, like it’s a ‘default’ setting.’

In Huang’s paintings, men and women commingle in a nonsensical world, reminiscent of the expansive detailed panoramas of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Like these European northern Renaissance painters, Huang uses her astute powers of observation to capture the nuances of human experience unfolding before her. The viewer must stop and observe the entire scene and then break it apart into sections to take in all the minutiae.

River of Little Happiness (2015) is characteristic of Huang’s unique signature style in its dense composition, amusing details, and rich colouring. Manmade factories and nuclear power plants mimic the effects of natural volcanoes, both of which can be disastrous when combusted. People revel beside a river as if at a resort, yet the scene is punctuated with surreal ambiguity. According to Huang, the painting is inspired by social media, where a diverse range of ideas and happenings are surfacing simultaneously on our digital screens. ‘Wars, afternoon tea gatherings, and so many events are occurring all at once. I want to care about the important matters, but the barrage of images and information reveals vulnerable helplessness. I wonder if it’s only me or is everyone experiencing this similar feeling? So, we resort to living our lives and having a good time because this is something we can do to connect one day to the next.’

Huang employs these techniques to maximum effect in her 2017 work Victoria Secret, which explores the absurd aspects of modern she power. The comical painting depicts husbands and boyfriends dragged through weekend ‘prove you love me’ shopping rituals, which tend to be a torturous affair. When it comes to in store and online shopping, women continue to dominate as the largest segment of consumers around the world. According to the Harvard Business Review, ‘as a market, women represent an opportunity bigger than China and India combined... Women drive the world economy,’ 23 a rather disheartening accolade that affirms the age-old female stereotype. As Judith Butler has argued, while gender is ‘constructed,’ it is more appropriately‘performed.’ 24 Haung’s scene of shopping mania reinforces Butler’s claim. In tragicomical fashion, Huang’s depiction of greed and abundance further underscores how many women have succumbed to the capitalist opiate of the masses.

One of Huang Hai-hsin’s most poignant institutional critiques is of the commercial art fairs. She returns a playful yet critical gaze at the very company that constitutes her world—collectors, art museums, and galleries. Ironically, the hierarchies are upturned when the starving artists become the tastemakers for the wealthy patrons. In Huang’s vision, the Chinese collector at Art Basel is depicted as a holy figure, with a brightly lit halo about his head like a prophet. The larger than life patron dominates the center of the picture frame indicating his high level of importance. While seemingly simplistic, Huang’s paintings are unrivaled in their depth of concept, use of saturated color, and the way they present life as the greatest comedy.

I WON’T COMPROMISE MY POINT
OF VIEW,
ABSOLUTELY NOT:

THE LATEST VIEWS OF MULTIPLE FEMINISM

The artists mentioned above, along with a wide cross-section of female artists I encountered throughout China, reinforce the fact that feminism cannot be forced into any simplified categorization. How does one define or advocate one’s rights in a country where raising such awareness is not always condoned and comes with great risks?

In my conversations with the four artists discussed, their latest thoughts on feminism in China are predicated on personal definitions rather than on a monolithic understanding. While the study of Chinese feminism is receiving much deserved attention in academia in China as well as overseas, from my observations, it seems that the fight for equal rights for and by Chinese artists is not necessarily occurring on a grassroots level or through collective activism, but more in an individualized domain where many women are assessing their rights in regards to their own bodies and life choices. For a great number of Chinese female artists, their practice is resolutely about who they are as human beings, with the personal freedom to create, destroy, laugh, cry, marry, stay single, vent, and circumvent. Their goals are to live as freely as anyone can under their given conditions. To have the ability to have a choice is itself a basic right that is denied to numerous women and men in many parts of our world. While the Chinese Communist Party continues to tighten its grasp on rhetoric, in the realm of daily lives, the general populace is granted the space to live their personal lives if they do not cross the party line. While in certain circles, feminist voices are rising in volume, especially in the international #MeToo movement, one still must be careful and selective in advocating for women’s civil liberties in China. Despite the challenges, we must believe that the next generation of young Chinese girls, albeit mostly from urban cities, will find effective ways to communicate the need for change and witness its achievements.

Reflecting on the potential of the next generation, I asked the four artists what message they could leave for young Chinese girls.

Here are their responses:

RUYA QIAN 钱儒雅

‘Try to be independent and watch less bullshit TV shows that tell you there will be a prince to save you. Don’t rely on another person for your dreams to be realized.’

LIU XI 柳溪

‘Be your unique you. Never let others define you or your life. It is important to have this idea in mind early on, then you can have plenty of time to practice, make mistakes, endure hardships, happiness, sadness, and all that is mixed in. You will gradually understand the different hidden layers. Between what we know and what we can achieve there is a big gap, which takes time to overcome.’

LI TINGWEI 李亭崴

‘Read more books; listen to good music (not just the trendy new stuff). You will see that in ten years, an intelligent woman can make a difference in your generation. Go to see more places if possible. Do what you are interested in. Don’t let school grades or the university you attended define you. Learn to make friends with yourself and listen to this friend.’