Abstract This is an investigation into the significance of the ancient 'secret' women's phonetic syllabary, Nüshu, in the performance and painting work of contemporary artist Ma Yanling, based on two extensive interviews with the artist in October and November 2013 and a close analysis of specific works. This article examines, first, the ways in which the gendered communication of life-stories and the exploration of female grievance found in Nüshu texts (the supposedly 'secret' women's phonetic syllabary used by peasant women in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province until the late 1980s) continues to have relevance in the work of a contemporary artist. It is argued that Nüshu texts (intended to be chanted aloud) are in themselves performative and cathartic in a similar manner to contemporary performance art practices. Second, the article argues that the ways in which Ma Yanling's work subverts the iconography of Mao-era propaganda portraiture and its Pop-inspired satire in contemporary Chinese art (Zhongguo Dangdai Yishu) represent complex and contradictory aspects of female experience and feminine subjectivity in today's China.
Abstract The yaji in Imperial China was an ‘elegant gathering’ of scholars who met to play chess, listen to music, and appreciate ink painting and calligraphy. They were generally all-male affairs, often taking place in a walled garden. Recently it has been argued that such forms of semi-private contemplation are appropriate models for exhibiting Chinese contemporary art. This article has two connected parts: the first examines how two women artists, Tao Aimin and Bingyi, ‘outsiders’ to the yaji garden gathering as it was traditionally constructed, subvert (yet also honour) important Chinese traditions. They challenge a gendered historical narrative by means of a reinvigorated and performative ink language, negotiating literal and figurative ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ spaces. Positioned as reconfiguring space in a way that challenges binaries of inside/outside, they interrogate the literati tradition that functioned as an expression of class and gender. Two works in particular exemplify their practice: Bingyi’s Époché, a 2014 performance in which she dropped 500 kilograms of ink/oil ‘missiles’ from a helicopter over the airfield at Shenzhen Bao’an Airport, and Tao Aimin’s 2008 The Secret Language of Women, an installation of bound books printed from rural women’s washboards employing the ancient Nüshu script invented by rural women. The second part of the article critically examines contemporary iterations of the yaji as a model for the exhibition of contemporary art. The term yaji is thus used in two ways in this article: as a metaphor to reflect on the absence of women artists in the reinvented literati ink tradition, and in a critical examination of its real-world manifestations in several recent exhibitions. In this context, the works of Tao Aimin and Bingyi occupy a complicated liminal space: they position themselves at times inside feminist discourse and at other times disavow a connection; they occupy a marginal space within dominant contemporary art world discourses and historically masculine discourses around calligraphy and the yaji, yet ‘inside’ the ink tradition. This article was developed from a paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Centre for Chinese Visual Art, School of Art, Birmingham City University, 13 October 2017.
3. Translation, transformation and refiguration: The significance of Jingdezhen and the materiality of porcelain in the work of two contemporary Chinese artists
Abstract In December 2016 a group of researchers led by Professor Jiang Jiehong travelled to Jingdezhen as fieldwork for the Everyday Legend research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Representing the White Rabbit Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art, Australia, I was invited to participate. This article developed from reflections on the fieldwork component of the research project, as well as the formal and informal discussions that took place, at the time and subsequently, in Shanghai, Birmingham, Groningen and London. In 2018, as a further development of this process of reflection, I conducted semi-structured interviews with two artists of different generations: the article examines how Liu Jianhua and Geng Xue approach the use of porcelain as a contemporary art material. Each has spent extensive periods of time in Jingdezhen and each is immersed in this particularly Chinese tradition. At the same time, each is identified (and identifies themselves) as practising in a global contemporary art context and participates in exhibitions and exchanges internationally. Considered in the context of current and historical discourses around global contemporaneity2 and its manifestations in twenty-first-century China, their work illuminates the key question that the Everyday Legend project was designed to examine: how can contemporary art and traditional Chinese craft practices intersect, informing and enriching each other? As representatives, respectively, of the generation who emerged into the first years of the post-Cultural Revolution Reform and Opening period, and of a younger generation educated partly outside China, they reveal how Chinese artists strategically negotiate local and global in positioning their work as contemporary reinventions of traditional forms and materiality.
4. Reclaiming Silenced Voices: Feminist Interventions in the Ink Tradition Source: Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art Vol21 No. 1, 2021. pp. 133-151 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2021.1934781
Abstract In the post-Cultural Revolution revival and reinvention of ink traditions in avant-garde Chinese art, women artists were almost entirely absent from the discourse. Specifically, in the genres of ‘unreadable’ calligraphy or performative applications of ink such as Gu Wenda’s 1985 Mythos of Lost Dynasties series, Wu Shanzhuan’s 1986 Red Humor installations. Xu Bing’s c.1987-91 Book from the Sky, or, later, the anarchic After DinnerShu Fa events of Zheng Guogu and the Yangjiang Group, the insertion of a demotic element into previously élite forms of literary and artistic communication is underpinned by the essentially unquestioned masculinist nature of literati wenren culture. This article argues that works by contemporary artists Tao Aimin (陶艾民b.1974, Hunan) and Xiao Lu (肖鲁b. 1962, Hangzhou, Zhejiang) may be interpreted as feminist interventions into a culture of ink and calligraphy from which they would once have been excluded by virtue of their gender. Developed from a broader investigation of gender and national identity in Chinese contemporary art informed by interviews with four female artists, this article examines their work through a lens of travelling feminist theory. Tao Aimin used the Nüshu script invented by rural women in Hunan Province as her calligraphy, together with weathered wooden washing boards as found objects and inked printing blocks. Xiao Lu’s recent performance works are rituals of immersion and endurance: ink and water, poured and splashed over her body, become expressions of femaleness that reference Daoist cosmology. Framed by Qing Dynasty anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen’s 1907 analysis of the Daoist/Confucian construct of Nannü – with which she powerfully critiqued patriarchal power structures and Confucian orthodoxies – the interpretation of their work underlines the absence of women from historical narratives that create and reinforce national identities. Restoring hidden histories and revealing female subjectivities, yet for the most part paradoxically disavowing a feminist identification, the work of Xiao Lu and Tao Aimin is positioned in this article as representations of a collision with the dominant discourses of the contemporary reinvention of the scholarly ink tradition, and a reclamation of silenced voices past and present.
5. Gendered Bodies: Feminism and Chineseness in the work of Li Xinmo, Xiao Lu and Xie Rong Source: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Vol 10 (1 & 2), 2023, pp: 85-106 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jcca_00077_1
Abstract: From its emergence in the post-Mao era of Reform and Opening (gaige kaifang) the performing body in Chinese performance art (xingwei yishu) was most often assumed to be male. The representation of performance practices in exhibitions, festivals – and in the art historical literature – has too often been dominated by male artists. This article turns the gaze onto three women artists, examining their work through lenses of gender, feminism and “Chineseness”: Performance artists Xiao Lu (肖鲁b.1962), Li Xinmo (李心沫 b.1976), and Xie Rong (谢蓉 b.1983) explore aspects of embodied lived experience in often-encoded ways. Li Xinmo explores experiences of gendered violence through theatrical, immersive performances that have often used ink or pigmented fluids as metaphors for blood and trauma – and through a series of paintings made with actual menstrual blood. In The Death of the Xinkai River (2007) she first explicitly links an embodied feminism with her distress at the destruction of the natural environment. Xiao Lu’s post-menopausal performances move beyond her previously more literal explorations of gender. Works such as Ren (2016) and Suspension (2017) employ ink and water in poetic reference to calligraphy (shufa) and ink-wash painting (shuimo hua). Inserting herself into the visual language of literati scholar painters, an artistic lineage from which she would have been excluded by virtue of her gender, Xiao’s liquid materiality becomes a feminist embodiment. Xie Rong (also known until recently by her English name, Echo Morgan) ‘writes’ ink painting using her hair as her brush in I Am a Brush (2011), Painting Until it Becomes Marble (2019) and Anatomy of Posidonia (2022). She paints her naked body with images of bird and flower painting and blue-and-white porcelain motifs to perform lamentations of grief, loss and longing in works such as Be The Inside of the Vase (2012) and Anatomy of Posidonia (2022). Framed by Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ‘Ornamentalism’, Ella Shohat’s notion of a non-Western ‘subterranean’ feminism, and early twentieth century anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen’s gendering category of ‘nannü’, the artists’ embodied practices are understood as creating nannü spaces that reveal female subjectivities and reposition them within the discourses of Chinese performance practice. Emerging from encounters with the artists, in studio visits and (during the pandemic years) online conversations, analysis of their counter-patriarchal work reveals not merely the ghostly presences and absences of women in narratives of performance art in China that have tended to marginalise them, but also the significance of their contributions.