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Opponent Sexyundressedsingers Id %20members Rating Sexy Undressed Singers Reclaiming their Bodies: Contemporary Chinese Women Artists

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as been argued that the survival of the latter for two years was because they depicted ethnic minority women, who in Han Chinese eyes are ‘sensual natives’ ).  China’s state council’s approval in April 1985 of the nude in art  was followed by the China Nude Art exhibition of 1988.  Even so, in 1986 when a nineteen-year-old woman working as a life model in the Nanjing Art Academy was recognised in a television series about Liu Haisu she was driven into mental illness by the harassment of fellow-villagers.  In 1998 Cui Xiuwen, Feng Jiali, Li Hong and Yuan Yaomin set up their feminist Siren Art Studio in Beijing, and by the early 2000s there was a popular outbreak of commercial body painting on bikini-clad girls and young women,  there were debates about college girls rushing to be photographed nude, numerous blogs by young women displaying their bodies on the internet, and the female painter and photographer Shi Tou came out as a lesbian on a Hunan province television talk show and starred in China’s first lesbian film, Fish and Elephant.

The works of our sixty-seven artists present female bodies in five main ways:

1.  Lubricious nudes
In mainland China Zhou Nan specialises in highly fetishised super-glamorous airbrushed paintings of breasts, pursed lips, and bottoms, in the midst of hyperreal hothouse flowers and tendrils, in imitation of the luscious and seductive advertising images of women’s beauty products.

Jiang Congyi has painted countless totally fetishistic and highly sexualised female nudes: the passive torsos of nubile young women in sexy underwear, centred on the open labia, and girls with a come-hither look pulling up their T-shirts to display big breasts, in acts of wild abandon and even sluttishness (in 1994 Lu Qing, 1964– , made a poster with a photograph of herself and the caption ‘I am a slut’ ), all with perfectly made-up pouting red lips, lacquered fingernails etc.

Shen Na paints frilly and sprightly young women in non-stop light-hearted lesbian lovemaking such as nipple-licking: ‘they are only interested in signing a contract with happiness, life and desire.  Although they are shallow and wanton, they certainly leave a deep impression,’ says the artist.

Cui Xiuwen did a series of two naked women (and also possibly a woman and a man) having sex, with the added interest of the people involved having different skin colours.  Feng Qianyu made (digitally altered?) photographs of young women naked together in a bath.  Guo Qingling painted a gorgeous series of scantily-clad sexy women showing off their charms and offering themselves to the viewer.  Zhang Yaxi celebrates sexuality in her more erotic sculpted female figures such as Nude II.  Fu Xi has painted the torso of a naked woman lifting her breasts up to be admired.  Guo Yan has painted a man and woman in various states of undress having sex.  It was said of Nie Mu’s series Lovers, 2002, that they were ‘both visually forceful and sexually explicit…[and] dynamically represent the physicality and ecstasy of sexual pleasure.’   Zhao Mengge paints only nudes in exaggerated postures of lively sexual longing, with limbs and breasts flying, in expressionistic brushwork and colours, usually much more vigorous than her gallery suggests:

Either the self dancing alone, fairy lady wandering in the garden or narcissistic goddess twiddling with her beautiful hair proclaims an oriental beauty with a little bit of sadness, drifting between the illusion and reality.

At school in China during the Cultural Revolution Hu Ming was allowed to draw only Mao Zedong’s portrait.  In 1970 she joined the army, where she worked in a hospital as a broadcaster and librarian.  In the library she found a book of Michelangelo’s life drawings of human anatomy that was banned at the time as pornographic.  Her website says that it changed her life forever; it also says that because women could not ‘display their femininity’ during the Cultural Revolution she ‘did not see shampoo until the mid 1980s, hence the womanliness of her army girls in her painting.’  She then trained as an army nurse, spending much time studying anatomy in the morgue.  She attributes ‘a reason for the prevalence of bottoms in her painting’ to the year she spent jabbing needles in soldiers’ rear ends.  Also, ‘During this time as a nurse Ming witnessed daily the dead and withered bodies of illness, so consequently she loves to paint the healthy voluptuous bodies.  She came to hate the view of an ill body.’  Between 1979 and 1983 she studied at art school, and then worked on army films for five years before leaving to study English in New Zealand, moving to Australia in 1999.  ‘Her paintings express dearly her worship of the female form depicting both physical strength and feminine beauty’ : they are also clearly lesbian in their sexuality, as though inspired by Anchee Min’s autobiographical novel set in the Cultural Revolution, Red Azalea.

Also outside mainland China, Yin Ling has her male partner photograph her in provocative poses wearing bits of bikinis, sometimes with a political slogan as a ruse: as Susan Kendzulak noted of one performance in Taiwan:

In Let Lovemaking Lead the World Towards Peace, Yin cavorted with a skeleton on a pink bed positioned between uniforms symbolizing Mao and Chiang.  This tableau of erotic kitsch was well attended, especially by local male townsfolk and the visiting male arts crowd.

Zhang O, frustrated at the restrictions on her freedom to express herself at art school in Beijing, began using a camera after classes at night.

In my first series of photographs, Masterpieces in My Eyes of 1998 I tried to explore the aesthetic and political aspects of the female body in the history of art.  I took slides of masterpieces painted by men, then projected the slides on the real female models, literally imposing the masterpieces, the male standards, on the female form…This raised questions about sexual distinctions and domination, about seeing and being seen.

After moving to London and discovering Ming dynasty erotica she made the Water moon series, which was followed by the Black hair series: ‘Again I posed nude models in a bathtub, and then I arranged their long black hair on their skin as if painting strokes on a blank canvas.  This is similar to Chinese calligraphy and ancient landscape paintings.’

For me, water has an erotic connotation: two people having intercourse feel a similar sensation of wetness, and one can feel something of a link to the ancient book of love…I wanted to create a sense of feminine vulnerability and fragility.  For me, the images of the body, hair, and water are full of innuendo.  These are an aesthetic expression of the seductive and ominous feelings of human sexuality, beauty, and death.

Whether of same-sex eroticism (lesbianism) or self-love (narcissism, autoeroticism), all the above works pander to many women’s beautiful masturbatory fantasies and emotional longings; in psychoanalytic terms they are instances of projection.

Women painting naked women plays havoc with feminist discourses of (male) subject and (female) object, of active (male) and passive (female), and of (male) surveillance and (female) display, and even with the idea that the mere pursuit of visual pleasure (‘scopophilia’) is inherently masculine.   Are female artists, then, being sucked into identifying with the male gaze?

As Avis Lewallen asked regarding the new wave of blockbuster sex novels written by women, ‘Do they merely contribute to the further objectification of women within our misogynist society, inculcating male power, or do they offer a form of representation that facilitates the female gaze?’   One feminist, in talking about television programs, argued that ‘the female gaze is not produced simply because women are behind the camera or because the main characters are women…the female gaze can be a mask for a male point of view.’

‘Awareness of this danger,’ wrote Gill Saunders in 1989 of Western female artists, ‘has led most of the women artists working with the nude to use their own bodies as subject and by so doing they escaped the traditional artist/model subject/object relationship, using the body as a locus in which art and artist are interchangeable.’   Certainly, Western feminist art in the 1970s was full of naked self-portraits, but feminist intentions alone could never protect such art from being ogled by heterosexual men (that it is also ogled by lesbians  is neither here nor there: we live in a society run by and for men, not by and for lesbians).  Nor, according to Mary Kelly, does it overcome the object/subject problem, for the female artist painting herself still sees herself in the feminine position as the object of the look and as an artist in the masculine position as subject of the look.   It is altogether too hopeful to say, as Xenia Tetmajer did of an exhibition in Beijing in 2004, ‘The naked bodies on display in She represent either the artist herself or her friends and thus falls [sic] outside the traditional objectifying male gaze,’  objectification not being decidable by reference to the sex of the artist, to the subjects being the artist or friends, or even to the artist’s intentions.

In 1973 Maryse Holder reported on the ‘amazing phenomenon’ of women all over the US ‘describing unprecedentedly explicit sexual content’ as they began ‘redeeming their cunts from male pawn shops, [and] appropriating the entire matter of human sexuality as well.’   Many Chinese female artists now seem to be manifesting a similar eruption of sexuality after decades of prudery.  They are celebrating the sexual beauty of young women (never of men), and the idea of beautiful sex with themselves or another woman, and occasionally with a man.

2.  Tasteful but saccharine cuties
Whereas those who have painted lubricious nudes are the youngest contingent, with a mean age in 2006 of 34.8 years, the artists we are going to look at now are the oldest, with a mean age of 44.2 years.  (The mean age of those in category 3 is 43.7, in category 4, 40.1, and in category 5, 38.6.)

Zhang Shumei paints nothing but dozens of ethereal buxom nudes, singly and in groups of two or three, in pastel colours and in flowery landscapes, all in the stiff life-class poses of Western-derived nudes of pre-Communist times, with some looking non-Han Chinese or non-Chinese Asian, in a kind of internal or reverse Orientalism.  Zhou Ling paints voluptuous exoticised young earth mothers of varying ethnicity in natural tropical settings, often with wild animals and birds.

Fu Jiying does paintings of female nudes in styles from the past, one being described by a commentator as, ‘Three naked Court Ladies enjoying themselves in the water as described in the excerpt from a Song Dynasty poet, Li Qing Zhao,’ and others showing a goddess-like nude with flowers in her hair posing with wild animals.

Liu Yousha paints pairs of pastel-coloured stylised female nudes floating in Cubist-derived landscapes with titles like One summer day.  Yang Xiaojun paints decorous female nudes with gorgeous hair-styling and makeup against generic Chinese flowers and landscapes.  Xu Jie has made oil paintings of standard Western-style posed female nudes, impassive, with eyes averted, closed, or hidden, and in Hong Kong Nancy Chu Woo draws and paints glamorised life-class female nudes, usually from behind.

Cao Weihong paints cute nudes, modelling them and their domestic surroundings on what might have been in old painted scrolls, as though the artist were retrospectively inventing a Chinese counterpart to the Western tradition of the female nude; they are idealised, slim, young, without pubic hair or labia, standing in lotus flowers, simpering behind fans: the epitome of passive, available sex objects, and amusing despite or because of that.

Xu Hualing has painted pale nude female torsos with heads cut off by the frame; of others Xenia Tetmajer wrote:

[T]he viewer is presented with the artist’s almost ephemeral body.  She looks at the viewer from behind a veil-like pattern emitting soft sexual innuendo.  The artist’s powerfully questioning gaze, however, undermines the docility of her body.

Yang Fan painted a series of idealised cuties bathing, their nakedness against bright pink or blue backgrounds partly covered by blurry water or steam.  There is a lot of cuteness in modern Chinese art, although it is still a long way behind the infantilised popular culture of Japan.  In psychoanalytic terms it connotes regression.  ‘Cuteness fetishizes powerlessness,’ is one opinion; from children and virtuous young women to sweet old ladies, to be cute connotes ‘the need to be saved, and creates the longing to rescue.’

This group of artists also celebrates youthful women’s sexual beauty (and again, never men’s), but unlike the first group they present the female nude as passive.

3.  Subordinated to the art
Jin Weihong has done an enormous number of ink and colour paintings of one or two people in domestic or garden settings, with the people and their surroundings being but lightly sketched, giving no more indication of narrative than their minimal titles, such as Looking at flowers, or People and bird.  Although the figures usually seem to be unclothed, the genitals are never depicted, so that the frequent suggestion of breasts seems to indicate that most or all of them are women.  Either way, the depiction in ink and colour of people singly or in pairs engaged in leisurely pursuits, in which they are so absorbed that mere material considerations such as dress can be forgotten, carries the viewer back to the classic literati paintings of the Southern Song dynasty.  By grafting quite notional nudes on to the indigenous tradition of ink and colour brush painting she is the artist whose work is least able to be seen as (even though it may be in fact) diaristic or the working through of her own personal experiences.

Jin Weihong: ‘Nude figures, unbound by social conventions, seem to be an ideal way to express my feelings freely.’  ‘I prefer the kind of emptiness there in my paintings, which leaves spaces for viewers’ imagination.’  ‘I have to be in a very relaxed and merry mood to paint and I want my paintings to be as natural as possible.’  ‘Line drawing is very important in Chinese paintings and one brief line can save unnecessary brushwork, while telling much.’

The depiction of ungendered human bodies brings to mind Georges Bataille’s concept of ‘formless’ (revived in more recent times by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss among others ), with its slippage and blurring of categories, its impossibility of definition, and its fluidity of identity.  Krauss envisaged a ‘field of the Imaginary that allows for its positions to be occupied by more than one gender at once,’  on which Sasha Si-Ling Welland commented, ‘This way of seeing disrupts any fixed notion of the male gaze, in which the eyes of a default male viewer fall upon a represented female body with the simple effect of fantasy fulfillment, manipulation, and control.’   It also caters to trans-gendered and tr eOpponent Sexyundressedsingers Id %20members Rating Sexy Undressed Singers Reclaiming their Bodies: Contemporary Chinese Women Artistsk Www%2Ejzzhut%2Ecom Sexy Undressed Singers iOpponent Sexyundressedsingers Id %20members Rating Sexy Undressed Singers Reclaiming their Bodies: Contemporary Chinese Women Artistsi m Sex Dating Sexy Undressed Singers