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Opponent Sexyundressedsingers K Sexy Obama Et 1 Sexy Undressed Singers Reclaiming their Bodies: Contemporary Chinese Women Artists
Opponent Sexyundressedsingers K Sexy Obama Et 1 Sexy Undressed Singers
inforcing oppressive definitions of women, e.g., women as always in their separate sphere, or women as defining their identities exclusively, and narcissistically, through their bodies.’ Others had cheerfully embraced biological determinism, with Adrienne Rich declaring that women must ‘think through the body.’ From that experience we might conclude that an initial essentialist view of women, particularly of a biological reductionist or determinist kind, may be a necessary phase in the growth of feminist movements everywhere.
Some Chinese female artists seem to be perpetuating a patriarchal or a Western 1970s feminist idea of women as nature, as essentially a body, governed by hormones etc, by showing naked women with wild animals and cavorting in the fields, and repeatedly likening women’s sexuality to fruit and flowers. Depictions of menstruation and pregnancy in themselves do not constitute evidence for that position, because the mere acknowledgement of their existence does not necessarily imply that they are determinative of everything else; they do, however, suggest that they are important. The marvel is that this is occurring in the context of the official One Child Policy. Is it possible that the diminished chances of actually using their defining biology is a cause of some Chinese female artists placing on it an even greater, compensatory emphasis?
There was a shift in the West in the second period, said Nead, to the recognition of a diversity among women related to class, race, and sexual preference. ‘Feminism has increasingly recognized that there is no monolithic category of “the body”; there are different types of bodies but many of these have been defined as deviant and rendered invisible by a dominant aesthetic that posits the white, healthy, middle-class and youthful body as the ideal of femininity.’
In some respects we can say that Nead’s two periods have been telescoped into one in China, with essentialist art that represents taboo aspects of their own bodies and the presentation of a diversity of bodies occurring at the same time. Lesbian art is already prominent in our sample, and lesbian organisations in China should soon become strong enough to support the same kind of sub-culture of lesbian female artists as in the West (eg, Lesbian ConneXion/s). One paradoxical effect of any lesbian movement is to increase the number of female bodies available for the heterosexual male gaze. Heterosexual men may feel threatened by lesbianism, because it implies they are redundant, but it is also a gift, because they can simply join with lesbians in worshipping the same body and in seeing female exhibitionism as a come-on, and because they imagine that they can move in to get a bit of the action for themselves. In contrast, sales of New York Queer to homosexual men plummeted every time it had a lesbian on the cover. ‘Psychologically,’ wrote Cassandra Langer, ‘we know that lesbian themes have always been an invigorating spectacle for heterosexual men and are the second most popular fantasy listed in Masters and Johnson for both sexes.’
‘The important issue,’ wrote Martha Gever, ‘is how to get past this — how to get free from the male gaze, to reconfigure the terms of lesbian representation to negate the past stereotypes and to create a new erotic self.’ Or, as Lucy Lippard put it, ‘Why not concentrate on what the male gaze cannot see?’ Some in the West attempted to achieve that by moving away from figuration through ‘blurring, superimposing, fragmenting, abstracting, or symbolizing.’
In the future, when obesity is more widespread in China, female artists there can be expected to expand diversity even further into celebrating the naked bodies of fat women (or ‘women of size,’ to use the feminist euphemism), as Western female artists (eg, Laura Aguilar, Laurie Toby Edison) have done, women with eating disorders being seen as having the same rights as others to self-definition, against patriarchal medicine’s ‘repressive’ attempts to contain their bodies in the interests of their good health.
We can also expect the same recognition that Western female artists have given to the disabled female body (eg, Mary Duffy, Alison Lapper), to the bodies of women who have had mastectomies etc (eg, Nancy Fried, Hannah Wilke, Marlo Broekmans), and to the HIV/AIDS body: in 2004 Song Pengfei, 1982– , an HIV-positive woman, organised an exhibition in Beijing called ‘Her Beauty’ of twenty-nine works of art by HIV-positive women; the UN predicts that China could have 10 million cases by 2010. Female artists showing the way include Jiang Jie in works such as The magic flower, 1997, based on acupuncture points, Xiang Jing’s sculpture of a possible cancer patient, and He Chengyao’s 99 needles.
Even so, the impression is of an enormous variety in contemporary Chinese female artists’ treatment of their and other women’s bodies. Sometimes by vantage point or facial expression etc they convey a subjective appreciation of the body’s feel from the inside, which does not prevent the depicted body also being viewing objectively. In other cases they expressly present them at a distance, as objects, as sex objects even, for their own or lesbians’ or heterosexual men’s delectation. They deal with the bodies of women who are sceptics, masturbators, contentedly heterosexual, lesbian nymphets, exhibitionists, unconcernedly enjoying private nakedness, engaged in motherhood, prostitutes, close to nature, depressed, nervous smokers, centred on their reproductive organs, and as strong and energetic. There are also the occasional instances of women with brown skin, of older women, fatter women, a mentally disturbed woman, and perhaps a cancer patient. What is missing?
First, as we noted above, they show little interest in the male body, only sixteen of the sixty-seven (Chen Yadan, Cui Xiuwen, Gao Yan, Guo Yan, He Chengyao, Jiang Jie, Jin Weihong, Kan Xuan, Liu Manwen, Liu Yan, Nie Mu, Shen Ling, Wang Nanfei, Xing Danwen, Yuan Yaomin, Zhang O, Zhang Yaxi) having also depicted male bodies, and then never as attractive. This may be because of the anti-male element in feminism and lesbianism, or because women tend to agree with most men that women’s bodies are more beautiful, or because they are so intent on searching out, constructing, and celebrating their own identity (‘I am woman’ etc): evidence suggests that women also prefer female stars in films. Gill Saunders concluded: ‘The role reversal of women gazing at a man, which seems automatically to render him passive, is not comfortable or convincing for an audience of either sex.’
Second, there is little hint in any of the depictions of female bodies by contemporary Chinese female artists that the body is also the seat of the mind, of reason, of the psyche, of the human spirit. In a John Sands greeting card series called ‘Off the Ceiling’ there is one with a closeup photograph of a bikini-clad woman running by the sea with this caption: ‘As Karen bounced down the beach, many gentlemen were instantly captivated by her intelligence, personality and the fact that she did a lot of good work for charity.’ The works of the above artists are mostly open to the same facetiousness. They remind me of Mary Acton saying of Jenny Saville’s art that it ‘asks us to think about women not in terms of ideal beauty or the male gaze but in the sense of who they really are’ — when it should be apparent that they tell us little if anything about who they really are, unless we believe that a person is just a lump of meat. Andrea Liss called for ‘ways of representing that do not continue to allow the patriarchal scheme that divides women’s minds from our bodies and our desires.’
When Maurice Merleau-Ponty talked about the primacy of perceptions, and pointed out that they come through the body, so that he emphasised the importance of the ‘lived body,’ he did not envisage people examining their navels, but thought of the body as our ‘point of view on the world.’ We deny ourselves a full sense of ‘our body, our selves’ (to use a Western feminist slogan from the 1970s) if we never get beyond the vulva or the vagina or menses or even sex. Perhaps it is only people who habitually go naked in the open air, like Australian Aborigines, who can fully experience bodily existence. They become one with their sensory environment, so that the rhythms of nature are their rhythms, with vision reinforced by sounds, smells, tastes, and touch and by the meanings given to everything by stories and ceremonies. The making of nets, bags, spears, burial poles, bark paintings, songs and dances is an intrinsic part of that seamless world; even non-Aboriginal city dwellers can rediscover something of it when they live in the open for long periods at a stretch. This is the only true essentialism, the only true biological reductionism or determinism, because it is how we began, how we evolved, and how we have lived for the past million years, minus a couple of thousand. From this perspective all the nudes and naked bodies of the art world are but half alive. It is up to Chinese female artists to start working out how to represent the body of a woman as her ‘point of view on the world.’
In 2000 the female writer and curator, Jiang Mei, arrived at a similar conclusion regarding Chinese feminist art in general:
…Chinese feminist art of the 1990s on the whole is characterised by intimate private space (in explorations), self-contentment, self-cultivation and attainment…Chinese female artists rarely participate in the debates that are taking place on the international [level] or employ artistic means to express their views of contemporary international or local politics, society or culture.
The Indonesian female artist, Kartika Affandi-K？berl, born in 1934, achieved it in her powerful autobiographical paintings of 1981, Rebirth, and The moment of beginning. The South Korean female installation and performance artist, Yi (or Lee) Bul, did it outstandingly in her 1994 work, The difference and the power, in which she stands naked, chained by the neck to a metal bed, and holding a pickaxe, ‘poised to break the binds of domesticity, sexual submission, or whatever the audience chooses to read into the act,’ wrote James Lee, ‘but in any case going about it the hard way.’ The Indonesian female artist, Arahmaiani, 1961– , voiced the issue in relation to her performance and photographic installation work, His-story on my body, 2000, when she wrote,
With our imagination, fantasy and ideology about power we control and shape our body, but we often forget this simple fact that the body has its own way, life, and intelligence; we tend to sink into the depth of the mind, into the abstract and the body (as concrete element) has to serve.
I wonder why the body has a small role in determining life? Why it has to serve the belief or the ‘ideology’? Why can’t we start to think from the body and from a very special part of the body called ‘the heart’?
The two male Chinese performance artists, Cai Yuan and JJ Xi, explained the use of their own naked bodies in their work as having ‘historical reasons behind it’: ‘Sometimes the body has been used to confront an oppressive regime. In that sense the body can be used as a site for protest against corruption, reflecting the human spirit of freedom.’ They see their role as democratic, as keeping an eye on government and institutions, and criticising and protesting in order to keep society healthy; unlike the anti-war protests by Yin Ling (see above), their performances are not intentionally erotic.
The fact that direct and explicit protest is much more dangerous in mainland China and dictatorial Singapore than in and post-martial law Taiwan is enough to explain the absence of protest art, otherwise we might expect to see attention on the bodies of female factory workers in sweatshops, minority women, tortured Falun Gong members, etc. There is obviously a lot more reclaiming of bodies to be done. Let Joanna Frueh have the last witty word: ‘Possessing the body empowers us with new sight, speech, and hearing. Moreover, self-possession helps us to shoulder responsibility, stomach criticism, stand on our own two feet, head into the fray.’
APPENDIX
Cao Weihong, 1971, possibly Hong Kong
Chang Hsing-Yu, 1971, Taiwan
Chen Lingyang, 1975, Zhejiang, Beijing
Chen Yadan, 1942, Beijing
Chen Yanyin, 1958, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Australia
Cui Xiuwen (Cui Youwen), 1970, Harbin, Beijing
Feng Jiali (Jyali), 1963, Beijing
Feng Qianyu, 1974, Guangdong, Beijing, Guangdong
Fu Jiying, 1962, Beijing
Fu Xi, 1970, Sichuan
Gao Xiaolan, c.1975?, Hong Kong
Guo Qingling, 1973, Hunan, Shanghai
Guo Yan, Shaanxi, Xi’an
He Chengyao, 1964, Sichuan, Chongqing, Beijing
Heng, Amanda, 1951, Singapore, Perth, Singapore
Hu Ming, 1955, Beijing, New Zealand, Australia
Ji Xiaofeng, c.1975?, Qingdao, Beijing
Jiang Congyi, 1963, Henan, Beijing
Jiang Jie, 1963, Beijing
Jin Weihong, 1967, Nanjing
Kan Xuan, 1972, Anhui, Zhejiang, Amsterdam
Lai, Mei-Hua, 1948, Taiwan
Li Hong, 1965, Beijing, England, Beijing, New York, Beijing
Liao Haiying, 1967, Sichuan
Lin Tianmiao, 1961, Shanxi, Beijing, New York, Beijing
Liu Hong, 1956, Sichuan
Liu Manwen, 1962, Heilongjiang
Liu Yan, 1965, Beijing
Liu Yousha, c.late 1950s, Hunan, Hangzhou, Canada, United States
Ma Yanhong, 1977, Shanxi, Beijing
Nie Mu, 1973, Xinjiang, Beijing
Niu An (Ann New), 1970s, Shanghai, Japan, Shanghai
Qin Jin, 1970s, Guangdong
Qin Yufen, 1954, Qingdao, Berlin
Shao Fei, 1954, Beijing
Shen Ling, 1965, Liaoning, Beijing
Shen Na, 1979, Sichuan
Wang Nanfei, 1975, Jilin, Texas, Beijing
Wang Yingchun, 1942, Shanxi, Xi’an, Beijing
Woo, Nancy Chu, 1941, Guangdong, Hong Kong, New York, Hong Kong
Xiang Jing, 1965, Beijing, Shanghai
Xiao Huixiang, 1933, Hunan, Beijing, Los Angeles
Xing Danwen, 1967, Xi’an, Beijing
Xing Fei, 1958, Beijing, New York
Xu Hualing, 1975, Harbin, Beijing
Xu Jie, c.1970?, Shanghai
Xu Sa (Sasa), Beijing
Xu Xiaoyu, 1959
Yan Ming-hui (Ming-Huy), 1956, Taiwan, New York, Taiwan
Yang Fan, 1972, Guangdong
Yang Xiaojun, 1971/77?, Tianjin
Yang Yi, 1964, Sichuan, Guizhou and Beijing
Yin Ling, 1978, Taiwan, Japan
Yu Hong, 1966
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