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Chinese female artists now; but the dominating patriarchal culture of China is somewhat different:
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(b) China’s official art history does not boast a long tradition of the nude, male or female
(c) It is only in the past fifteen or twenty years that sex, the body, contraception and prophylaxis, and bodily functions in general have been re-allowed into public discourse, including their representation in art
(d) Extreme overcrowding in most places makes heterosexual sexual relations extremely difficult and often impossible, even between married people, but encourages and facilitates (because of the widespread sharing of beds) same-sex sexual relations
(e) China has a One Child Policy
(f) There is a long history of female infanticide, now changing into the termination of a high percentage of pregnancies when ultrasound scans reveal a female foetus; with the resulting surplus of 41 million men (on the way to 120 million), Chinese women can afford to luxuriate in their privileged position, to primp and plump themselves, to shop around and to take their time until the very best father for their single child comes along; the shortage of women may also explain the Communist authorities’ tolerance of prostitution, with hundreds of thousands of brothels masquerading as beauty salons, barber shops, truck stops, and karaoke bars throughout the country, one estimate being that in Shanghai there are more than 100,000 female prostitutes, equal to the number before 1949
(g) There is an expectation that all women should participate in the (under-)paid workforce
(h) Female artists, feminists and non-feminists alike are able to draw inspiration from Western feminist or feminist-inspired works of art produced over the past forty years
(i) Traditional erotica in China shows ‘people indulging in every single aspect of sexuality to a mutual satisfaction. This is quite different from the erotic imagery in many other cultures where there is often an element of violence, particularly violence against women. In Chinese erotic art one does not see that…It is a culture that traditionally adored sex, with all kinds of rationales and philosophicals as to why one should have sex. There was the belief that sex existed for both genders, not just for the gratification of the male’
Nead saw two historical periods in feminist art in the West. The objective of feminist art in the first period ‘was to transform woman from the passive object of representation to the speaking subject. Feminist art articulated the right of women to represent their own bodies and sexual identities through vaginal imagery, performance work and the body, the representation of previously taboo subjects such as menstruation and so on.’ Much of it implied a ‘universal category of “woman”.’
The theory is that women have a womb, menstruate, become pregnant, lactate, have pre-menstrual tension, go through menopause etc, and that therefore they live inside their bodies, identify with their bodies, and take a greater interest in their own bodies than in men’s bodies, and a greater interest in their own bodies than men do in theirs; and this all makes them closer to nature than men.
Maryse Holder wrote, ‘Women are more interested in sex and sexual relationships. And women are discovering themselves. It is therefore not surprising to find that their work is often biomorphic, sexual, narcissistic, and mythic.’ And Gill Saunders wrote, ‘In many ways the female nude is a natural and inevitable subject for the woman artist; women have a stronger awareness of their bodies than men: their physical cycles are more insistent…’ Pam Meecham and Julie Sheldon: ‘…women have historically been seen as in thrall to their bodies to the detriment of their mental development.’
In the West some 1970s feminists had warned that ‘in celebrating what is essentially female we may simply be reinforcing 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.
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