Remaking Femininity: Women’s Portraiture in Modern Asian Art and Visual Culture
How is femininity represented in portraiture in modern Asian art and visual culture? What kinds of meanings do women carry as a subject matter? How does the portraiture of specific women represent their self-identity and social status? Usually interpreted as a self-conscious response to cross-cultural interactions, modern art in Asia emerged in the midst of political conflicts and social changes.
On the one hand, as a construct, female figures take up complex roles from embodying cultural traditions to representing a modern nation to the larger world. The idea of femininity, extending beyond standards of beauty and fashion, displays the clash of political power and cultural changes in modern Asian societies. From ballroom advertisements in Shanghai to woodblock prints of moga in Tokyo, those new objects in emerging urban life provide clues for a redefinition of femininity in modern Asian society. On the other hand, apart from being subject matters, women’s social mobility in modern societies deepened their engagement and roles in artistic productions as artists, patrons, and collectors.
This session seeks to examine how gender intersects with modernity in female portraiture in Asian art from mid 19th century onwards. What do these new concepts and representations of femininity reflect in terms of women’s identities, gender relations, and political agenda? How does female portraiture reflect women’s changing roles in artmaking? While expanding the literature of art in relation to race, gender, and post-colonialism, we are keen to include works that explore this topic in material culture, such as consumer goods, posters, and so forth.
Session convenor:
Xinyi Ye, University of Hong Kong
Speakers:
Mi Zhou, University of St Andrews
Not just a ‘Flower’: The Representations of Female Movie Stars in 1930s China
In the 1930s, photographic images of Chinese female movie stars boomed in public space and mass media. While many studies have been conducted about their characters, acting and performance on the screen, it remains under-researched that a close visual reading of their images off the screen which were represented and constructed in and by magazines. Were these women, in their portraits, simply the objects to be viewed and consumed? Were they just beautiful and appealing ‘Flower Vases (huaping 花瓶)’ – pretty faces?
This paper explores the case of the female movie star, Miss Li Minghui (黎明暉), a singer, dancer and actress who was famous between the mid-1920s and the late-1930s. Her portraits appeared in advertisements, on magazine covers and within various magazines, from the general-interest magazine Liangyou huabao (良友畫報) to the woman’s magazine Linglong (玲瓏). Not only were the media spaces diverse, but the representations of Li were also nuanced and complexed.
Female movie stars seemed to live on their sellable looks, and their occupations and careers centred on their visibility and publicity. However, I argue that underlying the emphasis on physical appearances is a Chinese female movie star’ negotiation and construction of ‘being a modern woman’. On the one hand, movie actresses were subject to the public discourse about the standardised femininity in relation to modernity and nationalism, which disciplined, criticized, and even attacked actresses. On the other hand, stars like Li’s performance and involvement of the image production and the act of looking in the portraits also embodies the pursuit of individuality and a changing, redefined femininity.
Miriam Yeo Sze En, National Museum of Singapore
Changing Times, Changing Clothes: Nyonya Self-fashioning in Studio Portraits from the Straits Settlement
The Straits Chinese community are descended from mixed marriages between Chinese men and Southeast Asian women. Unlike their husbands, Straits Chinese women (nyonyas) were rarely seen in Western clothing in the early 20th century. In their choice of ethnic clothing, nyonyas synthesised their dual identity as ‘culture bearers’ and modern women.
Studies that survey portraits of nyonyas in this period tend to locate the symbol of their modern identity in their preference for Chinese garments, in response to geopolitical changes in China and the Straits Settlements which catalysed the Straits Chinese Reform Movement. Chinese-influenced garments such as Baju Shanghai and Cheongsam are represented in studio photographs of nyonyas, particularly those with considerable social status who worked alongside their husbands to navigate the careful balance of the Straits Chinese community caught between western colonialism and rising Chinese nationalism. However, studio photographs also show that nyonyas did not exclusively wear Chinese garments; many wore Sarong Kebaya. As a modern iteration of the traditional Baju Panjang, I argue that the Sarong Kebaya symbolized nyonyas’ desire to protect their domestic command. As a garment it emphasised their historical position as matriarchs and justified their continued authority due to their modern education. Thus, whether for the public representation of community politics or the private battles for household authority, the studio portraits of nyonyas in the Straits Settlements depict nyonyas’ conscious and creative re-interpretation of modern self-identity.
Gail Levin, City University of New York
Faces of Anguish: Zhen Guo’s Self-Portraits in Feminist Art
The feminist artist Zhen Guo (郭祯), born in 1955 in China’s Shandong Province, emerged out of the dominant ideology of the Cultural Revolution. This paper will focus on several of her series of self-portrait paintings, especially one from 2000, called “Life Death Love,” showing the artist and her first husband seated frontally at their dinner table. Her left breast is stripped away and her broken heart has been removed and placed on her husband’s dinner plate, which is bright red. As large visible tears flow from her eyes, her knife and spoon remain unused next to her empty plate, for symbolically, she was starving. This is the devastation that she had experienced as an immigrant in America as she, a devoted Chinese wife, sacrificed for her first husband’s artistic success instead of her own.
Only in 2010, did Guo finally express her fury– in Self-portrait, depicting herself as an angry caged leopard with pigs’ feet and a human face, growling at the world. “This is about screaming and not being heard,” she protested, “about not being able to leave the cage.” She followed this harrowing image with a 2011 series of acrylic on rice paper: Suffocation was the first of eight grimacing and choking self-portraits. In its heightened emotional intensity, Guo’s series of grimacing self-portraits recalls Edvard Munch’s icon of alienation, The Scream of 1893. Guo sees her art as reflecting her life experience. It combines Western philosophy and art with Chinese aesthetics. Her art communicates her life’s high drama.
Patrick Carland-Echavarria, University of Pennsylvania
False Femininities and Queer Corporealities: Re-Examining the Life and Work of Kainosho Tadaota
As the recent publication of a comprehensive volume of his artistic works indicates, the critical and popular reputation of Kyoto-based painter Kainosho Tadaota (甲斐庄楠音, 1894-1978) has risen notably in Japan in recent years. A graduate of the Kyoto Academy of the Arts and an active participant in the National Painting Creation Association (Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai), Kainosho was a major painter in western Japan in the Taisho and early Showa periods. His oil paintings of geisha and Edo Period courtesans, at once spectral and sensual, attracted both attention and disdain in his lifetime, as did his flamboyant personality, affairs with both men and women, and use of gender-nonconforming models in his painting and photography.
Although Kainosho’s work has been discussed in passing in English, existent descriptions of his life and work contain numerous inaccuracies and do not reflect recent development in Japanese scholarship. This presentation attempts to provide the foundation for an English-language study of Kainosho’s life and work in the historical context of changing social and sexual discourses of 1920s Japan. It examines his early paintings and inspirations, his relationship with the painter Sakakibara Shikō, and the so-called “dirty picture incident” that led to the cessation of relations with many of his fellow Kyoto artists in 1926. I ultimately argue that Kainosho’s work and life must be understood in the context of his own self-professed aesthetic concepts and ideas, which have hitherto been largely ignored.