SESSION: Situated Feminisms: Rethinking Art, Gender, and History in China

This panel invites reflection on the possibility of a situated feminist grammar in the context of Chinese art. While such a grammar has not yet been fully articulated, it may be emerging through historical, cultural, and artistic conditions specific to China. We ask how feminist perspectives can be shaped by, and responsive to, the country’s intellectual traditions, political histories, and artistic developments.

Building on last year’s session on women’s contributions to Chinese art history, this panel turns attention to conceptual and methodological questions concerning the intersections of gender, power, and historiography in both the making and interpretation of Chinese art. Of particular interest are the ways feminist approaches engage with the structural foundations of Chinese art historiography, as well as the strategies used by artists and scholars to question or reframe dominant narratives across various media and practices.

We welcome contributions that explore these concerns through case studies, theoretical inquiry, or historiographical analysis. This panel opens a space for dialogue on how feminist thinking may complicate, revise, or enrich our understanding of Chinese art history—past and present.

This session will consist of four individual presentations, each lasting 20 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of Q&A per speaker. A final open discussion may be included if time permits.

Session Convenor:

Xue Li, Edith Cowan University/Luxun Academy of Fine Arts

Session Speakers:

Luise Guest, University of New South Wales

Remaking Gender: declared and undeclared feminist intentions in the work of Tao Aimin, Cao Yu and Liu Xi (Online)

This paper examines the work of three contemporary women artists in/from the People’s Republic of China, developed through a research methodology of extended feminist encounter, involving recorded interviews with the artists over many years and analysis of their work. Tao Aimin, Liu Xi, and Cao Yu explore gendered subjectivities, yet each is drawn towards and, at other times, rejects (Western) feminisms. The paper asks whether a situated Chinese feminist theory could provide a more complete interpretive framework. For the 2007 ‘Global Feminisms’ exhibition curated by Maura Reilly with Linda Nochlin at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Reilly cited Ella Shohat’s concept of a ‘subterranean’ feminism operating in the Global South. This notion of a subversive shifting of the patriarchal tectonic plates is seductive, but by itself, Shohat’s ‘relational multicultural feminist project’ is inadequate to the task of interpreting the work of women artists in/from China, which has a feminist lineage as long as that of Euro-America. This paper proposes that Euro-American and Chinese feminisms are not binary but rather complementary discursive traditions. Weaving (Western) intersectional feminist theory with Qing Dynasty anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen’s gendering Nannü construct and Min Dongchao’s analysis of feminist theory and praxis in China, it offers new possibilities for analysing the work of the three artists as feminist in its intentionality – whether declared or undeclared. The discussion contributes to developing discourses around feminist art practices in China and to the re-examination of the significance of women artists in contemporary Chinese art.

Xinping Wei, Renmin University of China

The World Beyond the Garden: Zhou Xi’s Illustrated Compendium of Materia Medica and the Visual System of Gentlewomen’s Botany in Qing-Period Suzhou

This study examines the Qing-period Suzhou female painter Zhou Xi and her Illustrated Compendium of Materia Medica. Such works are often categorised as ‘natural history illustrations’ or ‘needlework patterns,’ yet this study argues that they represent the systematic observation and understanding of the vast natural world beyond the ‘garden’ by educated women of the literati class. Zhou Xi’s paintings not only accurately depict the medicinal forms of plants but also embody a distinct feminine visual logic in her composition, colouring, and brushwork. This study explores how these women engaged in contemporary knowledge production through painting, synthesising the traditional spirit of ‘investigating things’ with a distinctly feminine concern for life and health. Beyond the male-dominated realms of Confucianism and medicine, they constructed a visual ‘ladies’ botany’ embedded within the visual arts.

Han Li, Hebei University of Science and Technology

Fluid Gender: The Cross-bodily Practice of Cyborg Subjectivity in group live streaming

Digital technology has given rise to a new model of community interaction, group live streaming, and has also provided a revolutionary cyberspace for the exhibition and reconstruction of gender identity. The article takes the concept of “cyborg” theory as the core framework and deeply analyzes the mobility of gender identity in the practice of group live streaming.

Traditional gender studies often adhere to the binary boundaries of physical bodies. The article argues that the anchors in group live streaming have constructed a decentralized and multi interwoven “cross-body” network through technical interfaces (beauty filters, virtual avatars, voice changers), character scripts, and real-time interaction with viewers/teammates. In this network, gender is no longer a fixed biological attribute, but has become a controllable, spliced, and dynamically adjustable cybernetic performance. The anchor strategically combines symbolic elements to create a “digital body” that transcends individual physical limitations, thereby achieving the flow and crossing of gender representation.

The study reveals the dual aspects of cross-body sexual practice through the case of group live streaming: It is not only an active survival strategy and self-empowerment for anchors in the digital economy but also carries the risk of being retrained by technological logic and consumer desires. Finally, the article argues that group live streaming serves as a cutting-edge gender laboratory, not only challenging the inherent gender dualism but also profoundly reshaping the way subjectivity exists in the digital age, providing a new critical perspective on the relationship between technology, the body, and identity.

Zheng (Moham) Wang, Ziqing Zhao

Performing Femininity in Translation: Madame Song and the Rewriting of Chinese Women’s Aesthetic Agency

The career of Madame Song Huai-Kuei opens a vital question: how can Chinese women artists articulate modernity and aesthetic agency beyond Western feminist theory and the male-centred paradigms of Chinese contemporary art? Through the lens of Song’s life and work, this paper examines how femininity functions not as a constraint but as a strategic and performative method of self-fashioning in late-twentieth-century China.

Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of gender as performatively constituted through repetition, we test how this performativity takes on different meanings within Chinese cultural and historical frameworks where “the feminine” has often been enacted as an instrument of negotiation rather than negation. Yet, as Wu Hung and Gao Minglu have noted, gender remains peripheral in most art-historical narratives. Wu’s Transience (1999) and related writings recognised women such as Cai Jin and Yin Xiuzhen but treated them primarily through formalist innovation; Gao’s Total Modernity (2011) mapped avant-garde practices through heroic male subjectivity, leaving feminine aesthetics under-theorised.

Re-reading these gaps, we analyse Madame Song: Pioneering Art and Fashion in China (M+, 2023–24) as a curatorial case where a woman artist-entrepreneur transformed aesthetic labour into cultural diplomacy. Song’s trajectory—from Beijing to Sofia to Hong Kong—demonstrates how art, fashion, and industry became intertwined media of self-representation. Works such as Kuei Family Portrait (1960s) and Butterfly (1980s) perform gender not as identity but as a visual and curatorial method that mediates between tradition, cosmopolitanism, and embodiment.

The paper argues that Song’s practice exemplifies an aesthetic politics that turns beauty and commerce into acts of translation and agency. Reframing the feminine as an active construct of Chinese modernity, we propose that Madame Song’s legacy demands a more situated feminist historiography—one that understands aestheticism itself as a mode of political participation and cultural authorship in contemporary China.