Canadian Sexyundressedsingers Sexuality Youtube Th 1 Sexy Undressed Singers Reclaiming their Bodies: Contemporary Chinese Women Artists

Reclaiming their Bodies: Contemporary Chinese Women Artists

Roy Forward

How have Chinese female artists been dealing with the female nude?  Have they reclaimed women’s bodies from the male gaze?  Have they presented women’s bodies from women’s points of view, and women as active on their own behalf and in charge of their own lives?  To find out we shall look at work by sixty-seven contemporary Chinese female artists, ranging in age in 2006 from 26 to 73 and with a mean age of 41.1 years, and including possibly three in Hong Kong, three in Taiwan, and ten in Amsterdam, Australia, Berlin, Japan, London, Los Angeles, New York, Singapore, and South Korea (see Appendix).

We do have to watch out for artists saying they are female when they are not, just as non-Aboriginal artists in Australia have posed as Aboriginal; and with Victoria Lu calling herself ‘Mister Lu,’  and Jiang Congyi signing herself ‘Mr. Jiang Congyi,’  we can keep our eyes open for the opposite as well.

‘Women reclaiming their bodies’ is now mainly an advertising catchphrase used by commercial tattooists, but it began life as a slogan of 1970s feminists working to end the patriarchal subordination of women, epitomised in the Western art tradition of the female nude as a passive and available sex object for heterosexual men, who dismembered it and fetishised its sexual bits, and polarised women/body/nature and men/mind/culture.   As Lisa Tickner wrote at the time, ‘the colonized territory must be reclaimed from masculine fantasy, the “lost” aspects of female body experience authenticated and re-integrated in opposition to its more familiar and seductive artistic role as raw material for the men.’   Chinese artists (including women such as Pan Yuliang, 1895–1977 ) inherited that tradition when they saw reproductions or went overseas to study, they perpetuated it in much of their work in the first half of the twentieth century, including in erotic posters of the 1920s (female life models were officially used in China for the first time in Shanghai in 1920 by Liu Haisu, 1896–1994), and revived it in the China Nude Art exhibition in 1988.

Chinese artists are also heirs to long traditions of Confucianism, which subordinated women to men and confined them to their domestic roles as daughters, wives and mothers; and of Buddhism: the occasional Indian-influenced sensuous stone bodhisattva might appear in the Tang dynasty, but it was never naked like some Indian counterparts.   Most have also experienced the Communists’ suppression of anything to do with sex as a distraction from Party dictatorship and industrial and agricultural work and as a sign of feudal or bourgeois decadence.  Chinese who are traditional Muslims include women who reclaim their bodies from unwanted male attention by wearing protective clothing.

Although Neolithic clay ‘Venus’ figures have been found in Liaoning,  and there must have been many ancient images of the fertility or earth goddess Hu Tu,  the most extensive portrayal of the naked female body has been in erotic drawings, paintings, ceramics, ivories etc, including in the kind of Ming dynasty erotic paintings reproduced in Michel Beurdeley, ed., The Clouds and Rain: The Art of Love in China, 1969, and in Robert Hans van Gulik, Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period, 2 volumes, 2004.  Even though such work was mainly by and for men, it also included ‘pillow books’ for the sexual education of brides, and it does usually show women taking an active part in the sexual pleasuring of themselves and their partners; but, as in the West, erotica or pornography is not included in art textbooks and is not usually on display, so that many female artists remain unaware of it: it is only selected visitors to the Unique Hill Studio, Shanghai, for instance, who are ushered into a locked room containing such work.  Around 2000 the Chinese female artist Zhang O found a book of Ming dynasty erotic paintings in London:

Seeing these pictures, I was at first dumbfounded and almost burst into tears.  The images are incredibly beautiful and graceful, as well as seductive.  Their esoteric narration is meaningful and mystical.  I became proud of this artistic heritage and being Chinese.  But Chinese living in China are not able to see these images because of government policy; this made me want to do something with this theme all the more.  I wanted to translate these pictures into a contemporary setting, combining them with my interpretation, injecting them with feelings.  I produced slides of the paintings and then projected them onto a model seated in a bathtub.

Female nudes reappeared in the Stars Group’s first exhibition in Beihai Park in Beijing in 1979, and in Yuan Yunsheng’s Water splashing festival mural at Beijing airport in the same year (it has 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.
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