Dr Luise Guest

Discourses of performance art (xingwei yishu) in China since its emergence in the post-Mao period have been overwhelmingly masculinist, and the representation of performance practice in exhibitions, festivals and in the scholarly literature has too often been dominated by male artists. In some ways this is surprising, given the presence of Yingmei Duan and Zhang Binbin in the significant “East Village” artists’ enclave in the 1990s, and Xiao Lu’s contentious (and still contested) action in firing a gun at her installation at the opening of the China/Avant-garde exhibition in Beijing in 1989. However, for myriad reasons, including the persistent patriarchy of the Chinese artworld, more attention has been paid to their male peers of the emergent avant-garde. This paper examines the performance practices of four women through lenses of gender, feminism and “Chineseness”. The work of Xiao Lu, Li Xinmo, Xie Rong and Cao Yu, and their use of fluids including ink, breast milk and menstrual blood in often transgressive embodied performances, are positioned as counter-patriarchal demonstrations of female experience. They may be understood as an intervention into discourses that have hitherto tended to marginalise the contributions of women artists to the development of xingwei yishu in China.

Huixian Dong, Arizona State University

Chinese women artists have faced more obstacles to raising art world profiles than men artists. Chinese women artists are less likely to be selected for major international exhibitions. One example was the Guggenheim Museum (NYC) show in 2017, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, which only presented eight women out of seventy-one selected artists. Meanwhile, less than fifteen percent of solo exhibitions are promoting women artists between the year 2014 to 2021 in China.

What obstacles have prevented Chinese women artists from pursuing art careers? Why does feminist art succeed in western countries but fail in China?

This study explores the contemporary Chinese woman artist community and the tension in this community between local and global, between history and contemporary, between male artists and female artists, and between the authorities and activists. It adopts cross-culture methodologies to examine the differences between western women artists and Chinese women artists. It explores the collaborations between Chinese women artists and iconic feminist artist-activists Judy Chicago and Betsy Damon in the 1990s. This study tells many stories in the community of Chinese women artists or a community story with many layers.

Louise Anne M. Salas, University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau

This presentation reflects on ‘movements’ and its resonance to the work of women artists in the Philippines who were active from 1970-2000. Reflecting on the profound sociopolitical upheavals and women’s movements which shaped the works of artists during the period, this discussion will focus on visual artists Brenda Fajardo (b. 1940), Anna Fer (1941), Julie Lluch (1946), and Imelda Cajipe Endaya (b. 1949). As a group, they founded KASIBULAN (Kababaihan sa Sining at Bagong Sibol na Kamalayan or Women in Art and Emerging Consciousness) in 1989, a women’s collective with feminist inclinations.

This presentation also tackles how the women artists have been at the forefront of expanding parameters through their works and multi-faceted practices that are tied to advocacy, discourse and pedagogy, outreach, and collectivity. As a metaphor for the passage of time, I attempt to explore ‘movement’ as an allusion to contemporaneity. Implicated in it are the forces which enabled art to change dramatically, especially in the last decades of the 20th century, resisting Eurocentric views of art. As a palpable imagery in the artists’ works, ‘movement’ also evokes the displacement or exodus of people from their native land and the massive feminisation of labour migration in the 1980s.

​

​