Exhibition puts the spotlight on women artists from China
Updated: 2011-10-12 09:42
By Kelly Chung Dawson (China Daily)
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A historic all-female Chinese contemporary art exhibition in Philadelphia, United States, attempts to pay tribute to those who hold up Half the Sky, as the collection is titled. Hosted by Drexel University and co-curated with the National Art Museum of China (NAMC), the exhibition features more than 60 artworks by 22 female Chinese artists, including the internationally renowned Yin Xiuzhen, Cui Xiuwen and Cao Fei, among others.
Spanning the mediums of photography, painting, installation art, video and sculpture, the collection is on display at the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery at Drexel University through Nov 12.
The title of the exhibition refers to Mao Zedong's famous slogan, "Women hold up half the sky", popularized during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) in conjunction with a marriage law that banned polygamy and mandated that women should work in the fields as equals.
Fan Di'an, NAMC director, who worked closely with Drexel University's chair of visual studies Dr Joseph Gregory, to curate the collection, says:
"This exhibition is significant because it is the first time the National Art Museum of China has cooperated with a university in the US, and it's also the first survey-scale exhibition in the US honoring only Chinese female artists."
Gregory called the exhibition an "exercise in cultural exchange".
"The show demonstrates that there are a lot of female Chinese artists who should get more recognition for their achievements," he says. "It brings together for the first time a great many contemporary Chinese female artists to show the variety and aesthetic quality of their works."
O. Zhang, a featured artist, says she has been waiting for a long time for such a show.
"It's an honor to be included," she says.
The Chinese artists who have risen to international repute have been 90 percent male, says Richard Vine, senior editor of Art in America magazine and author of New China, New Art.
"Like many things in China, the art world has been primarily a boys club, for many of the same reasons it happens elsewhere - cultural inertia and habit," Vine says. "But it's changing dramatically now. More and more of the art students are women."
While not all of the art works address an overtly female perspective, Fan believes the subject of women's rights permeates the exhibition.
"Pre-1979, the country was working on the notion of the people," artist Bingyi says. "Community mattered more than the family or the woman, so it was a double problem. You couldn't be an individual, and couldn't focus on self-expression. But after 1979 things changed a lot, and the Internet has helped too. Now there's a strong need to say something, to express yourself and now you can. You can have an audience within your own country or in other countries, like here."
Artist O. Zhang echoes her thoughts.
"Females in the United States are very familiar with feminism and the concept of group power, but China doesn't have this idea of feminism," she says. "In China it's about individual power. The downside is that female artists do kind of struggle more than male artists. I understand that there are many artists who don't feel the need to address gender issues, but it's there. It's in China, it's in America; it's everywhere."
Terry O'Neill, a feminist attorney and president of the National Organization for Women, says she sees the collection as an attempt to handle gender in a non-overt way.
"This exhibition features female artists who are self-consciously female artists, but who are often leaving gender behind in their art. And they're expressing themselves as whole human beings."
The long reported imbalance between men and women in China is due to the high number of female babies abandoned as a result of the need for strong hands in the fields, artist Liu Liyun says. "But nowadays the cities are becoming bigger and bigger; they're eating the Earth. The farmers don't need the Earth anymore, so they're more comfortable having daughters now. Everything is changing."
Fan says, "All these women in the exhibition have experienced the social transformation in China, so they have gone through a significant journey from localness to the global stage.
"In this way their experiences and their art reflects both a social evolution and a cultural critique."
Vine believes that the collaboration of perspectives on the collection is noteworthy.
"One of the things that is interesting about this exhibition is that it's a partnership curatorial effort," he says "You have a Western perspective, and a Chinese perspective. They don't always match perfectly, but it's that very difference that's one of the most fascinating parts about the experience because it leads to all kinds of questions."