Introduction: Why (En)Gender Women's Art?

Contemporary Chinese art since the 1990s has established an international reputation and gained market recognition. Its connection to the world involves multifaceted interactions: modes of art production against China's social-political history, discursive negotiation with English-language art criticism, spatial navigation across exhibition geographies, and capital circulation via the international marketplace. The continuing correspondence between the production of Chinese art and its international recognition creates a transnational flow across the boundaries between the local and the global. In Paul Gladston's (2014: 520) words,

Chinese contemporary art can therefore be interpreted not only as an index of China's recent entry into globalized modernity but also as a focus for localized reassertions of cultural identity. … Any searching analysis of contemporary Chinese art must therefore take into account its significance both in relation to established modernist/postmodernist artistic practice and resistant expression of cultural Chineseness.

For instance the exhibition Post-89 Chinese New Art held in Hong Kong and first-time participation in the Venice Biennale, both in 1993, marked a significant moment in the history of Chinese contemporary art. The transformation featured a stylistic departure from early modernist avant-garde experiments to a postmodern practice of fragmentation and "mix and match." Trendy works of political pop and cynical realism attracted critical attention as well as market interest. The transnational encounter that highlighted the emergence of Chinese art onto the world stage also posed challenges, however. Navigations between center and periphery, between Chinese works and Western discourses, and between official and independent venues became important concerns.

As artists, curators, and critics engaged closely in furthering the conception and market recognition of Chinese contemporary art, one rarely encountered or read about art produced by women, as if it was too marginal, too far beyond perceived borders, to merit prolonged study. The lack of public attention to women's art, both in and outside China, we argue, does not imply that the art was trivial or scarce but, rather, that the woman artist was too often viewed primarily as secondary to her male counterpart and dependent on male-led art movements, reflecting women's social position in the gender hierarchy. The neglect and ignorance cannot erase the fact that women artists and their diversified artworks contributed to the formation of Chinese contemporary art from its very beginning. Shen Yuan's installation work Fish Bed (1989), for instance, spoke critically to the repressive social-political condition of post-1989 China.¹ Hou Wenyi's installation Untitled (1985) initiated "new figurative art."² Huang Yali's sculpture of abstraction, Solemn and Quiet Series (1986), presented a dialogue between the traditional and the contemporary.³ The works by women artists were avant-garde in conception and experimental in form but not yet the subject of scholarship from the perspective of gender.

If this handful of examples hardly speaks for women's art, Xiao Lu's 1989 performance and installation art, Dialogue, announced an undeniable presence of women and art in the male-dominated art scenes. On February 5, 1989, two hours after the China/Avant-Garde exhibition opened at the National Art Museum in Beijing, Xiao Lu fired two bullets into her installation Dialogue with a handgun. The alarming gunshots and the shocking performance, viewed then as a provocative political act, could be interpreted today as a female outcry of unspeakable sexual harassment through the medium of performance art.⁴ The gunshot, in a sense, announced the closure of the China/Avant-Garde exhibition in 1989; it also signaled the conspicuous emergence of women's art. A careful examination of artworks by women artists in those early days shows that the artists pursued endeavors diverse in subject matter and innovative in visual form—which could variously take up political, artistic, and gender identity. As a result, art historians, exhibition curators, and the general public felt uncertain about what language to use, what descriptive rhetoric, when gender difference and female perspective were only then coming to terms.

A number of questions came to the fore: Why the absence of public attention in the presence of excellent artwork by women? Why...