As the globalization of the Chinese art industry has taken off in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the work of female Chinese artists still exists as a rare “commodity” in which their marginalized identities are often brought to the forefront of their works. On the global stage, Chinese women artists actively resist this overarching emphasis on their female identity and purported feminism in their work as a reductive activity that may obscure the underlying messages that they aim to convey. Discourse on deeper social and historical perspectives relating to the spaces available to Chinese women would provide crucial context into the development of a female expressive strategy in Chinese art. This paper focuses on the early performance works of Kan Xuan and He Chengyao, Kan Xuan, Ai! (1999) and Opening the Great Wall (2001) respectively. Presenting various degrees of explicit attachment to their female identities in their works, both Kan Xuan and He Chengyao use the artist’s body to subvert societal conventions within the public sphere. Situating these artists in the historical context of Chinese feminism, Chinese women never had the chance to shape their own voice because it was coopted by the communist regime. Thus, the way that Kan Xuan and He Chengyao express subjectivity and agency may not exist for the sole purpose of enhancing women’s rights, but they are inherently feminist performances as they assert their individual identity within a context that has especially precluded selfhood for women.

First, the context of the women’s rights movement in China is crucial to understanding why the works of these female artists from late 20th century China don’t fit within the traditional framework of feminism that a Western audience may naturally attach. Chinese society is built upon a Confucian structure that adheres to patriarchal values, thereby rendering the artistic representation of women as an activity that should “confine to traditional…male expectations” (Leng Teo 7). Specifically, these values depict female bodies as submissive, reserved, and domestic. Although Western ideologies of feminism were introduced to China in the early 20th century, they failed to be disseminated due to the beginning of Mao’s regime (Merlin). Instead, the supposed equality of women’s conditions in China today has been widely attributed to Mao, who emancipated women through the slogan “Women can hold up half the sky” (Andrews 19). During the Cultural Revolution, the state was motivated by a desire for manpower and used women’s rights as propaganda for a larger workforce and increased economic production. The resulting “pictorial idealization” of working women appeared in images like Pan Jiajun’s I am Petrel (1972) (Andrews 40). Despite claims of state-supported equality for women, patriarchal social norms continue to remain engrained within Chinese society and inhibit the development of individual self-worth for women.

The end of the 20th century imported Western feminist ideologies back into the country, but Chinese women had never secured an official movement to liberate themselves from societal pressures and conventions. This offers a nuanced context for women in China, who have been misled by claims of equality despite unchanged conditions. As Chinese sculpture artist Xiang Jing describes: “On the one hand, women enjoy the conditions or opportunities that other people fought for, but on the other hand, the values that we subscribe to still discriminate against women” (Merlin). This Chinese sociohistorical context is what makes “feminism” too monolithic of an interpretation for women artists in China, and the root of why these artists often “avoided a feminist stance, though in truth [they] confront gender roles” (Andrews 56). The idealization of women in the Cultural Revolution images has complicated the self-perception of female identity, influencing contemporary women artists to prioritize personal individuality as a theme.

Fig. 1: Video still of Kan Xuan running through the Beijing subway.
Kan, Xuan. Kan Xuan! Ai! 1999. Performance Video. M+.

Kan Xuan’s desperate search for herself in Kan Xuan! Ai! (1999) serves as a lens through which we can examine the reframing of personal identity in modern spaces by Chinese female artists in post-revolutionary China. It is a video installation filmed in the Beijing subway station, one of Beijing’s largest underground railway interchanges. The video follows her running through an underground passage, going against the rush-hour crowd as she calls her own name. Heads turn in the background, while Kan Xuan waves her arms and weaves between people in search of herself. More than just being a crowded space, the subway setting is also a regulated space with clear conventions of which way to go for the sake of efficiency. Since everybody is going in the same direction, she immediately stands out as an outsider at the beginning of the video by going against the established traffic. Going against directional cues, she emphasizes emotions of disconcertion and a search for something different from everyone else within the urban space. Her opposing movement subverts public norms and even disrupts other bodies around her, as they also turn to examine her actions. Kan Xuan’s video “reflect[s] contemporary realities in China, but…also question these realities” (Low 46). This is a subtle expressive strategy that distances her artwork from explicit political messaging.

Despite the lack of overtly feminist messages, the emphasis on personal experience reflects Kan Xuan’s desire to pursue an individual freedom in an environment that suppresses self-definition. These elements are emphasized through the dual-camera perspective drawing viewers into her personal subjectivity, deviating from the conventional single fixed lens of the 1990s (Wu 233). Roughly halfway into the 2-minute video, the perspective changes and we no longer see Kan Xuan— instead, we see through her. As she shifts from a third-person to a first-person perspective, viewers witness the world through her eyes, capturing the hectic nature of navigating crowded urban spaces. One can imagine that they are running through the crowd themselves. The viewers experience feelings of intimacy with the overall narrative and social identity that Kan Xuan has constructed. Kan Xuan is not just passively being looked at by society; she is also the one actively sharing her perception of the world. Her actions subvert Chinese social constructs of adhering to the collective norm.

Fig. 2: He Chengyao walking on the Great Wall during H.A. Schult’s Trash Army installation. He, Chengyao. Opening the Great Wall. 2001. Performance Photograph. HA Schult.

 

On the other hand, He Chengyao’s Opening the Great Wall (2001) is a performance piece on the Great Wall documented in the form of published reporter photographs, which were taken as her partially undressed body diverted media attention away from German artist H.A. Schult’s environmental installation taking place at the same site. Her photographed performance resulted in extensive criticism and popular discourse regarding the questionable artistic value of the public display of her own nude female body. This criticism seemed to inherently be tied to her female identity, as Ma Liuming had also walked across the Great Wall with his male genitalia exposed in his 1998 performance with much less condemnation (Welland 208). Given the central presence of nudity and the female body in the reception of her performance, a traditional feminist meaning regarding the opposition to bodily censorship is more easily attached to the work compared to Kan Xuan’s video. Further emphasized by the media attention from news journals beyond the art sphere, a political message subverting bodily control is more explicit.

However, the work should not be interpreted solely in terms of its political message. While the sociopolitical message is relevant to “the overall context,… mostly her work is intensely personal” and closely reflects her complicated familial relationships (Tatlow). After giving birth to her at just 19 years old, He Chengyao’s mother “had no job, no money, no husband and three children,” which was considered a taboo lifestyle that drove her mother to mental illness from the societal pressure (Tatlow). Her mother would walk around topless in public, garnering unsolicited negative attention and judgment from the community. Since childhood, He carried the trauma and suffering relating to her mother’s nude exposure. This private, intensely personal family history leads to He’s engagement with the nude female body and her overcoming of the vulnerability she attaches to it. While access to her Opening the Great Wall performance is primarily circulated through photographs, her expression and confident gesture in the photo clearly express her lack of shame and embarrassment as she goes against societal pressures in a public space. Her gaze more directly confronts the camera compared to Kan Xuan, but her lack of apology for disrupting the oppressive legacies of control governing her body in the public space around her is an element consistent with Kan Xuan’s Kan Xuan! Ai!. Both artists prioritize how their works are a cathartic personal experience based on their backgrounds, rather than their role as part of a larger feminist movement. Although female artists Kan Xuan and He Chengyao possess reluctance to tie back to the feminist movement, it is still reasonable to consider their performances as feminist voices in a Chinese context, given the lack of individual freedom historically and currently experienced by women.

In conclusion, both Kan Xuan! Ai! and Opening the Great Wall are performances that provide these artists with the agency to defy their social role of staying hidden and covered, inevitably offering a distinct feminist overtone relating to China’s past. Each artist’s pronounced strategy of going against the crowd contributes to the construction of a hybrid female identity that goes against conventional forms of control. While not directly advocating for feminism, these works influence the new generation of women artists by encouraging the representation of women’s complex emotions and alternative subjectivities.