INTRODCTION
Authentic Voices: Feminism’s Coming of Age in China
By Didi Kirsten Tatlow
The gunshots that smacked through the air at the National Art Museum of China in February 1989 didn’t just shatter the silence in the gallery.
Fired by 26-year-old Xiao Lu at her own work, an installation called “Dialogue” that offered a disappointed, even cynical view of romantic love, the two shots also fractured a larger silence surrounding women’s lives in China’s insistently patriarchal culture.
Xiao Lu’s shots on a cold, Beijing winter morning of Feb. 5th, 1989, did nothing less than launch a new era in the century-old story of modern Chinese feminism. A far more impatient, outspoken, angrier era, one that continues to this day in the work of younger women, that began to be recorded in detail, in pain and joy, in the studios of dozens of Chinese female artists around that time. These works are a giant repository of meaning; for art is, of course, a mirror of society, expressing and recording truths hard to express in public or within family and work circles. Many of the art works are shown for the first time, in Chinese and English, here in this book.
* * *
Most of my life has been lived in the different parts of China; 22 years in my birthplace of Hong Kong, 17 years in Beijing, and about half a year in Tainan and Taibei, on the island of Taiwan. From 2003 to 2017 worked as a journalist based in Beijing, first for the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong and, from 2010, for the International Herald Tribune and New York Times. In 2017 l left China for my adopted home of Berlin, Germany.
Over those 14 years I watched and reported on development of Chinese feminism. On domestic violence, education and work, art and marriage, gendered cultural traditions and practices and how women dealt with it all. I also reported more generally and very widely, about politics, culture, the resurgence of Buddhist and Daoist hermits, about literature and serial murder, about Singles Day, security in China’s courts, and the health-care system. And the more I wrote, the more it became clear how gender informed so many interests and determined so many fates. It was key to explaining world around us, and most people overlooked it entirely. As the saying goes, “fish didn’t discover water” – one of the most obvious and important issues was almost entirely overlooked. In China, many people thought the topic had been dealt with. The truth was different.
* * *
But let us return to that cold day in February 1989.
“Dialogue” consisted of two telephone boxes. Inside one stood a woman, inside the other a man. Between them on a table was a red telephone. The woman and man were trying to talk but the telephone was pointedly off the hook. Behind the telephone was a mirror, so when Xiao Lu positioned herself in front of the installation and raised her gun to shoot, she could see herself in the reflection. In a way, she was shooting herself.
It was all taking place at “1989 China/Avant-garde Art”, the first official contemporary art show in Beijing since the death of Mao Zedong, 13 years previously, in 1976.
Young, ambitious and hurting, Xiao Lu wanted to make a statement no one could ignore. Shortly after 11 o’clock that morning, she drew the gun she had borrowed the day before from a friend and pulled the trigger, literally breaking a “Dialogue”. Her action instantly transformed the installation into a piece of performance art, and it stunned China’s art word, alarming the authorities who rushed to close the show which had become a security risk.
Xiao Lu and a fellow male artist, lang Song, who would later become her romantic partner, were detained and interrogated for several days before being released. She told the police she had shot in a state of emotional confusion, that her motives were personal. Perhaps gender protest lay behind her audacity though it wasn’t well thought-out at the time; ironically, Mr. Tang got much of the public credit.
* * *
Xiao Lu would only speak of her motivation in detail about two decades later, offering an interpretation in a book also called “Dialogue”, and in many interviews that I conducted with her over the years.
As a teenager she had been raped by an older, artist friend of her father’s. Relations with the opposite sex, the 26-year-old was deciding, were trouble. Love was a source of pain and the world was especially hard for women.
It wasn’t easy being a female artist. Somehow, even well connected females like Xiao Lu, who came from an artistic family, weren’t doing as well as their male counterparts. Somehow, male artists were finding it easier to be collected and exhibited, heard and respected.
In retrospect her shots can be understood as an early #Me Too moment decades ahead of its time, a shout against the sexual abuse by the powerful of the vulnerable. That hashtag would go around the world in 2017 as women spoke up following the revelations about sexual abuse by the powerful Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein, and many, many others.
Ms. Xiao’s audacity was well-timed, even if she didn’t perhaps quite know it then. Throughout the 1980s ideas had flowed into China from the rest of the world after decades of isolation. Deng Xiaoping was telling people, “to get rich is glorious”. By 1989, China was buzzing economically and intellectually.
* * *
Tong Yujie, a curator from Xian, the ancient imperial capital of China, watched as all this unfolded. In 2002 she began gathering examples of the works of female artists that today are in this book, eventually making it a virtual, portable art gallery.
“A book is an art gallery too”, Tong Yujie said, in one of many interviews I conducted with her after our first meeting in 2012.
“Feminist art is about excavating the personal history of women’s traumatic past ( 女性受伤害个体过往的历史），and inserting the truth into public images，” she said.
“This book introduces Chinese feminism as a subject and motivation of artists’ creation for the pretty much the first time in China’s thousands years of history,” she said. “The agenda of Chinese feminist art politics is the creation of self-value, and we need to record it.”
Ms. Tong hadn’t always been part of the art world. As is common among women, especially those who marry and have children, her life contains discontinuity and change, ups and downs – professionally and personally – including ten years off paid work to raise twin sons at home. Then the daunting challenge of reentering professional circles as a middle-aged woman whose C.V. was “empty” for a decade.
Like this very book, which connects the personal and political, Ms. Tong crossed disciplinary boundaries. At university in the 1980s she majored in classical Chinese, only to find her attention increasingly drawn toward women’s rights as she read deeply into China’s literary history. She was spurred, she said, by horror at the casual, systematic cruelty she encountered in the texts.
“The more I read into the past, the more I realized how vast was the violence toward women in history,” she said over lunch in a Japanese restaurant in Beijing in November 2016, as an icy wind from Mongolia swept the capitals smoggy skies clean.
She singled out the Southern Song dynasty general Yang Zheng, famous for having those of his concubines whose music displeased him beaten to death, then skinned and hung on a wall. Twenty concubines were executed in this way, their skins watered as they hung on the wall to create what the general found was a pleasingly colorful effect. As a result, he called the killings “painting”. Surely, violence permeated all history, but that was just the point, she felt.
“ I thought, you can’t separate it from history, from power. From who had power. And therefore from politics. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t ignore it. I had to do something,” Ms. Tong said.
This book is the result of Tong Yujie’s tremendous determination to reflect on a giant, fundamental and often unseen reality that runs like an underground river through life – the one experienced by Chinese women.
* * *
Ms. Tong faced many challenges as a rare female critic interested in feminist art. There was the indifference, even hostility, from the male-dominated arts establishment.
There was a further, grave challenge: Some of the artists whose works address feminist issues didn’t – and still don’t – want to be seen as feminist artists. Sadly, one female artist demanded her work be withdrawn from this book. Others didn’t even make it in.
This reluctance arises from a complicated mixture of motives, including a desire not to be pigeonholed, fear of professional ostracism in art academies, being shut out of a potentially lucrative art market, and of the social stigma associated with being a “feminist” in China, a “nüquan zhuyizhe”.
“We can’t publicly talk about ‘feminist art,’ only ‘female art,” said Ms. Tong, highlighting the distinction between feminist art and female (or feminine) art, the ater known as nuxing yishu, a softer term that came into vogue in the 1990s. It was a more “feminine” style that curators and the public were comfortable with. it fited better with their image of women as gentle and passive creatures fixated on beauly.
And it masqueraded as feminism.
These and other factors, the money being a key one, led to a complex and socially fraught situation that required boldness to persist within. “I’s a very serious issue, that many female artists say what they are doing is not feminist art. They’re afraid.” Ms. Tong said.
“Ninety-nine percent of art curators are male. And they want to get exhibitions. So they must please these male curators and cannot be seen to be challenging the masculinist power of society. This is a tragedy for Chinese feminists,” she said.
Perhaps confirming her point about the gendered nature of the Chinese art scene, a landmark retrospective of Chinese art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, “Art and China after 1989”, included only 9 females among 71 artists or groups on show. Feminist art was represented in an exhibition subtitled “Theater of the World”. Notably, however, Xiao Lu was included in the show. So much of the work in this book, created slowly, in fits and starts throughout the 1990s to this day, has never been presented, and the issues it touches from a feminist perspective – violence, environmental degradation, objectification, sex work, childbearing – are pressing.
* * *
I first met Ms. Tong in March 2012 at an exhibition in Beijing’s 798 arts distric. “Bald Girls” was curated by Xu Juan, a Frankfurt-based gallery owner. In a room toward the back of the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Xiao Lu and two other performance artists, Li Xinmo and Lan Jiny, drained glasses of red wine before shattering them on the floor, then took turns to shave off each other’s hair to become bald as Buddhist nuns in protest at stifling gender norms. The crowd around us gasped as their locks fell away in thick, foot-long, black swathes.
It was another moment when something – not just a work of art, but a statement of courage and a spirit of defiance – was born.
* * *
For years, I worked to record that courage, in dozens of reports. People were growing richer, but women were living amid a commercial and traditional onslaught of vast proportions, one that was enticing them to sell their bodies, to become housewives, to marry for money and not for affection (i’d rather cry in the back of a BMW than laugh on the back of a bicycle” was one phrase spoken by a young woman on national TV that led to soul-searching in the country.)
Others were slowly thinking their way out of the expectations society placed on them and working on shaping new identities. I reported that too – the fun-filled actions by women to use public toilets for men to highlight gender inequality in basic social services.
But if stories were important, my connection to China was far more personal than that of most foreign reporters, and it sensitized me to the realities in a particular way. It had begun far earlier, during the Cultural Revolution, in Hong Kong.
Living in Hong Kong, China was closed to us. Bizarrely, it was a vast unknown land north of the land border at Lowu in Hong Kong. So near and yet so far – we knew it was there, vast, but barely recognized.
Intrigued, bored with the comforts of colonial Hong Kong, in 1984, three teenage schoolchildren – my brother, a friend and I – boarded a dark green train on the China side of the Lowu border and traveled to Guangzhou. Its train station in those days was tiny – a platform with an exit like a rural train station. That led to a square, and from there, across town, the Pearl River where vegetation floated down toward Hong Kong. In Guangzhou we bought tickets in Cantonese and changed for another train headed to Xian, where Ms. Tong, unbeknownst to me at the time, was studying classical Chinese literature at university.
It was late winter. Guangdong had been warm, as usual, but we were dressed inadequately for the north and continental inland and froze in our thin jeans, capitalist-style clothing that barely existed in China then. On the train to Xian a man in thicky padded, blue cotton trousers plucked at my denim legs and shook his head: “No good!”
After a mostly sleepless night on the train, loudspeakers shouted music and speeches at dawn and we made for the couplings like hundreds of others, dodging streams of white foam in an icy wind as teeth were brushed en masse between carriages, the only available space.
In Xian, we visited the soldiers of the first Qin emperor’s Terracotta Army still being dug out of the dry, brown ground. Also in the city, though our paths did not cross, Ms. Tong was delving into literary accounts of the fate of women and realizing the profundity of the issue. In Xian someone stole my watch from the hotel room; later, leaving China at the Hong Kong border I would be interrogated by army guards about the watch, which I had declared on my entry form. I didn’t dare say where or when exactly it had disappeared, for fear of getting the unknown thief into serious trouble. I didn’t care much about the watch. I could get another one. A watch was truly useful, and I didn’t blame a chamber maid for taking it. After an hour of pleading ignorance I was let go and finally made it back into Hong Kong, my nerves shaken.
After Xian we continued on to Beijing. There, in a capital where the streets were empty of cars but nonetheless vast, we saw how the windows of a public bus exploded from the pressure of passengers crowded inside raining diamonds onto Chang’an Avenue. We walked until our feet ached in black cotton shoes along giant, car-free avenues and in grey brick hutongs. We constantly missed dinner, unused to eating as early as 5.30, and in a city with almost no restaurants. As foreigners we could go to the Beijing Hotel for dinner. We did that quite often.
We returned to Hong Kong, traveling south via the major railway junction of Zhengzhou, where a woman with loose eggs in her bicycle basket stared at us as she cycled by and crashed into another cyclist, shattering a dozen precious eggs lying loose in her bicycle basket. They formed a gluey yellow puddle on the street.
All the time, not too far away on our journey south, Xiao Lu was studying art in her hometown of Hangzhou at the college that would later become the China Academy of Art.
Slowly, the threads of much later work were coming together through time, space, and individual story.
* * *
I returned to Beijing after finishing school in Hong Kong the following year, in 1985, to study Putonghua, a different language from the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong. And again in January 1990 as a student of Chinese and Politics at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Beijing had changed, and I ran into my own trouble.
Stranded downtown after a party on a sub-zero night, no transport available back to the university suburbs in Haidian district, a girlfriend and I accepted an invitation from a man we knew a little to stay over in his apartment. The night ended in disaster when, drunk, he picked me up from the sofa where I was sleeping with my friend, carried me to his bedroom and raped me. “Who do you think you are!” my friend shouted in anger as he whisked away his prey.
Of course, I thought of escape strategies. Running to the bathroom and locking myself in. But he was violent, with a powerful grip, and would break down the door, I guessed, my mind assessing physical damage and risk at lightning speed. Even if we got away, where would we go? It was below zero degrees outside. My friend was in the living room, equally vulnerable. I worried he’d go after her if I got away.
The next day I saw my vest was torn and my legs were bruised. I was in shock: Large parts of the night had disappeared from my memory. It took years to recover my emotional and physical equilibrium, even to put a name to what had happened. But when I did, I had changed. I understood the importance for women of being able to live their lives with self-respect and the strength that comes from confidence and, yes, anger; that this empowerment could shake off the patriarchy we had all been raised in that had always and was still creating so many victims. Years before the #Me Too movement swept the world with its sad record of daily sexual abuse, I too, like Ms. Tong, like Xiao Lu and so many others, was “there”. I knew. And so did they.
* * *
Back in China in 2003, now happily married and a mother of two adored children, wherever I could | focused on women in my reporting and made them the subjects, not objects, of my stories. I chased down stories that my fellow correspondents consistently overlooked – about female lawyers, artists and scholars, doctors, mothers and ayis, whose voices went largely unheard within the narrative of international journalism. I sought out female experts for comment on national affairs, since so few did, and I wanted to hear their thoughts judging them often more relevant and practical than those of their male counterparts who had often risen easily, surfing on a wave of “normalcy” that women were pretty much excluded from. The silence of colleagues about gender issues, their failure to give voice to women, only made me more determined to highlight the feminist angle in mainstream issues.
I met feminists in their law offices, their homes, over tea and for dinner. Women like the charismatic lawyer Guo Jianmei. Inspired by the 1995 United Nations Women’s Conference in Beijing -I’d attended it as a young reporter for the Eastern Express newspaper of Hong Kong, part of the mighty, Chinese-language Oriental Daily News group – Ms. Guo set up a firm shortly after the meeting, offering legal advice to women suffering violent marriages, who couldn’t inherit land due to gender prejudice, who were being denied pensions or being laid off earlier than men thereby losing both salary and pension. There were a great number of women in all three categories.
Together with the quietly-spoken Feng Yuan, Ms. Guo had lobbied for years to get a bizarre law struck off the books: Men who raped girls under 14, China’s age of sexual consent, were sentenced more lightly than those who raped girls over 14. This law had popped up suddenly, without anyone really knowing how, in the 1990s, and supposedly was aimed at shielding girls under 14 from the “shame” of being raped by defining the act as one of “whoring” (on the part of the men), something somehow less bad than rape. It made no sense to anyone who looked at it critically, and eventually, to many people’s relief, it was struck off. It was a good moment, and I reported that too.
Other pressing issues: the decades-long struggle by feminists to enact a law banning domestic violence. As late as 2014 China had no such law. I got to know Kim Lee, a United States citizen married to a Chinese English-teaching celebrity, “Crazy English” Li Yang, who had dared to go public on social media in 2011 after Mr. Li beat her. Her cause drew wide social attention and empowered many women and children of violence to speak out, hastening the passage of the law against domestic violence.
I wrote about, and won a prize, for how young Chinese women had to score higher in university entrance examinations to get into the same college courses as men. About Li Yan, a woman who killed her husband who had abused her horribly and was sentenced to die for it – until the Supreme Court in Beijing ordered a retrial and her sentence was commuted to 10 years in prison since she was suffering from “battered wife syndrome.” During that reporting, I also entered a Chinese court room for the first time to witness a sensitive trial, and was struck by how difficult it was for not just the defendants’ family, but also the court officials, to protect themselves and the justice system. The scene was little short of anarchy, and I was myself physically attacked by members of the family of the dead man who denied the violence he had inflicted on his wife and others, or that he had contributed to his own death in this way.
And in March 2012, I spoke at an academic symposium as part of the “Bald Girls” event, with Ms. Tong. By then, her interests had moved beyond feminist art into postfeminist art, or as she put it: “Feminist art first, then lesbian art. Queer art. All the voices that are saying, ‘Hey, look, I’m different. I’m telling a different story'”. After more than three decades of economic growth and social change, young Chinese especially were ready for a nuanced, differentiated encounter with identity and gender, but the road was still to prove very hard.
* * *
The art in this book tells that “different story.” It is a wide-ranging story of history, freedom, love, sexuality, exploitation, environment, birthing, language, labor, desire, marriage, mothers and daughters, and so much more. It is that no-longer-so-quiet underground river of lived life that has flowed for so long, and now urgently wants to join the mainstream.
Some works explore the impact of patriarchy on the environment, such as Huang Ying’s “Wonderland” series of digital photographs that juxtapose powerful symbols – esthetically beautiful, traditionally carved furniture – with women’s bare bodies and melting ice, as if to say, “we too are helpless here”, a feminist critique of environmental collapse.
In “Pregnancy is Art”, Feng Jiali shows the female body as a patriarchal birthing vessel – written on the artist’s own big belly are the Chinese words for iron, calcium and other trace elements a woman’s relatives, probably on her husband’s side, will ensure she ingests in order to produce a healthy child.
There was one story that was especially powerful for me, perhaps because it looked at a relationship that is rarely explored in public in such a tough society- that between mothers and daughters. And what a tale is “Mother and Me”, by He Chengyao, a performance and body artist from Sichuan province in China’s southwest.
One day in late 2014, I visited Ms. He in her home, a metal Quonset hut on the outskirts of Beijing beneath an electrical high-wire line. Inside the front door an olive cotton quilt kept the simple space warm. An open-plan kitchen joined to a living and work area, from which a bedroom was separated by just a thin wall. Ms. He’s recent work, a paper scroll punctured with needle holes, like secret code, lay on a table below a window.
Pregnant with the artist and in love with the artist’s father but not married to him, in 1964, Ms. He’s mother was told by leaders at the embroidery factory in Sichuan where she worked that she had a choice: abort the baby or lose her job. Jobless, she gave birth to Ms. He at the age of 19.
Ostracized, by now a mother of three (she married Ms. He’s father,) the artist’s mother faltered emotionally. She tore off her clothes and walked the streets of her small town naked. Was she baring her body in an unconscious statement about the sexuality that led to her ostracism – the transgression of having had a baby outside of marriage, for having known sexual pleasure, for being a woman? Was she saying, “Here you are, you wanted to punish me for having a body, here it is”?
Neighbors, and men in military uniforms who were untrained in medicine (to this day Ms. He isn’t sure who they were,) took down the front door of the family home, tied her mother to it and administered “acupuncture”; in reality, stuck needles in her while she screamed in pain and fear. In reality, torture. The artist, aged just 5, saw all of it, and understood none of it.
From that trauma a painful, tender work grew: “99 Needles,” in which the artist punctures her own flesh with acupuncture needles in an attempt to take the pain onto herself and thereby connect physically and emotionally with her mother. In China’s contemporary art world, where there is no lack of showy canvases, the work stuns the viewer with its utter, personal honesty.
Ms. He recently abdicated from the world and moved to Myanmar to become a Buddhist nun.
A younger generation of women have connected to some of the performance techniques of the artists and are carrying on their work. And the artists themselves continue to deliver ideas. Now in her mid-50s, Ms. Xiao is still pushing boundaries. She broods over the “family” she never had, so in the performance art piece”Wedding”, 2009, she married herself. In “Polar”, 2016, she cut herself bloody trying to chisel her way out a room of ice. Today, she says: “Feminism is good for men, too”. For sure is that Chinese society has changed, mostly for the better, since 1989, when the shots rang out in a Beijing state museum.
Dec. 2017 in Berlin
Article published on “Chinese Feminist Art”
Chinese Feminist Art
Tong Yujie
Xi’ an Academy of Fine Arts Subject – Building Sponsored Program
Published by Today Art Museum 2018
Didi Kirsten Tatlow
Didi Kirsten Tatlow is a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she spent thirty-nine years there and in Beijing and Taiwan, including as a journalist for the Eastern Express, The Associated Press, the South China Morning Post and the New York Times. She also worked at German media in Berlin, including Die Welt and Deutsche Welle. She was a senior fellow for Asia at the German Council on Foreign Relations and a senior nonresident fellow at Projekt Sinopsis in Prague, Czechia. She has won many prizes for her work and in 2021 co-published a book, China’s Quest for Foreign Technology: Beyond Espionage. Today she works at Newsweek and lives in Germany with her family and a bulldog from Tongzhou county east of Beijing.
“In Art, a Strong Voice for Chinese Women” by New York Times in 2012
