Bald Girls – Chain Reaction / KUH Art Space in Dusseldorf 2022

Poster by Li Xinmo

Preface：Bald Girls – Chain Reaction – 10 years Retrospect & Outlook

By Juan Xu & Julia Hartmann

In 2012, when the first Bald Girls exhibition took place at Beijing’s art area 798, feminist art in China tended to be dismissed as self-pitying. However, what the three artists Li Xinmo, Xiao Lu, and Lan Jiny together with the curator Juan Xu wanted to achieve was to make society aware of misogyny, sexual violence, and the lack of human rights.

It has been ten years and one #MeToo movement later and the situation has not changed much. In China, during the Chinese New Year, one particular case has caused a stir that set women’s rights back centuries. In a viral video, a mother in Xuzhou can be seen, chained and abused like an animal in an inhumane environment. One can see how the woman is fearful, has lost all hope, and can no longer speak. She freezes in thin clothes with no shoes on her feet in the cold winter months. Although she has given birth to eight children, she is disregarded by society and abused by men as a sex object. The case of the “woman in chains” goes directly back to the culture of patriarchal dominance and male-led discourse. Since the One-Child Policy, female fetuses have been aborted before birth due to the cult of masculinity, which has led to gender imbalance. Today, there are thus more men than women in China, which in turn has led to the emergence of trafficking in women. The “Woman in Chains” is not an isolated case and proves once again that the struggle for women’s rights is not self-pity, but still meets the fighting spirit of the Bald Girls…

Preface on the exhibition

After two years of the pandemic, women have suffered setbacks in societies worldwide, they are again increasingly seen as housewives and mothers, and are mainly responsible for care work. In China, the new Three-Child Policy is similarly inhumane to the One-Child Policy and violates women’s rights in new ways. Abortions are now banned and menstruation is monitored. The Chinese government is doing everything it can to push women (back) into the family. In South Korea, Yoon Seok-yeol, a prominent anti-women conservative, was elected president by a narrow majority. Shortly after his election, he announced the dissolution of the Commission for Equal Rights in the Korean Ministry of Family Affairs. In 2022, Europe suddenly has to face war, just when the world was trying to breathe a sigh of relief. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has already caused millions of war refugees fleeing to neighboring countries. The vast majority of these are women and children, who also bear the brunt of the harshness of war in other countries such as Afghanistan. And although the #MeToo debate has also spilled over into Asia, cases like that of Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai show that women’s voices can quickly fade away.

On the occasion of their tenth anniversary, the Bald Girls, together with independent curator Julia Hartmann, will start a dialogue with international artists* in the exhibition “Bald Girls – Chain Reaction” and offer an artistic and feminist retrospective as well as outlook. “Bald Girls” is an art form that takes up current feminist issues and political stances to deal with today’s world. They want to break visible and invisible chains, oppose any form of regression, and express themselves on daily world events in an artistic way.

Part artists and curator together

Bald Girls – China Reaction

2022 is the tenth anniversary of “Bald Girls”

Curator: Juan Xu（庸现）

Co-Curator: Julia Hartmann

Artist: Xiao Lu（肖鲁）, Jiny Lan（蓝镜）, Li Xinmo（李心沫）, Guo Zhen（郭桢）, Yan Geling（严歌苓）, Yan Rechtman, Mai Ling / Valie Export, Sandra Miranda Pattin, Hunang Mei（黄梅）.

Time: 14 July – 6 August 2022

Organizer: IO Cultural Network e. V, Chinese Feminist Artists Alliance

Location: KUH Art space, Hansaallee 159 40549, Dusseldorf, Germany.

From left: Curator Julia Hartmann, Juan Xu

Curator Juan Xu speech on the opening

From left: Curator Julia Hartmann and artist Jiny Lan

Xiao Lu, Jiny Lan, Dirt·trace，Performance, 2022.7.14

Xiao Lu, Jiny Lan, Dirt·trace, Performance, 2022.7.14

Traces left by performance

Performance process

Xiao Lu was wearing a pink dress, with pink paint on his feet, and walked on a dark gray wallpaper that was ten meters long and seventy centimeters wide. It symbolizes the 10-year road that the Bald girls has traveled. Jiny Lan carried a bucket of dirty water and poured it on Xiao Lu. In the process of walking and splashing dirty water, Xiao Lu left a line of footprints and dirt.

Valie Export, Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969

Sandra Miranda Pattin, Confessions- One confession in exchange foranother, Performance video. 2022

Xiao Lu, What is Feminism ? Installation, 2012

Xiao Lu, Skew, Performance video, 2019

Xiao Lu, Tear down this wall , Installation, Video, 2022.6

When Xiao Lu saw on WeChat how people were being caged in time after time behind barbed wire and fences, and their personal space wantonly trampled underfoot in the name of the Chinese zero-tolerance policy towards the Covid pandemic, I kept hearing the words of former US President Ronald Reagan ringing in my ears when he cried out in front of the Brandenburg Gate on the border of West Berlin on June 12, 1987: “Tear down this wall!”

The video materials used in this work were all downloaded and edited from WeChat. Some of the videos I had saved were very promptly banned. the fact that there were still people constantly publishing videos like this on WeChat despite such high pressure being applied in controlling the internet, is itself an attitude of resistance of the kind that tears down walls.