Reclaiming Silenced Voices: Feminist Interventions in the Ink Tradition

Abstract

Introduction: Women Artists and the ‘Empire of Signs’ In the continuing re-examination of cultural history that inflects much contemporary art in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), there has to date been insufficient acknowledgement that powerful notions of filial duty, self-sacrifice and the equation of femininity with fragility, served to constrain women’s participation in the pursuits of the imperial scholar class such as calligraphy, painting and connoisseurship. Craig Clunas’ analysis of the ‘gendering of the act of spectatorship as male’ and ‘male anxieties around women and painting in the Ming period’ reveals that the act of looking at paintings by the literati was as important as the act of producing them. Similarly, with very few exceptions, women artists have been absent from avantgarde前卫 (qianwei) ink practices that developed in the late twentieth century, as has been their work from scholarly discourses around those practices. Specifically, in the genres of ‘unreadable’ calligraphy and performative applications of ink in canonical works such as Gu Wenda’s 1985Mythos of Lost Dynasties series, Wu Shanzhuan’s 1986 Red Humour installations, Xu Bing’s c. 1987–91 Book from the Sky and Yang Jiechang’s 1989–99 100 Layers of Ink, it is the contention of this article that the appropriation and transformation of previously elite artforms left the historically masculinist nature of literati 文人 (wenren) culture essentially unquestioned. The post–Cultural Revolution re-examination, translation, and transformation of ink and text traditions have been documented and analysed by scholars from various disciplines. Artists were wrestling with their memories of High-Maoist China and the instability of language as part of the revolutionary apparatus of the state—in Barm e’s memorable phrase, they were examining the ‘empire of signs that had bedevilled so many writers and thinkers in China’s twentieth century’. Installations and performance works featuring altered calligraphy, books, and the materiality of ink were not only vehicles for the reassertion of Chinese identity and signifiers of contemporaneity but also reflections on past trauma. Wu Hung’s