Reclaiming Silenced Voices: Feminist Interventions in the Ink Tradition

Luise Guest
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引用次数: 1

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
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重拾沉默的声音:女性主义对水墨传统的介入
引言:女艺术家与“符号帝国”在对影响中华人民共和国当代艺术的文化史的持续重新审视中,迄今为止,人们还没有充分认识到孝顺、自我牺牲的强大观念以及女性气质与脆弱的平衡,限制了女性参与文人阶层的追求,如书法、绘画和鉴赏。克雷格·克吕纳斯(Craig Clunas)对“作为男性的旁观者行为的性别化”和“明代男性对女性和绘画的焦虑”的分析表明,文人看画的行为与创作绘画的行为同等重要。同样,除了极少数例外,女性艺术家一直缺席前卫艺术前卫 (钱炜)二十世纪后期发展起来的水墨实践,以及他们围绕这些实践的学术论述。具体而言,在“不可读”的书法流派和经典作品中对墨水的表演性应用方面,如顾文达1985年的《失朝杂谈》系列、吴山篆1986年的《红色幽默》装置、徐冰1987年至91年的《天书》和杨洁篪1989年至99年的《100层墨水》,这篇文章的论点是,对先前精英艺术形式的挪用和改造留下了文人历史上的男子主义本质文人 文化本质上是毋庸置疑的。文化大革命后对水墨和文本传统的重新审视、翻译和转变已经被来自各个学科的学者记录和分析。艺术家们正在与他们对高毛主义中国的记忆以及作为国家革命机器一部分的语言的不稳定作斗争——用巴尔姆令人难忘的话来说,他们正在审视“在中国二十世纪困扰了许多作家和思想家的符号帝国”。以涂改的书法、书籍和墨水的物质性为特色的装置和表演作品不仅是重申中国身份和当代能指的工具,也是对过去创伤的反思。吴鸿
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