0 1 Sexy Undressed Singers 1
All Sexyundressedsingers Hot Szh 1 Sexy Undressed Singers Reclaiming their Bodies: Contemporary Chinese Women Artists
All Sexyundressedsingers Hot Szh 1 Sexy Undressed Singers
of identity. Krauss envisaged a ‘field of the Imaginary that allows for its positions to be occupied by more than one gender at once,’ on which Sasha Si-Ling Welland commented, ‘This way of seeing disrupts any fixed notion of the male gaze, in which the eyes of a default male viewer fall upon a represented female body with the simple effect of fantasy fulfillment, manipulation, and control.’ It also caters to trans-gendered and trans-sexual people who disprove the binary masculine-feminine stereotype, and speaks to the feminine in all men and the masculine in all women. The racial indistinctness of the figures similarly blurs the Chinese-foreigner distinction.
When nakedness, lesbianism etc are reworked so that the artistic work involved is of greater interest the psychoanalytic term is sublimation. In her 25:00 [or 25th hour] series, Chen Lingyang shows a greatly enlarged female nude crouched on a rooftop at night, or lying front down on top of a Beijing building with her hair hanging down the wall, which may convey to some a discrepancy between human and particularly female sensibilities and the modern city of highrise apartments.
Cui Xiuwen in her video Lady's room secretly filmed prostitutes at work.
The choice to film in the unique location of the 'Lady's room' is very significant, as the lavatory serves as the only 'rational' place to go on a break from work. Here, the prostitutes uninhibitedly exhibit the abnormal state of the shameful 'work' for which they must sacrifice self-respect, youth, beauty and health, here they can also evade their clients for a while. Through this is revealed the real background of consumer sex in China, taboo on the surface but thriving beneath…
In the video Twice, 2001, Cui Xiuwen is shown alone in her apartment having phone sex while she rubs herself. In another video, Toot, 2001, a naked standing Cui is wrapped in toilet paper, which then disintegrates as water is applied. The musical accompaniment played on the pipa is associated with the occasion when the Han were about to defeat the Chu and the Chu leader’s favourite concubine killed herself, whereupon the Chu leader sang this song of mourning before he too killed himself.
Wang Yingchun in 2003 showed her ‘Comfort Women’ looking pained, desperate, and humiliated. ‘Comfort Women’ was Japan’s term for women forced to have sex with Japanese troops during Japan’s invasion of China and many other countries between 1931 and 1945. The painter said that she hoped to record history by painting these miserable Chinese women, many of whom had already died. It was the first time that Chinese paintings of ‘Comfort Women’ had been displayed in public.
Li Hong, a long-time feminist, has used female figures in a number of settings, sometimes disturbing as in her Conspiracy series from 1996, in which naked women are mangled in car engines, a reference to the fate of women in today’s society. She has also made pencil drawings of pairs of young women naked on city streets, clinging to each other for protection, or looking out at the viewer: the possibility that they could be prostitutes is not ruled out, but would seem unlikely in view of Li Hong’s statement:
To me portraits are the most direct way of depicting the human spirit…they reveal the problems of women in society. I really want to explore and expose the sexual identity and the status of women living in a male-dominated world…These are contemporary women, confused and depressed…they have lost their sexual and cultural identity.
Feng Jiali used paint and embroidery to decorate farmers’ worn-out shirts and jeans with images of cheerful naked women unconcernedly doing things at home or getting ready for a night on the town, a combination of closeness to nature (her studio is a restored farmhouse courtyard near Beijing), Western easel art, use of traditional women’s sewing crafts, and feminist feeling for the female body. The title of one such series, Xiaoxia Zhuang, 2001–03, relates to ancient stories of the wives of emperors. One critic commented:
From the feminist perspective, the artist calls up the ‘cruel beauty’ of patriarchal aesthetics in which the pain of female bodies could be codified into beautiful verbal expressions. Here she juxtaposes this brutal aesthetic with clothing and utilitarian found objects. Parts of women’s bodies adorn these quotidian things. In this way the works criticize the modern consumerist culture that focuses on [the] female body and makes it the trifling object of fetishism and increasingly subjects women to market control. Thus for Feng Jiali, the Resurgence of the Real means a return to the authentic existence of the female.
Niu An (Ann New) does paintings of female nudes that are almost lost in swirls of acrylic paint or of calligraphic ink lines, making her work as much about energetic mark-making as it is about feeling the sensuality of the women’s bodies — the latter emphasised by the emphatic explicitness of vaginal openings. Alonzo Emery:
New sees the blending of gender roles and sexuality as a natural result of modern urban life. ‘I myself am not a lesbian, but there's nothing wrong with me trying to understand women and to be close to them,’ she says. This attempt to be intimate with her subject informs her artistic process, as well. ‘I don't like to take photos when I'm working, because the process is about intimacy, it's about making love. How can I let people watch or photograph that?’
In ink and colour Chen Yadan does ethereal pink and blue naked woman and infants floating in the air. Shao Fei did a screenprint, The freedom, 2004, that is virtually a montage of some of Picasso’s cubistic female nudes. Liu Hong has painted surrealistic posed female nudes, their style and content such as the wrapping around the heads eerily reminiscent of René Magritte. Zhang Yaxi does very strong realistic or abstract sculpted naked female figures such as The gate of life, 2001, Pregnant (Fertility), 2001, and Standing woman, 2005. Zhang Yongping paints large female nudes, playfully exaggerating their bodies and diminishing their heads in an artfully stylised way. Zhang Tiemei painted images of naked women sitting and sprawling in a garden on her ceramic, The landscape of life, 1998. Feng Qianyu exhibited light box ‘advertisements’ featuring female nudes, with what (if anything) was being advertised raising questions about the advertising industry, if not about the artist’s intentions. He Chengyao showed herself topless at a table in her Play chess with Duchamp, 2001.
Liao Haiying and Zhu Bing play in various ways with resemblances between female sexual organs and flowers, fruit, and plants. Of Liao Haiying it has been said:
With a passion that resembles that of the ancient rite of worship of the reproductive organ, she carved out strange striking variations of bonsai-like sculptures featuring the union of sexual organs.
Outside mainland China Lin Tianmiao made Initiator, 2004, an installation in which a sculpted frog held the incredibly long hair of a sculpted naked standing woman. Chen Yanyin has used video images of female genitalia in her installation work. Amanda Heng in her photographic series, Narrating bodies, 1998–99, appeared topless before photographs of herself and her mother, in an effort to overcome an estrangement that began when she took up art; she and her mother appeared topless together in 2005. Chang Hsing-Yu in her The song of skin ‘dismembered’ a female nude in the well-worn Western way by showing only her crouched back as a limbless and headless torso. Again, Mei-Hua Lai and Yan Ming-hui see female sexual organs in flowers, fruit, and plants. One commentator wrote of Yan Ming-hui:
From the half covered fruit core in Three Apples (1988), to the close up of the concave part of a plum in Plum Concerto (1988), from Tomatoes and Breasts (1990) to Wax Apples and Breasts (1990). In all of these works, the artist symbolizes the vagina or describes the breasts, as an affirmation of the anatomical characteristics of the female body and the existence of its child bearing and nurturing function. Going still further, she uses the flavor of sub-tropical fruit as a vehicle to praise female sexuality. From 1990–1992 the ‘core imagery’ of fruit became flowers.
Yan Ming-hui herself said:
Often when I paint fruit it is almost as if I am painting a woman, it is just that I do not know whether I am painting other women or myself. When I am painting, a powerful emotion tells me that I am painting women. Sometimes, when men and women get along, men make women feel that women are like fruit, tasty, sweet, soft and juicy, but I placed grapes and breasts together completely as a result of intuition. In my experience it feels like ‘eating grapes’. I say this in praise of women.
4. Bodily investigation
Psychoanalytically this can be thought of as rationalisation, and it is often therapeutic. Twenty-eight years after Judy Chicago photographed herself removing a bloody tampon from her body in Red flag, and made Menstruation bathroom, Chen Lingyang graduated from art school in Beijing and ‘found herself in a period of withdrawal. I had no job, little communication with my friends. I would stay at home inside all day long.’ In such circumstances she became extremely aware of the cyclical rhythms of each day, week, month, year. One result was that she took the dozen months in a year, her own dozen monthlies over that time, the ancient poetic concept of a dozen flowers in their seasons, and a dozen mirrors based on old designs also to be seen in the doors and windows of Chinese gardens. Each month she had someone carefully arrange, light, and photograph her bleeding genitals in one of the mirrors, matched the result with the appropriate flower, and presented the prints on paper that is round, leaf-shaped, or fan-shaped etc. She also made a video called the Menstruation Fairy, in which ‘a fairy godmother invades a modern office and with her wand strikes workers, both male and female, with the “curse”.’
Given her psychological state at the time one critic (Zhang Li) had grounds for saying that these works represent ‘the artist’s reckoning with the complicated emotions of selfhood.’ Chen Lingyang herself admitted:
In facing the real world, I feel that I am usually frightened and at a loss. In public places and social gatherings, I always have to force myself to remain composed, I always have to suppress inner feelings of nervousness. I have a serious sense of inferiority, and I don’t know how to handle my affairs. I lack a sense of security when walking down the street, I even want to become invisible, because I’m so scared of people paying attention to me; however, with art, I have a definite level of freedom. I can transform those feelings of craziness into creative interests, and don’t have to feel ashamed when facing the deepest aspects of myself. In addition, I can also appreciate the wisdom and humor of others, at which I feel the value of being human.
Another way she found of coping was to invent Chen Lingyang 2, so that she could ‘play different roles in different situations.’ Zhang Li may have been right in saying that by revealing something conventionally kept hidden her work is ‘a roundabout way of expressing the pressures felt by women in a male dominated society.’ All that Chen Lingyang herself would venture was that ‘When people see this work in public space, it may provoke various reactions. But the work itself also offers the possibility of dispelling such reactions…Only through the process of provoking and dispelling can new possibilities emerge.’
The female artist and curator Xu Hong’s comment is apposite: ‘To use the body as subject to confront this notion [of body as object — that the female body becomes an object of control and suppression] is the most real and powerful of artistic choices.’ Chen Lingyang did her first menstruation work, Scroll, in 1999. It is noteworthy that in the following year a male artist, Xu Zhen, showed ‘menstrual blood’ dribbling down a man’s leg in Problem of colourfulness. Was the artist subjectively identifying? Was it a sign of the patriarchy crumbling?
Xing Danwen’s photographic series I am woman, 1994–96, shows a knowing, sexy, healthy and beautiful naked young woman, sometimes posed with what look like a young man’s naked legs close by; later there are pictures of a naked pregnant woman, and one of two naked people sleeping
oAll Sexyundressedsingers Hot Szh 1 Sexy Undressed Singers Reclaiming their Bodies: Contemporary Chinese Women Artistsn u Sexy Undressed Singers 1
aAll Sexyundressedsingers Hot Szh 1 Sexy Undressed Singers Reclaiming their Bodies: Contemporary Chinese Women Artistsg m c c 1 u Undressed 1