Guest Lecture on Chinese Art, Gender and Globalization

China Studies, Aarhus University is proud to announce the guest lecture "How the Avantgarde "Disappeared" Women: Gender Politics in Chinese Contmporary Art" by Associate Professor Sasha Su-Ling Welland, University of Washington, USA.

This talk explores the shifting relations between art and politics through the translingual encounter of xianfeng and avant-garde genealogies in global circulations of Chinese contemporary art. Bringing gender into the picture heightens awareness of the relationship between avant-gardism and nationalism, in which the avant-garde myth of originality is a repressive technology whose professed faith in renewal and innovation masks its power plays. The work of artists Xiao Lu and He Chengyao make visible the ways discourses of the avant-garde have “disappeared” women and the critical ways they reinsert themselves in these zones of encounter/occlusion. In 2002 a restaging of the Communist Red Army’s Long March as transnational art project gave rise to a contentious encounter between U.S. feminist art icon Judy Chicago and her Chinese “collaborators”; the interlocking double binds that structured their interactions further reveal center-periphery understandings of the world that have structured discourses of the avant-garde, global art, and global feminism.

All are welcome. The lecture will be held in English.