Scholar Christina Yuen Zi Chung examines how gender and feminism speak to Hong Kong’s recent sociopolitical struggles—including the Umbrella Movement and the protests against the North East New Territories New Development Areas—and discusses how artists have responded to issues like these in ways that reflect a feminist consciousness. By reframing artworks as sites of feminist history in and of themselves—including works by Ivy Ma, Jaffa Lam, and Chloe Cheuk—Chung’s methodology hopes to unearth and reimagine a language for feminism generated by Hong Kongers.
After the talk, Professor Eva Man and artist Phoebe Man offer responses based on their own extensive work on contemporary art and feminism.
This talk stems from “Gendering Her Art: The Category of ‘Woman’ in the Art History of Hong Kong,” an essay recently published in AAA’s Ideas, where Chung looks at gender-themed art exhibitions and their relation to feminist discourse in Hong Kong. She will discuss her ideas in greater depth by exploring how decolonisation, feminism, and archival work are inextricably related.
Free and open to the public with registration.
Christina Yuen Zi Chung is a writer, translator, and PhD scholar in Feminist Studies at the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Department of the University of Washington. Her research is focused on a decolonial feminist analysis of visual art in Hong Kong to explore its expressions and mediations of the city's complex, gendered, sociopolitical relationship with Mainland China.
Suggested Links and Readings
Chung, Christina Yuen Zi. “Contextualising Curator Liao Wen.” Accessed July 5, 2018. https://www.wagic.org/blank-2/2017/12/04/Contextualising-Curator-Liao-Wen.
Eisenstein, Zillah. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” Combahee River Collective. 1978. Accessed July 5, 2018. http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html.
Lim, Adelyn. Transnational Feminism and Women’s Movements in Post-1997 Hong Kong: Solidarity Beyond the State. Hong Kong University Press, 2015.
Liu, Lydia H., Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. Columbia University Press, 2013.
Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press, 2015.
Man, Eva K. W. “Some Reflections on ‘Feminist Aesthetics’: Private/Public? Personal/Political? Gender/Postcolonial?—The case of Women Art in Postcolonial Hong Kong in the 1990s.” In Issues of Contemporary Art and Aesthetics in Chinese Context, 65–70. Springer, 2015.
Man, Phoebe C. Y. “Discussions Always Start From Zero – Women Art Since 1990s,” 2004. Accessed July 5, 2018. http://www.cyman.net/hkwomen_art.htm.
Qiu, Tessa, et. al. “What is a ‘Chinese woman artist’?.” WAGIC, 2018. Audio, 29:54. https://www.wagic.org/podcast.
Shih, Shu-mei. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific. University of California Press, 2007.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003.
Welland, Sasha S. L. Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art. Duke University Press, 2018.
Wu, Amy S. Thunderclap. Accessed July 17, 2018. https://thenewnushu.hotglue.me/heyinzhen.
