Title
The Second Sex and Contemporary Chinese Women's Art: A Case Study on Chen Lingyang's Work
Document Type
Contribution to Book
Publication Date
2011
Abstract
One of the best academic publishing houses in China, Beijing Sanlian Bookstore, once made a survey of one hundred books that had most influenced Chinese society in the past twenty years (1978-1998); Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex was on the list.2 Everyone knows what 1978-1998 means to China—a period of dramatic changes in Chinese society. However, if one were to do a survey on the history of western feminism in China, one would find the attention paid to and celebration of Beauvoir in Chinese society is a unique instance, unsurpassed by that of any other feminist of both Europe and the U.S.3 In this paper, I will demonstrate how exploring this fact not only provides a fresh perspective on the development on Women's Studies in Chinese society, but how it also calls into question the very use of the notion of 'western feminism'4 for explaining contemporary Chinese women's art. I will use the work of Chen Lingyang as an example to demonstrate the problem.
Editor
Mary Wiseman and Liu Yuedi
DOI
10.1163/ej.9789004187955.i-446.48
Publisher
Brill
ISBN
9789004187955, 9789004201477
Repository Citation
He, J. (2011). The Second Sex and contemporary Chinese women's art: A case study on Chen Lingyang's work. In M. Wiseman & L. Yuedi (Eds.), Subversive strategies in contemporary Chinese art (pp. 147-170). Brill. doi: 10.1163/ej.9789004187955.i-446.48
Publication Information
Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art