Sasha Su-Ling Welland has produced an intriguing and richly detailed ethnographic account of the recent development of contemporary Chinese art in Experimental Beijing. Coming from the perspective of gender studies and feminism, Welland presents a sophisticated picture of the interrelations between gender, art and city by interweaving reflections from her participatory observations of art scenes in Beijing, the struggles and aspirations of some lesser-known Chinese female artists, and the rise of contemporary Chinese art in the international arena. The result is a compelling analysis of an evolving Chinese art world where individual artists pursue their professional career by taking advantage of newly available opportunities or struggle against shifting social and cultural frameworks that have rendered what was once familiar and significant no longer so.
As Welland writes, this book challenges conventional narratives about contemporary Chinese art by centring on an “art world transition grounded in everyday experience and struggle rather than landmark exhibits and events” (p. 8). She constructs a counter-narrative that bypasses the usual focus on key players, and instead attributes significance to the practices of less familiar artists from peripheral spaces, either geographically or culturally. Drawing on a wide range of resources – historical, contemporary, textual, visual, theoretical and empirical – Welland produces an alternative history. In particular, she convincingly portrays the micro-histories of a few women artists who are upholding the experimental spirit of contemporary art and making their quiet but meaningful contributions to the development of critical art practice. Building upon feminist cultural critic Dai Jinhua's analysis of contemporary culture, Welland strives to engage Chinese contemporary art as an expanded field that exists in “a proliferating, multiple, overlapping cultural space” (p. 40). She integrates monumental and ephemeral by moving between the practices of individual artists and large spheres of urbanization, city image building, cultural industries and globalization.
The monograph is divided into three parts. Part one, “Art worldings,” articulates the impact of China's rapid transformation and urbanization on the operation of the art world, as manifested in Beijing, the de facto headquarters of contemporary Chinese art. In two chapters, “Xianfeng Beijing” and “Showcase Beijing,” Welland portrays the changing cultural landscape as Beijing remakes itself into a world-class city, and she discusses the emergence of art as a cultural capital that bears economic implications. Many new cultural institutions, public or privately funded, have emerged where competing ideas about art's social role and aesthetic expectations are fostered. Amid the shifting national ideology about art, she problematizes the gendered evolution of the Chinese avant-garde, which, as it gains momentum both internationally and domestically, excludes the active participation of women artists.
In part two, “Zones of encounter,” Welland engages in greater depth the transnational subtext of contemporary Chinese art through individual artists, specific artworks and her own experiences as an interpreter between Chinese artists and English-speaking curators. In chapter three, “The besieged city,” she describes various transnational encounters experienced by Chinese artists and discusses their response to the constraints of a world that is organized according to nation-states, despite the arrival of the global age. Chapter four, “The hinterlands of feminist art,” recounts an unprecedented encounter between Chinese women artists and Judy Chicago, the icon of the US feminist art, that took place around Lugu Lake, a site known for its association with the matriarchy practiced by the Mosuo people. Welland explores Chinese female artists’ negotiation with, and even challenge of, the institutional power presented by the male Chinese curator and the famous Western feminist artist. Importantly, arising from her critical analysis in this chapter is her argument for “the double bind” as an interpretive framework for speaking about the predicament that marginalizes women artists.
In part three, “Feminist sight lines,” Welland details her personal encounters with three lesser-known women artists. Through her reading of their lives and artworks, she inserts these artists into an emergent Chinese feminist discourse. Chapter five, “Red detachment,” tells the sad story of Li Tianpian, a trained painter who excelled at academic representational skills that have become obsolete. Chapter six, “Opening the Great Wall,” centres on He Chengyao, one of the first woman performance artists in China, and highlights He's bold experimental art that reflects on silenced personal trauma, gender discrimination and everyday injustice. Chapter seven, “Camouflaged histories,” focuses on Lei Yan, who not only transcended her training as a military artist but has created a rich body of experimental art that deconstructs the political images she was employed to make in the past. Throughout these chapters, Welland denotes gendered avant-garde expressions embodied in these women's artworks that might not be readily legible to the audience who are used to the male-dominated narrative of Chinese avant-garde art.
A key feature of this book is that Welland relies heavily on her personal encounters with these artists. She demonstrates that these encounters offer her insights to challenge the two prevailing frameworks: one that perceives “Chinese contemporary art as brand new and nation-bound,” and one that sees “global feminist art as born in the West before spreading to the rest” (p. 27). Feminist art for her is a kind of worlding that bears the potential to make invisible “worlds” visible and create, as she beautifully puts, “new sight lines of knowledge, recognition, affiliation, and alliance in which art takes on an ethical dimension, of reordering the pain and pleasure of being in the world, of memorializing, of taking care” (p. 27).
While telling a captivating story of contemporary Chinese art in many layers, Welland can sometimes bewilder her readers. This is most evident in chapters three and five when multiple layers of encounters do not always seem to connect. Chapter four, however, stands out as well-focused and is particularly strong in its relevance to the themes of gender and globalization. It is also puzzling that Welland does not relate her work with Cui Shuqin's recent book, Gendered Bodies: Toward a Women's Visual Art in Contemporary China (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2015), a pioneering research that presents an alternative reading of visual art from contemporary China by inserting women's narratives into Chinese art history. Cui's work was the first major endeavour to challenge the established art historiography in which woman artists are denied legitimacy, and it is natural to want to see how Welland would engage with it.
Despite these minor issues, however, Experimental Beijing is a soundly researched and well-written monograph. Although not the first to centre female artists from contemporary China, Experimental Beijing advances an emerging gender-critical perspective towards the study of contemporary Chinese art, appropriately situated in the specific cultural conditions of late socialism in China and the general context of globalization and late liberalism at large. Welland confidently weaves the stories of these women artists into discussions of the intersecting local, national and global forces that have simultaneously created new opportunities for male art professionals and marginalized female artists. It is therefore a much welcome addition not only to the expanding scholarship on contemporary Chinese art, but also to Chinese feminist art, and gender studies.
