Troubling the gaze: The writers and zhiyin of ‘Women’s art’

Women-centred exhibitions and discourses, which often grew out of a feminist response to male-dominated collections and art histories, have been criticized for committing the pitfall of perpetuating canon production rather than problematizing it. Yet, locating women artists is fundamental to the recovery of women’s subjectivity and their histories and contributions, without which, no claims for intervening or destabilizing male-centric discourses can begin. This article assesses two such examples of recovery projects, Indonesian Women Artists: When the Curtain Opens (Bianpoen et al. 2007) and Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China (Guest 2016) that served as testimonies to the making of modern and contemporary art as artistic outlets that are unique to female artists. Both texts, as this paper argues, testify to the rise and emergence of ‘women’s art’ as an expressive category, gendered female by its objective to speak to and for the shared conditions and experiences of women in Indonesia and China, respectively. Employing a range of strategies, from the destabilization of the male gaze to the redefinition of femininity, the women artists discussed in the texts – both authored by female writers – were framed as agents that arguably served an ‘othered’, ‘female’ gaze. Thus, this article argues for a new interpretative approach to recover and locate female agency, as articulated not merely through the artist’s hand, but concomitantly through the receiving and knowing gaze.