Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art - Volume 9, Issue 1-2, 2022

Since the early twentieth century, Chinese women artists have emigrated to other countries. Their works are influenced and shaped by diaspora experiences, which vary across time phases. However, the world history of diasporic women is often lost in the larger historical narrative. As such, women diaspora artists also remain an under-represented segment in art realms, both within and outside of China. This is a case study of three Chinese diaspora women artists – Pan Yuliang, Shen Yuan and Pixy Liao. Their works reveal engagement in cultural identity as well as gender identity through an autobiographical approach. For cultural identity, dynamic interaction between the culture of the artist’s homeland and that of her host country play a vital role throughout their art practices. Rather than using elements of typical Chinese cultural heritage, women artists tend to engage in cultural emblems, which connect to their personal-gendered experiences. Albeit confronting the double otherness on cultural and gender identity in a foreign country, the experience of diaspora pushes women artists to pursue independence, self-awakening and broader world-views. With modern conceptions of gender, their practices, particularly the family-theme, convey reflections on the conventional ideology of the family, as well as traditional gender roles.

Colonization and race are important issues influencing international contemporary art practice, but related discourse is often focused with Europe or America at one end of a binary dialogue opposing the peripheries and former colonies. Since mid-twentieth century, following the independence of new nation states and events such as the 1955 Bandung Conference, there has been an increasing awareness to create new axes of sociopolitical connections. China–Africa relations evolve from this context but remains a topic mostly studied from state-level politics and economics. Recently, artists from the Greater Chinese context have started investigating ways of understanding Africa culturally through their artworks. Pu Yingwei (mainland China), Musquiqui Chihying (Taiwan) and Enoch Cheng (HK) are three young artists whose recent works focus on creating more intimate narratives to construct an understanding of China–Africa relations. China is introduced in the dichotomous mode of discourse, and this new triangulated focus expand the understanding of China–Africa relations by offering more nuanced perspectives.

This article examines the works of the Chinese American artist Patty Chang, tracing how Chang’s early deconstructive approach to Asian American identity evolves into her more recent diasporic approach to landscape and travel. The first section covers the early ‘body art’ phase of Chang’s career (from the late 1990s to the early 2000s). The second section focuses on the pivotal work Shangri-La (2005), which usefully illuminates Chang’s evolution from identity to relation, from deconstruction to ‘diasporic cartography’, using her diasporic body to forge a mode of navigation and world-making that is embodied, anti-systematic and relational in nature.

As a Chinese-born woman living in the United States, Liu Beili is aware of the structurally, politically and representationally formulated intersectionality based on her national origin, ethnicity, language, gender and other factors. As a high-profile artist, Liu’s multimodal, polysemous and intermedial art reflects on the nuance that provides for understanding an intersectional immigrant’s sociocultural experience. Liu analogizes her femininity to water, which is resilient, and regards her art practices as the way to ‘better understand how migration and diaspora impact human experience through encounters and separations, displacements and assimilations, the intimacy of memories, and the gravity of time’. This article scrutinizes Liu’s relational art, social participation and civic engagement by focusing on three pieces of performance-based projects, all involving the traditionally feminine task of sewing. Through the simple act of sewing, Liu investigates multiple experiential discourses on the intersectional community: oppression, repression, displacement, disempowerment, self-empowerment, communication and reconciliation.

In a global context characterized by a growing complexity of the dynamics of Chinese transnational mobility, we find the need to resort to a new vocabulary to understand the localized artistic expressions related to such dynamics. In this article, we focus on two Chinese artists, Musk Ming (1979–present) and Tony Cheung (1987–present), who live and work across China and Europe, reflecting on how their transnational life trajectories combine with the transculturality expressed in their works. Considering body and language as two privileged sites of ethnicity, the article suggests that, in their representation, the authors engage in a process of critical deconstruction of ‘national culture’ and ‘ethnic identity’. Such deconstruction is achieved by disconnecting cultural tokens from their ‘ethno-national’ or historical referents, creating instead unlikely or unexpected associations with elements extracted from non-Chinese contexts, or using them to critique the very cultural lineage they are supposed to embody. Considering the critical reception of the artists’ work in Europe, the article also discusses how this act of defamiliarization provokes the viewer by contesting both the ‘Chineseness’ and the ‘westernization’ of the artwork itself. The critical representation of body and language thus creates a powerful discourse to question the equation of ethnicity and culture, compelling viewers to go beyond a superficial characterization of the two artists’ work as either ‘genuinely’ Chinese or ‘critically’ hybrid.

This article discusses the work of Yan Xing, who has established an international career as a Chinese diaspora artist. This transnational identity, however, raises certain questions, including how Yan Xing’s work changed from when he lived in China to when he became a US resident in 2015, and how these changes differ from the globalized art of earlier diasporic Chinese artists. Accordingly, this article first argues that overt references in Yan Xing’s earlier work to sex and sexuality shift to an exploration of desire, truth and fiction in his later work that aligns with discourses on queer diasporas and minor theories. Secondly, this article argues that the new generation of Chinese diaspora artists live and work in a different political climate from the earlier generation of Chinese diaspora artists; the new generation works in an art world in which they are not exoticized objects, but actively participates in the making of a global visual language.

The simultaneous phenomena of the political upheaval in Hong Kong and Sinophobia in the United States produce a double bind for diasporic artists working about and between Hong Kong, China and the United States. Hong Kong diaspora filmmaker Simon Liu navigates this political landscape through experiments in abstract film as a medium for documenting protest and urban transformation sans spectacle. This article locates Liu’s work in the transnational matrix of Hong Kong’s post-colonial non-sovereignty and American Sino-diaspora politics to analyse the ways in which the filmmaker’s diasporic positioning necessitates abstraction and to demonstrate the potential of abstraction as an apparatus for geopolitically vulnerable subjects to continuously deconstruct and re-establish their subjectivity under political conditions that threaten their erasure. I posit that abstraction in Liu’s quasi-protest trilogy – consisting of Signal 8, Happy Valley and Devil’s Peak – offers a sensory orientation for finding blind spots between recognition and indecipherability, opening up new ways of documenting a crisis through the disarticulation of discrete events into atmospheric conditions.

The mass shooting in Atlanta that killed eight people including six Asian women in March 2021 marked the new peak of the unceasing waves of anti-Asian violence since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. In this context, this article examines how a group of Chinese visual artists in New York perform and remake their Asian identity on social media in response to a surge in hatred towards and violence against Asians in the United States following the outbreak of COVID-19. Based on my analysis of their visual rhetoric and media activism, I identify three approaches that this group of Chinese visual artists use to perform and remake their Asian identity. First, they performed their Asian identity by developing various visual rhetorics to combat and denounce anti-Asian discourse and hate crime. Second, their Asian identity emerged when they created new visual rhetoric to reimagine what it meant to be Asian in the United States. The new visual rhetoric enriched the understanding of Asian-ness and diversified the experiences of being Asian in the United States by overtly or subtly challenging Asian stereotypes as a product of the western imagination. Lastly, they claimed their Asian identity through seeking racial justice in a larger social context in collaboration with other racial minority groups.

The London-based multimedia artist Lisa Chang Lee, born in Beijing, China, is a representative example of exploring alternative identification in the context of the global health and environmental crisis. The conversation focuses on her artistic experiments with algorithms and digital technologies to transcend established norms of ‘Chineseness’ culturally and artistically. Gao Shiyu will investigate Lee’s projects to question the binary distinctions between humans and non-humans, nature and culture, the East and the West. The discussion intends to show a shift in the new generation of diasporic Chinese artists’ creative practices and challenge the tendency in contemporary Chinese art criticism that locates these works in large-scale, systemic and political ways.