Invisible Ink: Feminism and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art

What does it mean to be a woman artist - or a feminist artist - in China today?Analyzing how Chinese women artists have reinvented traditional forms of ink and brush painting, Invisible Ink shows how the use of ink in their work becomes a tool of gender and art historical subversion in contemporary Chinese art. The book explores how the work of Bingyi, Ma Yanling, Tao Aimin, Xiao Lu and Xie Rong invoke contemporary manifestations of the traditional Chinese form of ink and brush painting to explore themes of the embodied, gendered experience of Chinese identity, including: motherhood and daughterhood; the exercise of state control over fertility in the implementation of the One Child Policy; and the experience of menopause in a society that prizes youth and beauty. Each chapter examines one artist, analysing carefully selected key works and drawing on interviews with the artists themselves.It positions the artists as intervening, not only in historically exclusive, elitist literati trad