Shock of the Nude: Pioneering Women Artists and the Cultural Politics of Modern China - Di Wang

[00:00:06]It's my great pleasure to to uh welcome Dr. D. Wang. Um and uh I hope uh you're going to give a a warm welcome as well when I've read off the the notes here.

[00:00:17]Uh Dr. Wang is an art historian and a curator whose work focuses on art and culture in East Asia from the late 19th century to the present. She served as a departmental lecturer and research associate at the department of history of art at Oxford from 2021 to 2024 and is currently an assistant professor at the school of creative arts at Hong Kong Baptist University. As a curator and a cultural producer, D managed a series of international exhibitions for the contemporary artists and I'm not going to even pronounce mispronounce this because it would be my shame. Would you would you mind?

[00:00:51]>> Thank you so much. in New York. Her curatorial and theater projects have been recognized by the WH Pemrook Prize and is supported by the Pemrook Annual Art Fund. Dr. Wang's talk today is part of a book projects which is called Body Politics: The Scientific Gaze and the Arts of Modern China, which is currently under review at Penn State University Press. So, please welcome Dr. Wang.

[00:01:15]Thank you.

[00:01:17][applause] Uh good evening everyone. Can you hear me? All right.

[00:01:26]Um thank you for coming tonight. It's a Monday evening. It was raining and um you're all here fully closed. Um and I also want to thank Gresham College for the opportunity to explore what I think is uh one of the most fascinating chapters in modern Chinese cultural history.

[00:01:43]The period we will cover tonight encompasses um the decades surrounding the fell of the last imperial dynasty and the birth of the republic. Uh when competing visions of modernity, conflicting ideas of arts relationship with science, race, gender were all fought out on and through the naked body.

[00:02:07]>> [sighs] >> Nudity and art uh has always caused argument, but for early 20th century China, it was shocking in a unique way.

[00:02:15]It was new to the culture. In this photograph titled The Very First Day Nude Models Appeared in China, the Shanghai Art Academy made an announcement to the world. Since 1919, this private institution had formalized the use of live nude models in art education.

[00:02:35]As many of in this audience might know, the nude was a foreign concept to Chinese culture. Chinese art occasionally depicted semi- naked bodies and the unclothed form appeared in erotica but it had never been organized into the idealized formalized genre that had been central to western art since antiquity the tradition that give us Michelangelo's David or Bichella's Venus rising from the waves as the art historian John Haye has observed no Chinese painter ever produced a nude in the sense sense of that cluster of culturally defined anatomical shapes and surfaces so prominent in western art.

[00:03:21]This is the case despite the fact that since mid-9th century, Chinese painters in treaty ports such as Shanghai, Canton, places forced open by colonial powers had been studying western technical skills, but they were learning what served commerce and missionary works. Uh, copying religious paintings or rendering landscapes and oil for foreign patrons. There was little interest in the genre of nude.

[00:03:51]And for women from 1907 the since the last the last imperial dynasty theqing government introduced educational reforms. Women could for the first time in Chinese history enroll in public education. The curriculum equipped them with practical skills such as weaving and embroidery. These were no longer just domestic duties, but as visual art for trade, as a source of economic income and contribution to the nation.

[00:04:22]And more momentous changes were coming.

[00:04:27]In 1912, following decades of internal crisis and external imperialist exploitations exploitations, the last imperial dynasty fell. Nationalist reformers established the people of the republic, sorry, the republic of China.

[00:04:44]It was Asia's first democratic republic.

[00:04:48]Although real power wound up in the hands of dozens of competing warlords.

[00:04:53]But even in this chaotic environment, one question united almost every faction. What direction should modernization take? Does modernization mean westernization in China?

[00:05:11]This nent nation sought rapid transformation.

[00:05:15]Self-identified modernizing intellectuals called for a thoroughgoing revolution of China's cultural and political life, calling themselves the new cultural movement and promoting Mr. Democracy, Mr. Science, and Miss Freedom.

[00:05:34]In the art world, forward-looking intellectuals founded private artmies, especially in the cosmopolitan millu of Shanghai, where East and West converged in uneasy splendor and reformers sought to emulate Western modernity while remaining acutely aware of their increasing imperialism.

[00:05:57]For young women, the new cultural movement present presented unprecedented opportunities. Women and men could now attend co-educational universities, most notably when Peing University admitted its first female students in 1920.

[00:06:14]Progressive private institutions such as Shanghai Art Academy, headed by Luhai Su, broke from traditional master pupil apprenticeships system that excluded women, training female students alongside their male peers.

[00:06:32]This was controversial enough, but the academy really became notorious for using live nude models.

[00:06:40]There was strong opposition to this practice and after the warlord government took over Shanghai in late 1925, they immediately banned the use of live nude models in our school.

[00:06:53]Now, this ban resulted in one of the century's most famous public exchanges between government officials and the intellectual circles. Many leading voices of the day were weighing in which got circulated through the Shanghai newspapers across the nation. The public debates not only reflected the confusion and anxiety over the meanings of the naked body, but also the larger concern over China's direction towards modernization.

[00:07:23]Questioning the academyy's blind following of western art traditions, members of the parliament publicly criticized the practice.

[00:07:32]What important relationship does the structure and mechanism of the human body have to have with art? Why must the workings of one's mind be falsely projected onto the naked body?

[00:07:46]The philosopher and public intellectual Foolt argued that the nude simply did not belong in China.

[00:07:55]He said, "Throughout Chinese art history, regardless of painting or sculpture, we can never find a naked figure. This is not because the naked form is lascivious, erotic, but because in terms of aesthetics, especially philosophically speaking, the naked form reflects poor taste.

[00:08:17]Chinese thought never positions the human being as superior over other beings. Humans are not made according to this perfected image of a god like in the western tradition. Therefore, it's not really particularly perfected. It's just monkeys with hair without hair.

[00:08:35]Right? See, from this point, nature is far superior.

[00:08:42]Foulet's argument was not simply prudy.

[00:08:45]He was speaking up for a living alternative to western style art. the great tradition of Chinese landscape painting which since the 4th century had been the dominant genre placing humans as tiny details among mountains, rivers, clouds and mists. In Chinese painting, the brush is not just the tool. The ink brush is the index of the artist's body movement, their mind and character.

[00:09:12]Chinese art criticism had always focused on brush work, the quality and movement of the brush itself, the fabi, flying white, the ink thins to reveals the texture of the stroke, or the tunfa, the modeling lines that give mountains or rock their textured surfaces, as well as the ink wash that dissolves the atmosphere, renders rains and fogs and mist. Intellectuals like Fle argued that this was the real modern Chinese art.

[00:09:44]Artists were already experimenting with transforming their own painting traditions through Gua, national painting, positioning brush work as an expression of an artist interiority and subjectivity.

[00:10:00]The body, the surface of body was in this tradition then was not the point.

[00:10:05]The brush work was it was they argue the very essence of the modern an art that had already prioritized inner experience over surface appearance and these art continue to enjoy commercial success much more than oil paintings.

[00:10:22]Female artists equally shine in their experiments in the national paintings.

[00:10:26]Uh here on the left the line by Hanging the great Lingan school artist and on the right uh here's a women's magazine featuring on its cover female artist Wooing Finn's new landscape very novel composition and brush work. So why look for the essence of the modern in the nude? The opposition would ask a foreign ideal with no cultural tradition to lean upon when what the Chinese have practiced for 2,000 years is already modern. Hence, the whole debate of the nude misses the point. They argue not everyone was persuaded. Lang Chao, the highly influential political reformer and board director of Shanghai Art Academy took a different view entire entirely and many also follow this viewpoint. He connected the nude directly to western science especially to western anatomy. He argue to draw from a model is the last step in describing the truthful state of the human body. Without it, the truth of the body is never never going to be revealed.

[00:11:37]I want to pause here because there is a historical contingency in the argument that matters enormously. The reason Charles the polit the top political reformer could see science in the nude.

[00:11:50]The reason that linkage was available to a lot of political reformers at the time was that it was anatomy not art. that first undressed the Chinese body in the public realm decades before the nude model controversial controversy.

[00:12:07]In 1851, the British missionary and physician Benjamin Hobson and his Chinese colleagues published the first systematic anatomical treaties in Chinese language. Its illustrations included the wrestling classical nude figures of Hercules and Antias. The text reads warriors battle battling with each other. It explains on the side that human force human power comes from the contractions of the muscle and the muscle is the first time invented uh in Chinese language to to translate here when the muscle contracts and shortens and then force derived from there. These images served multiple purpose simultaneously.

[00:12:54]First they introduced the novel visual language of western anatomy. Cutting, marking, measuring, abstracting, showing variance depths and sectional planes, exposing both exterior and interior that was fundamentally different from Chinese medicine which fl focused on the flow of chi bodily liquids and acupuncture points. an art of body's energy pathways, not its surfaces.

[00:13:25]Second, these classical figures served the purpose of evangelization.

[00:13:30]Such sublime muscular design, the text argued, could only be attributed to God.

[00:13:36]But upon closer examination, these images also perpetuate the pseudocience of cranianology, the measurement of the human skull as a marker of racial difference, evident in their depiction of the white profile at the perfect 90 degree and in the concept of the ideal profile here uh with Hercuus and Antias first theorized uh by a German art historian Winklman.

[00:14:03]So the undressed body in this medical scientific mode really entered Chinese consciousness before the artistic mode.

[00:14:11]Chinese intellectuals were acutely aware the aesthetics of the body were was political informed by scientific racism and inflected by deeply asymmetrical power relationship.

[00:14:24]Imaginary Chinese body at the time were called the sick men of Asia. The yellow paria perial in the west. So the body became a site where empire was practiced and internalized.

[00:14:37]It was also the medical image that first undressed the Chinese female body in the public realm. An 1892 issue of the Shujai Illustrated News, the first Chinese Illustrated newspaper run by the British businessman reported the first C-section operated in an American missionary hospital in Kton. In this pictorial space, if you look closely, the conventional social space of child births, which is always women- centered, are completely reversed. The male doctors, the male nurses, the father of the child are in the pictorial center with the mother tied to a chair on the side, her body fully expos exposed, and the midwives placed right outside of the surgical space trying to leaning in and observe And in the following decades, photographic reproduction carried the process further. Through obstetrics imagery, the female body was opened up literally for public view. Uh this is the cover of China's first weekly pictorial for women reproduced a frozen section image from Williams of Cetrics used by John Hopkins University in the US. a visualization of a woman dying at the beginning of the second stage of labor in a breach presentation. Uh we could hardly imagine such an image on the cover of Vogue today. Uh yet this was the visual edium through which the Chinese female body entered mass print culture clinical exposed subject to a scientific gaze.

[00:16:17]And these dynamics were shaped further by the introduction of evolutionary theories and eugenics, the pseudocience that use selective breeding to improve the human race. So the idea that we have to improve women's health so that they can breed healthy future Chinese citizens.

[00:16:36]So when Chao uh championed, sorry just lost the image. So when Leanti championed the nude in the name of science, he was really drawing on an intellectual field that extended well beyond anatomy into the territory of scientific racism and eugenics.

[00:16:56]And by and large, the arguments in favor of nude in the academy failed to persuade a broad public. In 1927, the nude commodo controversy gradually faded away when the warlord government retreated from Shanghai.

[00:17:11]And it was in the print media that we saw an increasingly gendered nude figures. Uh in Shanghai Sketch, one of the popular pictorials, boundaries between the medical, the scientific, the erotic, the pornographic, and the aesthetic fully broke down. And it was hard to actually when doing archival work, it was hard to find a complete copy of the pictorial. A lot of these surviving uh material has been cut out presumably to be pinned up on a wall or hidden under a pillow.

[00:17:43]Uh so this is a collaborative project and Chinese print media imagery come from multidirectional global pictorials sourced by traveling Chinese elite men uh across the world. It also greatly benefited from the transnational network of global magazines consumption of female photographic nude.

[00:18:05]These sources include the illustration in France, the illustrated in London news in UK, life magazine in the US as well as a whole raft of pictorials across Latin America and Asia from Argentina to Japan. Anatom the anatomical visual language of anthrammopetry and physomics offer the visual language for this type of human especially female connoisseurship.

[00:18:30]Women's bodies are made subject to the intersecting gaze of X-ray machines and cameras eugenic anatomical procedures of measuring contouring turning exponents of the body surfaces into telling signs.

[00:18:44]Uh that's one approach and another pictorial the young companion. It reached a readership of half a million per issue. You can purchase this pictorial in Paris and Singapore at the time.

[00:18:58]It was immensely popular among women.

[00:19:01]From from its very first issue, the magazine took a distinctive approach to help the readers overcome the shock of the nude. It tactically juxtaposed the western classical nude with Chinese faces. using the classical nude as a signifier of feminine virtues alongside images of reputable Chinese women.

[00:19:21]Here's the famous actress Hudia. Um, and here is another uh halfpage long article about Madame Leu Janming's altruistic demeanor and her charity work. She looks right and our gaze also rests on the prominent image of the classical Greek sculpture uh Venus Dillo on the right of the page and and she the Venus is titled by the editors goddesses of kindness beauty and it echoes the adjacent test emphasis on the kind and loving temperament of Mrs. Leu. Increasingly Venus is called upon to signify feminine ideals in both character and appearance.

[00:20:01]And here is the same actress Hudia 10 years later. Notice how much has changed in a remarkably short period of time.

[00:20:09]The dress code has completely transformed. Uh you can see here the chip now contours the body closely making visible precisely what earlier fashions had concealed.

[00:20:22]curves and their associations with good health became the buzzwords and also central to the government's reform related to the female body. In July 1927, following the ban on footbinding, the Guangong government passed a breastbinding ban and issued a center page advertisement calling for 46 photographs of those who could show a curvaceous body beauty. the political and as the aesthetic had become fully entangled uh to manage the women's bodies.

[00:20:54]At the same time, women artists and activists also sought their own empowerment using the buzzwords curves. Um, women's magazine reviewing the first national exhibition of art held by the Ministry of Education in Shanghai in 1929 called the 26 female artists darling god goddesses of beauty and deemed women especially suited to art making due to their preference for everchanging curves over straight lines. adding that it is because women are full of curvy fluidity that they have the capacity to be specifically sympathetic to invisible beauty and forms within our future society.

[00:21:39]By this means women artists appropriated the very language used to classify and contain them and redirected towards their own creative agency, professional legitimacy and authority.

[00:21:52]One of the most celebrated artists in the first national exhibition in Panu.

[00:21:57]Uh here we have a reproduction a lot of her painting were lost. Uh reproduction of her work uh exhibited in the first national exhibition. Uh Pan is a figure that we will return to very soon.

[00:22:22]Um, this is also a reproduction. Uh, the original work is lost. Beyond pictorials and canvases, women used their own insurgent body as the medium of expression.

[00:22:36]Uh, here is a drawing by a female artist named Shiaoin. This is her response to the sensational events on March 8th, 20 1927 which caused a national shock and drew public attention to Chinese women's activism across the globe. In this image, several naked women danced freely in an open undefined space. Almost in a matislike style, the women leapt through the depicted landscape with expansive motions. The leading figure with her round glasses on wears chains and shekels on her neck and she has just broken free from them.

[00:23:16]Her ill-shaped bound feet had been released leading the rest of her female peers emancipation.

[00:23:24]This drawing depicts a sensational event that took place in 1927 Wuhan. And the city, the city was the seat of the left-wing nationalist government, a city alive with revolutionary energy, the place where the alliance between the nationalist party and the communist party was at its most volatile before Chiang Kaisha of the Nationalist Party's brutal purge of the Communists later the same year. For a very brief charged moment, women's emancipation was officially on the agenda. It felt possible. On March the 8th that day, major government officials and female representatives of the Republican government in Wuhan were parading along the city's riverbank in commemoration of International Women's Day.

[00:24:13]Uh Time magazine and the US give one of the most detailed accounts of the protest describing the event as the highlight news from the Far East. It notes that eight college educated young Chinese women, serious, zealous, patriotic, paraded solemnly down the bond at Hano, Wuhan, nationalist capital last week. The tallest walked first, carrying a placard a top of a bamboo pole, wearing only large shell rimmed glasses. The seven others were most were more scantly clad. Their plaque cards read, "Emmancipate yourselves. We have won freedom from Christian shame. Win freedom for China from the Christian powers."

[00:25:03]The reference to Christian powers was not abstract. Just weeks before the protest in February 1927, the Wuhan nationalist government had successfully reclaimed the British occupied Hanko after weeks of massive ci civilian protests that forced a British cons surrender of the concession area. Wuhan was at the moment the revolutionary capital of China and other sources such be as Bayon Ptorial comments that these women were calling to emancipate from shame from confusion shame. Women's parades are said to be lasting for quite a while with more than 2,500 people signed up for the parade now already prohibited.

[00:25:47]So there are different sources claiming the content of the protest uh plaque cards. Uh the city was electric with a sense of the old order, both the Confucian domestic one and the foreign imperial one uh was finally being dismantled. For these women, stripping off was a precise political act, a simultaneous rejection of the discourse of shame that had governed women's bodies for century. and for the foreign and of the foreign Christian moral authority that also sought to replace with its own. In this sketch, the larger than life-siz shadow that the leading protesting women casts is the portrait of a dead old self. Marching towards the light is her newly emancipated self. Her glasses reflect her intellectuality. Her strongly built body defies the definition of the beauty of beauty defosed by the print media. This drawing frees the female subjects and in an almost anticclassical nude stance, anti-anatomical stance, their naked bodies takes on agencies as irregularable and shapeless forms that defy any gazes that attempt to reduce the female body to a particular type of figure.

[00:27:04]Now, the protest that the newspaper had to try to bury under the label protested by prostitutes found its most powerful response in a woman who knew exactly what that label meant. The motif of naked women dancing and joy here on the right uh first imagined by Shiain in her sketch uh on the left found its next life in the paintings by of Pulan.

[00:27:32]Pulan had been sold to a Brussel as a child by her uncle in the last years of the imperial dynasty. Her earliest artistic training was in embroidery uh in the Brussels. She managed to escape uh finally with the help of her future husband, the Republican government official Panzan Hua and she later then enrolled in Shanghai Art Art Academy as one of its first female students. She then studied in Rome in Paris, won numerous awards, and in 1928, one year after the Wuhan protest, she became the first female professor at Shanghai Art Academy.

[00:28:17]Had we encountered this work of hers in 1929 Europe, we might have easily overlooked this seemingly innocuous painting. In this captivating visual narrative, we encounter a lush spring landscape where where verdant foliage and nude figures flourishes under the golden ray of the sun. In the foreground, a figure was bestowed a wreath from a fellow female nude figure underscoring themes of recognition, solidarity, and celebration.

[00:28:48]Pan certainly almost certainly knew the alleged leader of the protest, Sheni Bin, an artist and head of Shanghai Women's Law Academy. Both of their husbands were senior government officials from Ani Province. So they were moving in the same political circles. So I read the work as a poignant recognition and celebration of the women's protests. The work itself is a tribute grounded in women's agency and subjectivity. This new naked truth depicted in the work of female artists established a foundation for challenging the Chinese maledominated narratives of anatomy, eugenics, beauty that had long legitimized women's objectification.

[00:29:33]They also challenged modernism's relationship to otherness. the ways in which discourse on the nude had distinguished the aesthetic nude from the merely naked body in the medical scientific in the ethnographic archive.

[00:29:49]Female nakedness here was neither a medical specimen nor an erotic object.

[00:29:55]It's a political declaration.

[00:29:58]But the voices of these artists and activists were soon overwhelmed by the tumultuous events of 1937 when Japan invaded China. The creative fervent quickly gave way to the demands of wartime survival and then to decades of silence.

[00:30:18]Um, sorry, this is the wrong sequence here.

[00:30:22]Before the war broke out in 1937, Pulean headed to Paris when she continued her practice.

[00:30:31]In 1941, this work was exhibited at the Paris spring salon during the German occupation of the city. The painting is titled A Woman at Ease. And the reason why we're looking at this uh divided it was that the canvas broke um and you can see the wound actually on the women's tummy. On the back of the canvas, the artist wrote and recorded. A Nazi so soldier had attempted to acquire my work at a reduced price. The artist refused.

[00:31:07]Two days before the salon closed, the artist wrote, the canvas was slashed.

[00:31:12]It was not alone. A large work by Keith Swan Dogen uh the Dutch artist was found similarly cut in the sim same exhibition.

[00:31:24]So as the second world war engulfed both Europe and Asia, Nazi occupation in the west, Japanese imperial expansion in the east, violence for Pulan was not abstractions but the immediate conditions of her life. So even though she was living in poverty, she reduced to sell this work at reduced price and and it's then the female the motive of female dancing and joy reemerged. This time under peach blossom echoing a classical Chinese poem about a hidden world of perfect peace stumbled sp stumbled upon by accident and never found again.

[00:32:12]And here the artist continued her experiments painting interracial intimacy and transnational moments of of the solidarity between the female figures.

[00:32:27]And by 1949 when the People's Republic of China was established, Pan returned to the motif for the third time. Eastern landscapes blend with European ones. An ideal peach blossom opens beside a different sky. A group of women gather in a pleasurable picnic simply at ease.

[00:32:47]There's no hierarchy of looking. No single nation's body is held up as the ideal. These are women of different skin colors. Women who only get gaze at each other or the sky. And the artist stands in the middle holding a white dove. It is a vision of the world as it might be held lightly like a bird. In this utopia where the female body is no longer a relational space within which to negotiate cultural politics, it breaks free from any scientific eugenic racialized eroticizing and or controlling gaze. And here's another one down the following year.

[00:33:30]Again the artist was holding the white dove at the left hand side.

[00:33:36][clears throat] Um so where did this leave the questions we began with the debate that had convulsed China's intellectual lives in 1920s whether the body could be seen who had the right to see it and on whose terms.

[00:33:57]This was never resolved. The nude had moved in barely 30 years from invisible to the explosive. It had been claimed by science, by state, by the print media, by the men who believed they were speaking for the nation. And then it had been claimed by women in paint and satire in protest.

[00:34:19]The claiming was cut short first by the SinoJapanese war and then by the est establishment of people's rep uh people's republic of China where socialist realism and art for the masses left little room for the female nude and after decades a nude painting uh in 1979 as Deniaing's reform began to open China to the outside world a nude painting appeared in the newly built Beijing capital airport and promptly reignited the same debates that convulsed intellectual circles half centuries ago.

[00:34:56]The controversy was so serious I mean back in 1920s it went up to the very top to the warlord governor Sununfang in 1979 this also went all the way up uh to Deniaing. It was Dung himself who gave the final approval uh for the nude to stay at the airport. Within a few years, a new generation of artists, the 85 new wave would take the nude provoca provocation further uh in the new avanguard. And it was in this climate that Puang's work uh were all shipped back to China from Paris according to her will. The artist passed away in 1977.

[00:35:38]Her work celebrated as having anticipated everything the new generation was reaching for.

[00:35:46]My own mother-in-law uh she didn't know I was coming for this talk. So when I told her, she vividly recalled cycling an hour through heavy snow in 1988 Beijing uh to reach an exhibition titled the beauty of the human body across the world held at the National Gallery of Art in Beijing. When she arrived, she found out that she was not alone. The hall was full. People had been waiting.

[00:36:12]Thank you very much.

[00:36:15][applause] [music]