On Chinese feminist art from the perspective of globalization

. In comparison with the expression of feminist art during the second wave of the feminism movement in the United States, Chinese feminist art embodies similar development paths but with different pursuits. Immigrant countries determine that feminist art in the United States has different aims on account of artists of different races and nationalities, such as black women discussing racial discrimination and immigration; European immigrants criticize patriarchy from the perspective of Western art history; and LGBT people are oppressed by society. However, Chinese feminist art also has its own unique artistic expression objects and goals in the development and evolution of feminist theory. Aiming at the prevalent problem of preference for boys over girls and gender inequality, Chinese female artists criticize the hidden gender discrimination in society in a particular way.


Introduction
Feminist art has become an important topic in international art criticism. As a form of expression in the feminist movement, female artists reflected and criticized the social situation of gender inequality based on their own experience. Feminist art flourished during the second wave of feminism.Simone de Beauvoir, a French feminist, pointed out in her book The Second Sex that "women, as the civilized appendage of the 'other', are controlled by the patriarchy just like nature." Women need to get rid of the shackle of "internality", find their own meaning of existence and achieve transcendence." It covers the analysis of sociology, biology, history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and so on. It has inspired women from all walks of life to fight gender inequality around the world.As the pioneer of the second feminist wave movement, Beauvoir's series of thoughts, such as "other," "transcendence," and "internality," have become key words in post-modern feminist theory and exerted great influence. "Woman is the secondary sex, excluding men from the "other"" in their book simply points out the plight of women's survival. [ 1 ] Simone de Beauvoir's ideas influenced other feminists after her ideas got into the United States, suchas Linda Nochlin. As one of the most important figures in the second wave of feminism, she published Why have there been no great female artists? Before that, art history was only a male art history book, and women were considered unlikely to be 'geniuses'. [2]This caused a heated discussion and a strong resonance among female artists. Its theory advocates male-dominated western art criticism and thinks penetratingly about the internal causes of long-term ignorance of female art; acknowledges female art's artistic value, which is equal to that of male art; and records feminist art in the new art history at the same time. So far, this period, the second wave of feminism, has become a crucial chapter for advancing feminist art.
In the 1970s, American women's art turned up vigorously. Many female artists criticized the artistic application of female images and the low social status of women under traditional concepts through photography, performance, painting, and other different ways. Such as The Inner Scroll, performed by American artist Carolee Schneemann in 1975, in which the artist herself stands naked with dark paint all-covered and reads aloud from her own book, Cezanne, She Was a Woman Artist. She also pulled out a scroll from her vagina describing the discrimination that satirizes feminist art. She initiated a new form of female body performance art, passionately expressing her daily anger as a woman being discriminated against in an unpleasant way. American artist Cindy Sherman created a series of black and white photographs titled Complete Untitled Film Stills from 1977 to 1980. The series consists of 69 photographs in which she dresses herself up as female characters in classic films, criticizing the stereotypes of female identity construction in contemporary society. The American artist Eunice Golden created a large number of male nude paintings in the 1960s and 1970s, such as landsacapes#160 (1972), which offers a private view of the male body, especially the enlarged depiction of its phallus, which spans the whole picture like a mountain. She replaced the character of women being viewed with sexual innuendo in traditional paintings with that of men, and flirtatiously criticized the sexual innuendo under the gaze of men in art history. In 1968, Guerrilla Girls, a women's art organization, was founded in New York. Its members wore gorilla masks to anonymously expose sexism, which was against female artists in a paternal society. For example, in the poster How Can Women Get maximum Exposure (FIG. 1), created in 1989, they put a gorilla mask on the head of a nude woman with her back towards the audience and asked the public in the title :Can women enter the Metropolitan Museum only naked? Below the poster reads: In the modern exhibits of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, less than 5% of the artists are women, but 85% of the nude images of women are made public. The plight of female artists is disclosed, and the propaganda function of the poster is used to publicize one of the existing sexism phenomena to the greatest extent. As an immigrant country, the United States gathers different ethnic groups all over the world. Many scholars study and publish numerous works on feminism.Many of them are translated into English, the common language, so as to weaken the limitations of language and expand the influence of feminism, as well as outspread those ideas to women in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Due to the rise of the civil rights movement of black Americans in the 1960s, the art of women of color was valued by society. For example, Faith Ringgold, a black female artist born in the United States, put forward a new perspective to criticize patriarchal society based on her own experience of racial discrimination and women's social status. In the 1960s, she produced a series of collective-minded paintings called the American People Series, in which #20 Death depicted the conflict between people of different races, genders, and ages. White men armed with guns in an attempt to hurt white women but revolted by black men, the black women, at the same time, attempt to help white women, as seen in the picture at the bottom of the page with the two frightened children who are hugging together. It reflects the different social, racial, and gender statuses in society. In Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, she depicts eight socially influential women of Africa presenting a quilt with bright sunflowers while Van Gogh holds them in a field full of sunflowers on the right side. The acknowledgement of African women's contributions could always be seen in her work, and she presents social issues that are often overlooked by women of African descent through her unique perspective. In 1971, she created a public work titled Dedicated to Orange with a grant from the Creative Artists Public Service Program (CAPS). She created eight equal triangle character parts, each of which separately described the police, the driver, and the teacher, etc. and other female figures, which have different careers and different colors of skin, to reflect the change in the modern female's social status and those views toward gender and occupational equality of neglected black female artists in contemporary art. Before 1960, a large number of European artists immigrated to the United States due to different factors such as war and the economy. What differentiates them from native American female artists is their diverse understanding of discrimination against women in history, tradition, and literature. Take Louise Bourgeois, a French-American artist, as an example. Her works reflect the low status of women in traditional European families. Louise Bourgeois was born into a middle-class family in 1911 in Paris. She married her husband and moved to New York in 1983. She found a ten-year unethical affair between her father and her tutor when she was young, while her mother chose to suffer in silence until she died of depression eventually, which caused this dark cloud of misfortune to hang over her for her entire life. All her work enables people to communicate deeply with each other through symbolic skills. She studies the huge psychological trauma women receive in this society of extreme gender inequality and expresses the greatness of motherhood based on her identity as a daughter. Bourgeois' father was a stereotypical male figure in paternal society.They regarded women as appendages and deprived them of the right to be treated equally, while Bourgeois's artistic work, which was centered on childhood experience, showed the criticism of patriarchy. The Destruct of the Father (1974) is full of Orpheus's plots for her father. Her father once inserted a pen into an orange on the dinner table that was full of inappropriate suggestions and stated that this orange is the daughter of the "I."As a father, this behavior of belittling women, even his daughter, causes huge psychological damage to Bourgeois. She fantasized that a cat would jump on the dinner table and eat her father's eyeballs in her dream. Using the red of hell as the background, this installation work mutilates and exhibits her father at the dinner table. round vesicular objects just like the person as well as the sick body. Her spider series uses symbolism to show that mothers are just as good at sewing and protecting themselves as spiders. For example, the spider in her work seems to hesitate whether to move forward or not, exuding a cautious and depressed atmosphere, which shows how much she misses her mother. The Screw Series embodies the feeling of her father's disloyalty through huge ferocious sculptures to make the visitors feel fear. Such as the work Spiral Woman in 1984. The twisting state reflects her inner contradictions, just like a hand grabbing the heart hard. The filament on the top, which was created to hang the spiral sculpture, and the black hole on the floor showed that the troubled woman was about to fall into darkness at any moment, which also reflected the inner revolt of Bourgeois against the patriarchy. Louise Bourgeois's works directly address her childhood trauma, criticize paternity, and acknowledge motherhood as a source of powerful female power. Her works are truly based on her personal life and re-examine female personal value by expressing the relationship between women and nature. Drawing lessons from fairy tales, she guides the audience to redefine the role of women in society and exposes the oppression of women under the patriarchal system through its symbolic significance. Her work wraps those thoughts about those women's problems in fantastic and beautiful ways. She wanted to declare that those female figures who suffer violence aren't set in stone. Different from the stereotype about female character appearance depicted in traditional art work, such as the kind woman always beautiful and weak, she acknowledges women's personal power through overturning the traditional image. Smith's sculpture Rapture (FIG4) uses the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood" as the background, showing a naked woman tearing the wolf's stomach and standing out from the inside, breaking out the immense power and rebirth. The wolf symbolizes the supreme power in nature, which has a strong offensive. The male wolf also has absolute control in the midst of wolves over the female wolf. Naked women represent women. Admitting the own characteristics of women and women's great power The spirit of facing up to the powerful and resisting the unfair is the basic principle of the women's movement. In addition, Smith's Sky depicts the integration of female nudity and nature in the form of a tapestry, revealing women's dominance over their own bodies and the harmonious relationship between women and nature. The medieval decoration colors of the picture express the artist's reflection of no female painters in art history. Through the female dreamy color and weaving art of the packaging to reflect that only female characters exist in history under the male gaze, while both men and women are products of nature, so that man and woman should have the same rights and interests.Smith's works are abstract, symbolic, and can deeply generate social thinking. She proves the correctness of feminism by exploring the truth about women and nature. The scale and academic strength displayed in these three exhibitions are enough to form a spectacular landscape in Chinese contemporary art during the turn of the century." [3]In the 90s, Chinese female art had the characteristics of a particular, isolated from the male discourse and self-value, making up the missing women's art history from the perspective of women, reconstructing female discourse by taking physical features as symbols.
Take Hong Yu as an example. Her work constantly focuses on women's bodies and identity. Hong Yu was born in 1966 in Xi'an and raised in Beijing. During her studies at Central American University, she studied female portraits. Her works truly express the reconstructed female images in female discourse power following the awakening of female consciousness and break down the sexual implication of the female body in traditional picture language, which is fundamentally different from traditional art history dominated by male perspective.Through the series Witness Growth, created from 1999 to 2019, Hong Yu depicts the macro background of history and the micro performance of individuals, reflecting the changes in the relationship between women and society through the transformation of their own identities as "mother" and "daughter". Among them, August 12, 1994 + Giving Birth to a Daughter at the Age of 28 (FIG5)shows the scene of the painter who has just finished giving birth to her daughter. The audience is staring at her while she is staring at her daughter. This is the vision of a mother who loves her son without payment, and it is also the expression of maternal talent, showing the great maternal function. " Feminist works point out the absence of such artistic themes from tradition, while simultaneously congratulating and regretting women's experiences." [4]Hong Yu uses "childbirth" to create, publicly praising women's great fertility and affirming women's fertility function so as to emphasize women's social value. . Qing Zhou's works reflect the liberation of modern women's power. Women are no longer confined to the family, and they are separated from the patriarchal society so as to think and explore their selfworth.", she criticized the patriarchal society under the ancient feudal society in China, reflecting the right of Chinese women to obtain personal freedom. Due to the restriction of women in traditional families, the proportion of female landscape painters was very small in history, while Qing Zhou filled the historical void of landscape art from the perspective of women. Qing Zhou's creations are based on the dialogue with her own heart, which makes her works romantic and dreamy. While emphasizing femininity, she also boldly uses dark colors to break the public's stereotype of female art. For example, in the Changxi series(FIG6), which was created in 2008. Her pictures use Chinese traditional legends such as Mengdie, Queqiao, Benyue, etc., for reference to construct their own dream. She reconstructs her style with landscape painting and cold gray tone. She expresses those subconscious unspeakable words by painting. The etchings in the E Series, created in 2005, are closely related to the painter's love of traveling around the world. The painting retains fierce colors and brush strokes to describe the natural landscape. Mountains and soft lines can be seen faintly, floating and floating like clouds and rivulets. Qing Zhou created a profuse, delicate and gentle space scene, filling the female perspective of landscape art expression. The appearance of Qing Zhou broke the limitation of the public's cognition of female art. Women and men have the same perception and expression ability for the same things, reflecting the phenomenon of the improvement of women's social status.
After the 1990s, China's culture and economy entered a period of rapid development, and the status of urban women generally rose, and most of them had the right to receive an education. However, in remote and backward rural areas, there was still a deep-rooted ideology of male superiority. Female artist Aimin Tao, who was born in Hunan province in 1974, rewrites the stories of rural women forgotten by history with a series of washboards. The washboard, as a unique symbol of Chinese rural women, represents all the domestic labor that women are responsible for in traditional culture, which makes her works great symbols of Chinese feminism. Before that, the productive functions of rural women were converted, hidden, and unrecorded because most rural women were illiterate and had no right to go to school, and their contributions to society and the family were widely ignored and denied. Aimin Tao uses the washboard as a symbol to symbolize the value of these women's silent labor. For example, her installation River of Women (2005) combines washboards with portraits of rural women to create a time river. Each woman's story is closely related to the washboard. The Women's Sutra (FIG7)(2005) links the washboards together like scrolls of ancient books. Each washboard represents a rural woman's lifetime; it's also an outward expression of her means of production and self-worth. A series of her works enable women at the bottom of society to speak up and change social perceptions of the value of women's family labor.Aimin Tao's works use washboard as the medium to introduce the low social status of rural women, and then express the importance of promoting gender equality in China, including but not limited to affirming the invisible value of women's labor and breaking the wrong idea of overlooking women. Feminist artists from the 1970s to the 1990s made significant contributions to the Art Nouveau movement. Their works produce different viewpoints. For example, they describe the language violence and traditional constraints that women are subjected to in society through their personal experience from a female-specific perspective and criticize the female stereotype in social identity and the unequal social status of women. Feminist art subverts the male bias in traditional art, inspires women to acknowledge their self-worth, promotes the liberation of human rights and freedom of will and thoughts, gets rid of the bondage of male perspective, and pursues their inner self. In other words, most of the works of this period assumed the similarities of women, reflecting the essentialist view that all things have some essence and some unexpected characteristics, expressing the commonplace of women's art.
In an article published in 1992, Rebecca Walker, an African-American woman, put forward the "Third Feminism" for the first time. She raised the issue of the social relationships between women of color, queer and gay groups, which are more vulnerable among women, and traditional ideology. It reflected anti-essentialism thought at the same time. It denies the inevitable relationship between biological sex and social sex and turns its attention to the social problems of minority groups. The third wave of feminism is not only a criticism of the second wave of feminism but also a continuation. Feminist art can be divided into two camps: The first group pays great attention to race, colonialism, and LGBT groups, and the second group, influenced by postmodernism, advocates that women should be highly identified with their own identity. [5]Both of these two types of feminism reflect the importance of culture to feminism, and eras and individuals contribute to feminist art. As the pioneers of the third wave of feminism, women of color emphasized the contradiction between race and class in imperialist society based on their feminism concept. The legacy of race and gender issues forced them to always live on the edge of society. For example, the research of Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, an Asian American female artist, is based on the dual social issues of immigrants and women. Such as her work Findings, which are placed in the public space in the form of murals. She cooperated with different areas and local art organizations, showing the same female power in different places through different colored skin groups. When in a world where most of the murals were created by men, women's depictions were easy to disguise. But she argues that "women are the fabric of families, societies, and nations---the society would fall apart without women" [6]. In her work, the We Are More series, she collected the interviews of Asian Americans from different countries and regions, especially those interviews where women were excluded by cities. She created a series of provocative female portraits through public installation art to criticize the problem of racial discrimination. The portrait of an Asian woman full of strength and leadership in Stand With Us shows that Asian women also have the courage and right to fight for equal human rights. In the third wave of feminism, LGBT groups participated in feminist movements thanks to queer and transgender theory. such as experimental lesbian and queer movie pioneer Barbara Hammer. She was born in 1939, but her first feature film, Nitrate Kisses, was not released until 1992.Given the social and historical neglect of LGBT people until that time, "It is an exploration of the repression and marginalization of LGBT people since the First World War," [7] she says. In the form of collages and interviews, the film reveals the unrecorded past of the LGBT community through the voices of lesbians and queer people who face social discrimination.
In 2005, American artist Nicole Eisenman and A.L. Steiner established the Ridkyeulous organization, which is concerned with queer and feminist art exhibitions and art and cultural criticism in a humorous way. For example, in 2006, in the book Advantages of Being a Lesbian Woman Artist (2006), they strongly pointed out the sexual oppression of women in patriarchal society and the denial of the very existence of lesbian artists. Nicole Eisenman was born in France and grew up in New York. Her figurative painting is known as a way of depicting characters and comedy. Her paintings mainly focus on the love of the queer community. Her character in the image, both in several or single, reflects a sense of isolation with feelings of loneliness. She depicts friendship and indifference in the era, also showing the socially unacceptable groups themselves. For example, in I'm With Stupid (2001), the clown-like man's aversion to his first sexual characteristic reflects society's rejection of the queer group. The Commerce Feeds Creativity, 2004, used symbolism to show a man (Commerce) with a decent hat and scornful eyes feeding a naked tied woman (Creativity) and placing the man in the center of the picture, expressing the absurdity of patriarchal society and the low status of female groups.A.L.Steiner is a multimedia artist. Her work studies queer and women's problems. Through surveying the existing situation of women in the LGBT community, she thinks "Lesbian in photography, where the Muse is a woman, we strive for collaboration, not domination." [8] such as The Patrarchy Is A Pyramid Scheme (2008), which is based on photography, performance, and video multi-level installation, and pays attention to inequal experience in female artists. Besides, Queer Is The New Black, (2009) shows queer bodies in different races by the method of collage.  In different cultural environments, female artists from different areas have different artistic expression needs for social relationships. British feminists, who are heavily influenced by postmodernism, primarily advocate the liberation of being confident in one's own female identity and reject body politics.For example, Alexandra Gallagher mainly criticizes the female body in art history, "The inspiration behind my work is our experiences as women in western society." But I didn't want to put something out there that's obvious or brutal. I wanted to create something beautiful out of something ugly. But, the difference of a voice. " [9] In Carry My Soul To Heaven and Sit On My Blind Side, the woman is the theme in all of them.in the picture with the divine eye and attitude is surrounded by flowers and birds in the center of the picture. It's a fusion of classical portrait and feminism, and the geometrical line of the image is a symbol of some contemporary significance. Gallagher fused uncomfortable impressions with fairy tales in the main body of the painting, which contains most women's symbols rejected by history. It is also full of praise for the nature of women. Women laugh in Roxana Hall's Laughing While series, defying the stereotype that women are always tender, beautiful, and elegant.The women in this series all have some kind of desire, especially in the series in which Laughing While Reigning. It reflects the unequal social phenomenon that sex and power are skewed in patriarchy society and women's desire to pursue equal rights. Any art work can only have its existing significance while being watched by humans. But women are no longer the objects of being observed but the subjects of being watched. Art is a born gift for everyone, including females. Due to the difference in history and culture, Chinese feminist art embraces Western female art and combines it with its own social culture to derive feminism with Chinese characteristics, which is not only limited to expressing "feminity", but also reflects "gender equality and transcendence between men and women through diversified expressions of female art." [10] One of the important motivations of Chinese female artists is to criticize the ideology of gender discrimination that still exists in the traditional family under patriarchal society, such as preference, ignoring women's value, and some other problems left over from history. Their highly personal and liberal artistic expression exemplifies the transcendence of feminist art; they are more concerned with their relationship with society, reflecting on the era and the daily experience of invisible gender violence.
The main theme of female artist Matyusha's artistic creation is to study the relationship between women and society through personal experience, through symbolic means, and those constraints of emotion and behavior that women have received as a "second sex" in daily life. Matyusha always creates through multimedia. For example, in Milk Body (2008), milk, as a daily product, flows slowly from the artist's body to the surrounding environment. To express the contradiction between the natural person and society, he combined milk with the fragmentary technique in an integrated and destructive manner.There are other similar works like Drift (2020). In the work, a long-haired man cleans a short-haired woman. She uses the same custom to unify their identity and weaken gender difference in order to eliminate the stereotype of the length of hair on men and women. She expresses her thinking between men and women in society based on eliminating physiological features reflected back to the audience through the performance interpretation, guiding the audience to break the stereotypical impression of the appearance of men and women, and to think about the phenomenon of men's oppressive power over women in daily life. Matyusha refuses to confine her works of art to the audience's stereotype of "feminism" through the label of "female artist". She hopes to tell the audience her personal experience as a story from an objective perspective as a way of dissociating herself. Xinmo Li, another performance feminist artist, advocates that contemporary women should be free women with an independent spirit. Her works not only investigate the relationship between women and society, but also the living conditions of LGBT people under the patriarchal system.For example, One Person's Complaint (2007) tells the story of a female worker who was fired for unknown reasons and tells the camera about her experience of having no access to help, expressing the problem that the lower class in the patriarchal system has no human rights. In Wedding Night, 2008, the dismembered body is presented to the audience, and they put the female body together by the reflection pictures of a mirror to express the implication of male sexual organs, a symbol of patriarchy. However, male figures do not exist in the picture, which reflects the artist's queer spirit and criticism of the patriarchal system. The wedding night is supposed to be happy, but the pictures are filled with horror, subverting the popular conception of heterosexual marriage.
Feminist artist Jie Jiang is a sculptor active at the forefront of Chinese feminist art. She is good at creating huge sculptures and placing them in public spaces to invite the general public to feel and think about the real survival status of women in society. She breaks the gender difference between men and women by integrating biological sex characteristics, expressing the equality of different genders, and making the audience more intuitively feel the prejudice faced by women. The sculpture, More than one and a half tons, has many long thin wires pulling through 3 tons of glass fiber reinforced plastic, resin, mud, and brown strings of cloth hanging in mid-air. The combination of genitals and lace cleverly reflects the gender under the fusion of different materials, shows the inclination of the transgender community and constructs the androgynous object. It presents the fragility of human beings with a shocking sensory experience and arouses the viewer's thinking toward vulnerable groups. Equality should be the most basic right that every natural person has to have to live in a social group. It is different from the former, smaller sculpture. Less than one and a half tons and uses soft wedding materials such as silk, gauze, lace, and crystal to create a sacred bodylike scene. Decorative gauze, lace, and silk are placed around to show a kind of poetry referring to women. But Less than one and a half tons has the same shape and the same theme as More than one and a half tons, it reflects a sense of harmony, affirms the vulnerability and strength of women, and guides the audience to rethink their cognition of the female group. The contradiction between women and society contained in feminist art is a problem shared by women all over the world. The spread of feminist art also benefits from the influence of globalization. Through the picture album, exhibition publicity, and art exhibitions held in the past to promote female art circulated in the world, such as the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, UCCA Art, and so on, famous international exhibitions in different countries in different areas of exhibition, the profound meaning to society of a work of art, Under the influence of art economics, female art can easily achieve crosscultural communication. Especially after 1995, with the highly developed Internet and the flattening of cultural exchanges, feminist art has achieved a high degree of dissemination around the world. In view of the different social problems of women in different regions, feminist art has reflected the characteristics of diversification and localization in the disseminating process.
Feminist art is one way for women to fight for human rights and promote gender equality. It has great significance in the disintegration of the patriarchal system and social stereotypes. Eliminate gender identity of male and female, keep personal differences to create a wonderful condition for the realization of an abundant and colorful personality. "Without the feminist movement, I wouldn't exist; an enormous amount of artwork that we take for granted wouldn't exist; and a lot of the subject matter that we assume can be encompassed by art wouldn't exist. The feminist movement exponentially expanded what art is and how we look at art and who is considered to be included in the discourse of art-making. " says Kiki Smith [11]. Feminist art from various countries communicates and develops with each other. They complete each other. Female artists promote women's awareness of the thinking of an unequal social system through artistic expression. Encourage women to have the courage to fight against gender discrimination and oppression so as to promote the development of gender equality worldwide.