Dr. Grace S. Fong
Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University
Friday, May 21st, 2021
2:00 PM-3:30 PM PST
Significant work by art historians of China have engaged with issues of gender and women, particularly the representation of women in the genres of “paintings of cultivated ladies” (仕女畫) and “paintings of beauties” (美人畫), from the Tang and Song to the Ming and Qing. Produced at court in early times, the intended audience was male, and the figures represented male conceptions of desired feminine subjectivities. During the Ming and Qing, these genres of painting circulated in a broader social context than in the Tang and Song. This paper explores changes to the production and reception of these painting genres in relation to the rise of women’s literary and artistic culture from the late Ming on. By drawing on the repertory of poetry written by women on viewing paintings and as inscriptions on paintings, I will explore questions about the new female audience and their responses to paintings of beauties and ladies. What were the contexts of viewing? How did women position themselves to the feminine subjectivities implied in paintings meant to appeal to male viewers? Were such paintings produced for a female audience? For women who painted, what visual self-representations did they create and how did they signify their gendered subjectivity?
About the Speaker
Grace Fong is Professor of Chinese Literature and Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University. Author of Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China, she has published widely on classical Chinese poetry and poetics, autobiographical writing, and women writers of late imperial China.
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