Li Hong, who also trained in Beijing, had problems with her art in China because her works portray young women in various situations from a very personal point of view. The intense emotional disposition of her characters met strong opposition. Having lived in New York for five years, she has recently returned to live in China. For the exhibit she offers portraits of young women of various racial identities in modern dress and in urban situations drawn in pencil on paper with the skill of a classical draughtsman. With this broad cultural basis, Li Hong is able to suggest the similarity of the problems of women throughout the modern world, in beautiful renderings of young women.

Feng Jyali also continues to explore figure painting in which she was trained. Often the subject is intimate portraits of herself and her friends. In close up view, the women are shown in private settings, like the bedroom and bathroom. Similar to portraits of hothouse plants, these portraits are predominantly colored brilliant red and pink. Dynamically patterned textile designs executed in raucous colors compete with the human form. The women look out directly at the viewer, who has entered their intimate space. The air is thick with expectation. In early portraits the women have bright pink faces, reminiscent of Chinese women, who after the Cultural Revolution were fascinated with Western cosmetics. Echoes of the traditional Chinese opera with its female impersonators and the multitude of cheerful dolls made for export are also evoked. Exploring other media, Feng started painting on clothing. She used worn out workers’ clothes and painted them with MTV like images of young women dressed for a night out on the town. These are sexual creatures, scantily clad in the newest body revealing fashions, their faces coated with layers of makeup.

Cui Xiuwen was trained as a figurative artist in Beijing and early in her career she painted studio images of naked men. In dark tones that were barely polychromatic, the male body was presented with the focus clearly expressed, through composition, perspective drawing, light, and color on the genitals of the model. This type of view was in opposition to the academic practice of mainly depicting female subjects, and when using male models, to cover their genitals. More recently Cui has turned to the video camera as the instrument of her expression. She is exploring the new social conventions and practices of contemporary China. Hidden cams in the ladies room reveal the urban nightlife of paid female companions, phone sex, and pornography. Cui’s stance is somewhat enigmatic; her straightforward recording of these sexual events is cool and contemplative.

True to her training Yuan Yaoming continues to paint oil and canvas paintings. She trawls the contemporary urban scene for her imagery: figures from computer games and video technology dominate the work of the last few years. A series of paintings juxtapose the image of a combative female placed in the context of the pottery soldiers of the First Emperor of China’s clay army; one of the most fabulous archaeological finds that is ubiquitous in the commercial images for tourism in the media. These ancient silent soldiers accompany the noisy attack of the video world and in this confrontation the questions of peace and war, past and future, male and female are presented like a meditation on the yin-yang duality of the ancient philosophy.

Such themes are central in the poetry of ZHANG ER, who born and educated in Beijing, now lives in the US. Her poem Noodles focuses on one of the most essential characteristics of Chinese culture—its food. As everyone knows in China, when meeting someone, “Have you eaten?” (“Ni chilema?”) is the greeting, not “How are you?” Here the warm comfort of a bowl of noodles is the nexus for woman as caretaker, homemaker, sensual temptress, mother, and waitress. The homeland noodles link the poet to her seduction of man, to fragmentary liaisons, and both the deep love of child and worn memories of childhood. These are universalized: Noodles from so many places—Yang Chow, Singapore—merge on the American menu. Stirring memories in the heart, China is seen in the dregs of tealeaves. So the poet straddles the fragile space between the past and the present, China and America, partner and solitude. Pondering the contradictions and frustrations of the states of in between and becoming.

Thus, in the work of these eight artists clearly addresses the question of their femininity, their body, and their cultural identity. The media is varied, from traditional draughtsmanship, to figure painting, photography, video, and mixed media installation. The voices are varied as well, but the view is consistently personal, highly emotive, and centered on the physical body as the medium of expression. By viewing their work one sees the struggles of these contemporary Asian artists living in the US, London, and Beijing to maintain their cultural identity. Their art is a record of their attempt to straddle two worlds, to hold onto the things of value from the past and merge them with those of the future.
 

XING FEI

Xing Fei trained as a figurative painter and in traditional brush painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and throughout her life she has worked in both traditions. Much of Xing’s life is distinguished by this dichotomy. Born in Beijing she has lived in New York for over a decade and is a dedicated artist and mother of three. She seeks to explore new types of art adapting technological processes and computer-generated images, ancient brush technique and figurative painting. Early in her career Xing focused on calligraphy, a largely male dominated medium. Although historically elite women were at times praised for learning to write and having a graceful hand, this feminine hand was not the style she appropriated. Rather, she chose the distinguished “grass script” type of calligraphy of the monk Huaisu (735-800).

In 2001 Xing returned to the figural painting in which she was trained. She used mixed media to document the events in her life in a series of 19 works on paper, entitled Journey. Using the computer, she combines photo transfers, text, and illustrations from famous works of literature. Then with watercolor and ink, she hand paints the multi-layered images. Several pieces reproduce a photograph that was published in the local newspaper, XiaoPengyou, (Little Friend) in 1966, which praised her for illustrating one of Chairman Mao’s poems extolling the role of women in society, exemplified by his phrase “Women hold up half the sky”. (Discontinued during Cultural Revolution, the magazine is once again published weekly.) In the photo she holds the brush upright with great concentration. Another piece is based on a famous passage from The Dream of the Red Chamber, the Ming dynasty novel. A woodcut illustration of the dramatic scene presents two slender women standing in a traditional Chinese woman’s bedchamber reading a love letter. Interspersed into the composition are modern photographs of her three children sprawling in the foreground. Laughing, Xing explains this is the outcome of the amorous letter. A Qing dynasty woodcut of Chinese bandits attacking the invader Manchu troops is the basis on a second work. Text from the history of the era is printed over the image and at the top is a photo of Xing and three friends dressed in Mao jackets; the analogy is clear, they the modern protectors of the realm. The illustration of an infamous historical account of the gruesome beheading of a Chinese woman by Manchu troops \occupies another one of the series. On the right are sections of Mao’s writing and above is an idyllic view of a Chinese landscape: a grand archway leads to a covered walk in an imperial garden. This piece combines the turmoil of China’s history, distant and recent, with the tranquility and beauty of the landscape.

A series of three painted canvases of 2002 also entitled Journey of 2002 are far more biographical in their content. Inspired by the events of September 11, Xing linked the terrorist attacks with her experiences in China. Like many artists who lived through the Cultural Revolution, Xing met the chaos of that tragic day with a dreaded sense of familiarity. In the first she explores Growing Up. On the right is the photograph of her as a child painting, an image that anticipated her future vocation. Many of the images are taken from her childhood diary that her father discovered among his papers. Xing describes her work as a woman’s self-discovery. Photographs of the streets of China, passages of text, illustrations from Ming novels, and bits of history are combined in overlapping layers. The second piece, The Cultural Revolution is dedicated to the chaotic events of the seventies that upended everyone’s life. Here the conformity of the Maoist uniforms worn by men and women reveals how the society repressed sexuality, expressions of femininity, and the display of human affection. As Maoist garments cloaked the bodies to achieve conformity, Maoist dictums inhibited freedom of expression and shrouded intellectual development.

The third painting is dedicated to fertility: it is a celebration of Giving Life. Xing Fei explores her own procreative cycle as well as the ancient images of the fertility goddess, a cult that has re-emerged in China in the wake of the dissolution of the Cultural Revolution. She has photographs of herself just prior to giving birth embed in the composition that celebrates, as the double entendre Chinese title suggests, “giving life” and “life style”. The American flag may also be seen in the complex composition, as testimony to the freedoms in the US that sustain individual expression and procreation.

For the exhibit Xing has made a new group of works that are a continuation of the Journey series. Using Chinese landscape she inserts her image, or that of her family, into the picture. In one a traditional literati style monochrome ink painting occupies most of the area; it is a reproduction of one of the landscape artists she most admires, the Qing dynasty literati Xiao Yutong. The text and scattered images are from the Mustard Seed Manual, a Ming dynasty how to book for artistic compositions, and the photo of her painting. A second work features a photo from 1968 of Xing Fei and her brother in the park near Tiananmen Square where they played during the Cultural Revolution; hidden, they watched the great parades in the square. In the center ground is an illustration of an enchanted garden from a Ming novel and the text above is a description from the Mustard Seed Manual on how to paint rocks in the traditional manner. Xing Fei is reconstructing her life, her youth and training in art in China, her aesthetic experiences, and her personal artistic proclivities. From her vantage point in New York, as a mother and artist, she looks back to her past and sees the gradual process that integrated the varied experiences of her youth. The third work features a photo of Xing Fei’s father holding her in his arms on a white marble bridge in front of Tiananmen Square; her brother and cousin stand nearby. A second photo overlay is of the house in which she was born, and above is a bedchamber scene from an illustrated edition of the erotic novel Golden Lotus. Xing says, these early illustrations of the novel were not erotic, but the connotations were. She explains during the Cultural Revolution sexual activity was repressed resulting in a kind of hypocrisy. Sex took place in her Beijing home (resulting is her birth) just as it was described hundreds of years earlier in the Ming novel. Last is the image of the Goddess of fertility, Xing’s daughter in a fanciful Chinese cap, and a transfer photo of Xing Fei naked, on the brink of giving birth to the child in the picture. The Chinese text, referencing the great Daoist text, the Daodejing, reads, Under heaven, since the beginning, there was the Heavenly mother, affirming the philosophical tradition of the equality of the Yin and Yang, female and male principles of the universe. In works such as these, Xing Fei has integrated her childhood and the cultural traditions of China and her present life.

Xing Fei has had exhibitions at the Hammond Museum and a number of colleges: Columbia University, Vassar, SUNY Albany, Sarah Lawrence, Lehman College, Bard College, Yale University Art Gallery and Smith College in Massachusetts. Xing Fei exhibits at the Ethan Cohen Fine Arts Gallery in New York City. 

LI HONG

Li Hong, trained as afigural artist at the Central Academy in Beijing, works in a number of media and formats.  Early in her career she created muted canvases that presented women, singly and in pairs, in home interiors.  The figures are restrained in their physical gestures and their faces seem filled with expressions of expectation.  Such disturbing images were very much a part of her artistic intent.  In part Li Hong was responding to the restrictive environment in Beijing academic art circles where depicting feelings was eschewed and the emphasis was on technical training.

On a trip to Europe in 1995-96 Li had first hand experience in viewing Western artists like Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, and Lucien Freud. Her resolution reaffirmed, she continued to explore the emotional possibilities of color, suggestive shapes, distortion of figures, gesture, and facial expression. Paintings from 1997-98 employ brilliant colors, complex compositional patterns, and industrial type settings.  Machinery and cars provide the backdrop for what at times are surreal visions.  Within the masculine environments, the women appear fragile, threatened, and afraid.  A familiar setting resembles a basement with its boiler and pipes, among which young beauties entwine themselves.  In one painting a girl, wearing an emerald green dress, embraces the boiler, she looks like a Western advert for plumbing: an imaginary wind blows her locks, her nails and lips painted a crisp red. 

Resistance to Li Hong’s work in China was consistent, her entries into group shows were restricted and in one extraordinary event,  because of their highly suggestive content, her paintings were turned against the wall.  This academic attitude has roots in traditional values in China, where pictorial art did not seek to portray the interior life of characters.  Landscape and calligraphic compositions prevailed and figural painting was largely limited to scenes of historical figures in landscape settings.  Women were rarely shown, for art was supposed to be morally uplifting and subjects that might arouse the senses were not considered appropriate for artistic expression.  As a result of her confrontations with the artistic world, Li Hong intensified the tenor of her paintings.  The mood of the subjects grew more strident.  Malevolence to women is harshly depicted in the series called Conspiracy, begun in 1996. Women are placed in cars as glamorous passengers, but interior views of the mechanical parts reveal scenes of physical violence.  Injured and naked, women are caught in the auto’s machinery.  Shining primary colors explode in these works—the automotive industrial palette of red, yellow, green, and blue.  Li Hong explains her use of bright color, limited groups of figures and the plain settings are metaphors of the current social environment. Li Hong’s oil on canvases figurative paintings depict modern day women.  Soon after forming the Sirens, Li Hong moved to New Jersey with her husband, and her work changed again.

 On a trip to Beijing, Li Hong found she was pregnant and went to the doctor. She was denied a pre-birth certificate because she did not have official permission to be pregnant and as such did not qualify for health care. The Pre-birth certificate, required in order to be admitted to any medical facilities,  is an administrative method insuring the one child-one family policy. Thus, in accordance with China’s population explosion, personal decisions like getting pregnant are determined by the state, and Li Hong was shocked to find she was treated as if she had committed a crime.  Using this clinic’s record denying pre-birth care from one of the leading hospitals in Beijing together with medical records like the KCG and ultra sound test results that were obtained in New Jersey, she made the painting Pre-Birth Certificate  A large red stop sign dominates the work, and the word stop is employed as a frequent decorative device.

 Last year Li Hong and her family moved back to Beijing; she never adjusted to American suburban life with its insularities and status dominated activities.  Back in Beijing Li Hong is still engaged in making art, but her political outlook has only sharpened since her five year stint in the US.  She is more convinced than ever of the universality of these problems. She recently said,

In her drawings, Li Hong’s skill as a draughtsman is readily apparent. Fine pencils detail every nuance of the meticulous portraits.  She executes delicate drawings of young women of indefinite racial identification on city streets.  In desultory postures they stand by the subway, lean against a street lamp, sit on a stoop.  Shown in pairs in an inner city setting, the girls cling to one another, for mutual protection. In an untitled drawing from 2000, the women are less confrontational than those painted a few years before.  Here, the paired female figures impassively look out at the viewer, who is privy to their suffering. In an interview Li Hong has explained her process and her long affiliation with the Feminist movement.
 

YAQIN BETTY CHOU

YaQin Betty Chou’s art is an exploration of self. On the most obvious level, Chou seeks the deep parity she shares with her mother in several different kinds of images. In the aftermath of the typical adolescent withdrawal and rejection of familial identity, Chou now is trying recover her lineage, her connections with her still estranged mother, and her hybrid cultural upbringing.  Her family emigrated from China and landed in Columbia, South America, where she was brought up speaking Spanish and Toishanese. In 1990, at the age of 12, she and her family arrived in NY. Chou learned Cantonese in Chinatown,and  English in junior high and high school in Manhattan; she also  worked throughout her college years  in New York.  Chou is the new kind of world citizen, bearer of several cultures and living in NY; the future belongs to people like Chou. As an artist she sensitively analyzes the layers of her connections. Her pictorial constructions derive from her psyche as well as her body. Chou turns in to find herself, to her family, and to her body and Chou has come out of herself to find her identity as an artist.

 But Chou is also in the here and now:  Touched by the political and social issues of being an American, she has been caught up in a number of art works commemorating 9-11 and the situation of Asian Americans in Chinatown.  Unlike the glamorous male émigrés from China whose celebrity graces the NY art criticism media, Chou explains to those who seek to involve the local community in Asian American art, that as her parents worked relentlessly, her mother sewing clothes in a sweat shop, her father as a cook in a fast food restaurant 7 days a week, there was no time for museums or exhibitions that celebrated their ancestry and their culture.  For them and for herself, Chou seeks to reestablish links with her culture  

The installation work 4048 is made of 1000 squares of white cloth on which the number 4048 is silk screened on white.  The number is her current address, a small apartment which she shares with three other roommates.  The piece is pristine. The crisp white delicate cloth is starched and ironed, cut into 6” squares with a pinking sheer. After being silk-screened, it is assembled into what she describes as a bathroom installation. The piece recalls her youth in Columbia, where as a small child she lived in a number of places; one in particular had bathroom with white tiles on which she would draw images with the steamy drops of water.  Chou uses this simple cotton cloth rather than paper in a gesture to connect with her mother who was a seamstress by profession.  Acquired from the Chinese supermarket, strings used for cooking are sewn to each corner of the square of cloth and then tied together to form a quilt pattern.  Chou says the strings represent her relationship with her father who she wanted to be part of this artistic process.  Using these walls of cloth, she creates an enclosed rectangular space. Thus, 4089 evokes many associations, her parents and their occupations; her current address; the homes she experienced as a child in Columbia; and her future dream house.

Sometimes her daring explorations recreate cellular organisms in brush and ink on paper as if she were searching in her microscopic biology for the explanation of her being.  These drawings that evoke the developing oocyte following fertilization, the forces of her genetic material, are made with ink and brush in the traditional Chinese manner; though such a technique is not readily apparent to viewers. But to Chou it is another connection to Chinese art, which is dominated by brushwork. So too she works in black, white, and red, the dominant palette of Chinese aesthetic expression. A series of drawings made with red ink comprise circular forms that appear to organically evolve.  The creation process is an act of meditation.  Although the forms are abstract, they have a very specific association for Chou.  She began For Ah Pah by meditating on her father and her childhood memories, drawing without stop for two to three hours. The forms suggest anatomical parts, but look more like microscopic organisms. In another it is her mother on whom her thoughts focus.

The desire to forge bonds with her mother from whom Chou is physically separated and emotionally alienated is the heart of a number of images.  One work is an attempt to create a family portrait of mother and child, for no such photo exists.  A series of ten prints bear a multilayered and indistinct image. ID has a photo of Chou as a child; the second is a randomly selected portrait of a woman holding a child from Western art. The combined photos are manipulated making them less distinct and ghostly in appearance. With a Polaroid Junior Daylab, they are printed into an adhesive image, which is applied to a cotton square. This ephemeral portrait of a mythical family is a sad negation of childhood memories, of maternal protection, of ties that bind.  In a second series of self-family portraits Chou began with an image of a female pelvic bone from Gray’s Book of Anatomy. Over this she laid down a picture of herself as a child, the first photo id of her from a pre-kindergarten school in Santa Marta, Columbia. The images were printed onto small pieces of cloth, which she arduously and carefully hemmed like a handkerchief. Traces of the skeletal anatomy are visible beneath the overlaid portraits of faces. Genre issues are most apparent in the creating of this lady like accessory, imprinted with the image of feminine anatomical parts associated with sexuality and reproduction, and her own childhood  portrait. Chou says this is meditation on society’s insistence on procreation to make a woman complete. Chou asserts that such pressures are without merit.

 Closer yet to a family portrait is the group of tiny prints in which a photo of Chou’s head is superimposed over one of her mother’s. Her mother is sixteen and she is three years old. The resultant image, only  1”  square, is printed in red in the lower righthand corner of a piece of paper 8” X 10”. Most of the paper is blank, the elusive family portrait waits to be fully written.

 Chou has worked in the art field to support herself with a number of work experiences. As an arts specialist she has worked with children. She held a residency at the Lower East Side Printshop Key Holder 2002-2004, Artist in Residence at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY. Her work has been exhibited at the Hammond Museum, Bard College, Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx River Art Center, The Annex, M3 Projects gallery and Museo de Arte Acarigua, Araure, Venzuela South America.

CUI XIUWEN

Cui Xiuwen, one of the four Sirens, also began as a figurative painter much in the style of her friends. In the last few years however, she has turned to videos. In these she explores the issues of femininity and sexuality in contemporary China.  In one video from 2000 entitled Ladies a hidden camera was placed in the ladies room of a Beijing night club.  Through the secret lens one saw the young women adjusting their make up, hiking up their bra, fixing their hair, changing clothes, and rolling up small wads of cash and hiding them in their undergarments.  Their continuous banter revealed the nature of many of these liaisons, and one girl even threatened to tell the john’s wife if he did not pay up.  This kind of coarse interaction is atypical of communist China where morality was clearly promulgated and all attempts at intimacy were castigated.  Couples did not dare to touch each other in public and had to have for permission to marry; prostitution, alcohol, drugs, and homosexuality, were strictly outlawed.

Cui does not wish to proselytize or comment on the social situation in China. Unlike the other Sirens she is not vocal about feminist issues, claming that she wants only to present the situation for others to experience without her commentary. This seems somewhat disingenuous considering  the very torrid nature of her output.  She says she turned from painting to video for greater freedom of expression.  Indeed the video format is far less personal than oil painting and its range of potential images is limitless.  The absence of men in her recent work should be noted, since her earlier paintings featured them. Close-up views of their naked bodies were displayed in her oil paintings.  Sprawled in the darkened interiors of the artist’s studio, the subject was harshly lit and drawn with extreme foreshortening, which rendered these intimate portraits like dramatic still photograph from a film.  A sense of a narrative, a narrative interrupted, was conveyed in the abrupt fashion in which the figure was painted and the harsh quality of the light.  The focus was inescapably on the figure’s genitals, due to the placement of the image, compositional elements that directed the eye to the lower center of the canvas, and the lighting.  These paintings were in direct response to the Chinese art school practice where female nude models were available, but men were rarely used, and when they were, they were modestly covered.

The video on view Twice, created in 2001 (10 minutes) is a further exploration of the new sexuality in China. Here Cui tackles phone sex: she, alone in her apartment, engages in licentious repartee while she caresses herself. Cui says: