Cruel/Loving Bodies

Cruel/Loving Bodies brings together art works in diverse media--sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and video--that reflect upon the interrelated issues of gender and body, particularly in the context of China or the Chinese diaspora. The exhibit participants live in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Great Britain, and the United States. Working from locations and backgrounds that challenge a dichotomous East/West border, they grapple with the question of Chinese identity, but in local contexts with different social and historical conditions. From this rich layering of experience emerges a shared exploration of how personal histories or historical legacies are inscribed on the gendered body. The collective work of these practitioners crossing borders represents social and historical cruelty inflicted upon the body--in the form of physical violence or social regimes of surveillance--but also counters cruelty with a simultaneous focus on the body as a sensual site of love and subversive possibility. They mix cruelty with cuteness, violence with humor, intrusion with intimacy, and repressed histories with metaphors of healing.

The Cruel/Loving Bodies project grew out of a panel of artists who will give presentations in June 2004 at "Feminism in China Since The Women's Bell," an international conference in Shanghai. This conference, jointly sponsored by the Department of History at Fudan University and the Center for Chinese Studies and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan, aims to bridge the intellectual gap between China scholars in and outside of China by engendering the historiography of modern China. Coordinated to coincide with the centennial of the publication of Nüjie Zhong [The Women's Bell], the organizers invited participants to address topics that would enhance scholarly awareness of the genealogy of Chinese feminism.

With the Cruel/Loving Bodies project, we endeavor to open a dialogue between scholars of gender and artists working in the Mainland and Chinese diaspora. Both contemporary art and feminism are fields that have evolved through international exchange, yet local conditions deeply influence their cultural production. In order to elucidate this point and debunk the notion of hierarchies of First and Third World feminism, the artists in Cruel/Loving Bodies present individual visions of what it means to be an artist engaged with questions of gender. They "speak" alongside each other, from different locations of Chinese-ness, to the cross-cultural exchanges that shape feminist thought and practice.

Over the last two decades, Chinese contemporary art from the Mainland has exerted an increasing presence in international art circles, but men have dominated the avant-garde scene. As response and provocation to this trend, this exhibit places women and the female body at the heart of its inquiry. This insistence on making women visible is grounded, however, in an understanding of gender as a cultural construction dependent on female/male relationality. Moving beyond the ghettoizing effect of exhibiting under the name of "women's art," this group of artists centers the female body within the nuanced context of a female/male dialogue. For example, Cruel/Loving Bodies presents the work of two artistic teams, Wu Weihe & Bai Chongmin and Lesley Sanderson & Neil Conroy. Both partnerships create art collaboratively, as a dialogue between different gender and cultural positions, and demonstrate how questions of gender or feminism do not remain exclusive to women.

This model of collaboration guides the Cruel/Loving Bodies experiment in crossing lines of gender, national culture, and art practice/criticism. The exhibit has emerged from more than a year of ongoing conversation; it is not simple a group of individual artists assembled by an authoritative curator. With a focus on interaction, we intend to draw out points of contention and commonality, as we present a multivalent expression of the complexities and tensions surrounding Chinese-ness, cultural authenticity, gender identity, and feminism.

Fudan University, Shanghai
Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai
798 Space, Beijing
Association for Asian Studies China and Inner Asia Council