Wu Mali, Secret Garden, 1999

New Geographies of Feminist Art is an international conference, organized by Sonal Khullar and Sasha Welland, that examines the practice, circulation, and cross-cultural significance of feminist art from Asia. Through a lively intellectual exchange and consequent publication, we seek to understand how Asian women have negotiated changes in the contemporary art world and intervened in politics of visual representation. By staging an interdisciplinary conversation among art historians, anthropologists, historians, and Asian and cultural studies scholars, as well as artists and curators, the conference explores a feminist art history grounded in a comparative framework and the Asian context.

Sonal Khullar

Sasha Welland

Waste, student art exhibition, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2010, photo: Sonal Khullar.

Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity, 2007.

Historians and literary scholars have struggled with the ideas of world history and world literature, but their efforts have largely run parallel with each other. Taking cue from discussions of world history and world literature, how might we conceive of world art and the place of Asian feminist art within it?  What new geographies are possible when we consider Asian feminist art on the world scale?

Jenny Lin is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Art and Art History at the Universityof Oregon. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History, with a focus in contemporary Chinese art, from the University of California, Los Angeles. She completed her B.A. in Architectural Studies and Italian Studies at Brown University. Jenny’s general research interests lie in the relations between twentieth and twenty-first century art and design praxes and broader social phenomena, such as colonialism, urbanization, and globalization. Her current book project studies imaginations and constructions of cosmopolitan Shanghai vis-à-vis art, architecture, and film produced within and about the city, and addresses issues of Chinese modernity and cultural hybridity. Her research has been supported by fellowships from UCLA’s Graduate Division, the UC Pacific Rim Research program, the U.S. Department of Education’s FLAS program, and the Confucius Institute at Fudan University. Jenny has presented and published her research in a number of venues, including Columbia University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Association for Asian Studies annual conference, at which she chaired a panel on contemporary Asian art, and in X-TRA, Frieze, and Shanghai Wenhua (Shanghai Culture). In the art practice and curatorial realms, Jenny has worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, Shanghai’s Space Art Gallery, and at artist Gu Wenda’s studio. She is currently organizing an exhibition of contemporary Shanghai-based photography in conjunction with the White Box Gallery in Portland.

Lin is the moderator for Panel: The City.

798 Space Gallery, Dashanzi Art District, Beijing, 2004, photo: Neil Conroy

The history of feminist art, as presented in Western museums and classrooms, tends to be dominated by work produced in metropolitan centers like Paris and New York. If we ground our investigations of feminist art in locations like Shanghai or Mumbai, what networks and affiliations emerge? How do women artists in Asia draw on and depart from traditions of feminist art in the West? How do they carve art worlds—systems of commission, transmission, production, and reception—that do not always circuit through the Global North?

Doris Sung
York University
Chinese Women Artists’ Global Presence, 1900-1937

Chin-tao Wu
Academia Sinica
Missing in Action: Women Artists and Biennials

Kajri Jain
University of Toronto
Simryn Gill, geographer

Moderator:
Karin Zitzewitz
Michigan State University