Matching Items (4)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Women's Studies
- All Subjects: Ink painting, Chinese
- Creators: Fahlman, Betsy
Description
The turmoil that China endured during the twentieth century triggered a series of social and political revolutions. As China struggled to resolve domestic questions of dynasticism or democracy and nationalism or communism, Western industrialization and imperialism dragged China rapidly into the globalizing world. Likewise, Chinese painting had to confront the West, as Chinese artists dealt with the twentieth-century version of the recurring question of modernizing Chinese painting for its times: how does one reconcile an ancient painting tradition with all the possibilities Western interactions introduced? This dissertation focuses on one artist's lifelong struggle, often overlooked, to answer this question. By examining C. C. Wang (1907-2003) and his life in art, this case study reveals broader truths about how twentieth century Chinese diaspora painters, such as Wang, modernized the tradition of Chinese ink painting.
Wang's reputation as a connoisseur of ancient Chinese painting has overshadowed his own artwork, creating a dearth of research on his artistic development. Using public and private sources, this dissertation applied stylistic analysis to track this development. The analysis reveals an artist's lifelong endeavor to establish a style that would lift the Chinese painting tradition into a modern era, an endeavor inspired by modern Western art ideas and a desire to play a role in the larger movement of elevating Chinese painting. The argument is made that these efforts establish Wang as an influential twentieth century Chinese ink painter.
To clarify Wang's role within the broader movement of Chinese diaspora painters, this dissertation employs a comparison study of Wang with such established twentieth century ink painting artists as Zhang Daqian, Liu Guosong, and Yu Chengyao. It is
asserted that the 1949 diaspora forced this cohort of artists to adjust their style and to transcend traditional Chinese painting by integrating newly-salient ideas from Western art, particularly the abstract movement. Meanwhile, the essential Chinese identity in their art collectively became more significant. The solidarity of purpose and identity is a distinctive part of the answer this group of twentieth century Chinese diaspora painters proposed to their generation's inherited challenge of enriching the tradition.
Wang's reputation as a connoisseur of ancient Chinese painting has overshadowed his own artwork, creating a dearth of research on his artistic development. Using public and private sources, this dissertation applied stylistic analysis to track this development. The analysis reveals an artist's lifelong endeavor to establish a style that would lift the Chinese painting tradition into a modern era, an endeavor inspired by modern Western art ideas and a desire to play a role in the larger movement of elevating Chinese painting. The argument is made that these efforts establish Wang as an influential twentieth century Chinese ink painter.
To clarify Wang's role within the broader movement of Chinese diaspora painters, this dissertation employs a comparison study of Wang with such established twentieth century ink painting artists as Zhang Daqian, Liu Guosong, and Yu Chengyao. It is
asserted that the 1949 diaspora forced this cohort of artists to adjust their style and to transcend traditional Chinese painting by integrating newly-salient ideas from Western art, particularly the abstract movement. Meanwhile, the essential Chinese identity in their art collectively became more significant. The solidarity of purpose and identity is a distinctive part of the answer this group of twentieth century Chinese diaspora painters proposed to their generation's inherited challenge of enriching the tradition.
ContributorsHua, Ming (Author) / Brown, Claudia (Thesis advisor) / Baker, Janet (Committee member) / Fahlman, Betsy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This thesis expands the scope of literature surrounding the work of Juno Calypso, Christina Quarles, and Lisa Yuskavage by increasing the scope of their theoretical interpretations. Juno Calypso’s case requires establishing a critical foundation for her interrogations of domestic space, her subversions of feminine performance—particularly through accusatory address of the gaze—and her demonstrations of the new-hysterical process that I argue for via her alter-ego, “Joyce.” Similarly, I emphasize Christina Quarles’ subversions of art historical traditions, such as the gaze, meta-framing, and figural language, instead of her explorations into race and linguistic titular play. Finally, Lisa Yuskavage’s inclusion will bring discussions of her contemporary artworks fully into the present, leaving behind the scandalous-or-not questions plaguing her oeuvre in favor of contemporary figural reinterpretation. Through comparisons of each one’s approach to contemporary, artistic feminist theories and dilemmas, the artists convey informative insights into today’s visual culture. The thesis brings these ruminations to light through study of Calypso’s, Quarles’, and Yuskavage’s shared themes and characteristics, including subconsciously-influenced practices, multiplicity, and uncanny space. I account for one of Calypso’s most crucial yet divergent strategies of spatial uncanniness—gendered space. Calypso, Quarles, and Yuskavage are also linked by their ostensibly domestic spaces and featuring feminized figures. Yuskavage uses hyperfeminine performance as means of questioning the conventional and the pleasure one expected to receive from it; Quarles instead uses ambiguity to challenge the traditional white femininity assigned to subjecthood in order to reinforce her dissolution of race and gender. Unanswered performance and gaze questions of femininity, feminine performance and feminine rituals drive Calypso’s photographs, in which an onlooker’s voyeurism is highlighted by their mid-procedure state. Yuskavage uses the home as extension of cheesy self, a site of performance, but Quarles uses domestic spaces as sites or causes of internal struggle. Calypso is closer aligned to Yuskavage’s intersectional-feminist anxieties than Quarles’ post-pandemic ones. The temporal span of the artworks’ creation (2015-2022) is reflective of the dramatic social paradigm shifts experienced by Western societies post-BLM and other social movements, and post-COVID pandemic; the arguments made by this essay will contribute to the understanding of ongoing change experienced by women.
ContributorsBugno, Celia (Author) / Fahlman, Betsy (Thesis advisor) / Anderson, Lisa (Committee member) / Hoy, Meredith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Counter-Landscapes: Performative Actions from the 1970s – Now presents a group of artists working in both natural and urban environments whose work exploits the power of place to address issues of social, environmental, and personal transformation. Through a focused selection of key works made between 1970 and 2019, which extend beyond traditional categories, Counter-Landscapes illuminates how the methodologies created by women artists in the 1970s and 1980s are employed by artists today, both men and women alike. Developing a practice of performative actions, these artists countered the culture that surrounded and oppressed them by embodying the live elements of performance art in order to push for social change. Looking back to the 1960s and the counter-culture mindset of the times, I approach the histories of land, performance, and conceptual art through feminist studies. Then I apply the same feminist approach to philosophical histories of landscape, place, and space. Through a discussion of an extensive range of works by 25 artists, this research seeks to demonstrate the indelible influence of feminist art practice on contemporary art. It brings the work of an innovative generation of women artists—Marina Abramović, Eleanor Antin, Agnes Denes, VALIE EXPORT, Rebecca Horn, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, Lotty Rosenfeld, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Beth Ames Swartz, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles—together with more recent work by artists who have adopted and extended their methods. These artists, both male and female, include Allora & Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Angela Ellsworth, Ana Teresa Fernández, Maria Hupfield, Saskia Jordá, Christian Philipp Müller, Pope.L, Sarah Cameron Sunde, Zhou Tao, and Antonia Wright.
ContributorsMcCabe, Jennifer (Author) / Fahlman, Betsy (Thesis advisor) / Hoy, Meredith (Committee member) / Asmall Willsdon, Dominic (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Social stereotypes in industrial countries have long regarded women as lacking the capacity for understanding the intricacies of machines, from appliances to cars. A major barrier excluding women from technology was the specialized language spoken by those in the industry. It is through my unique perspective as a female Automotive Master Technician that I explore the photographs, paintings, and prints during the interwar period between World War I and World War II created by female artists from a technical point of view. The First World War had artists such as Olive Edis who recorded female ambulance drivers while Dorothy Stevens, Henrietta Mabel May and Anna Airy showcased the skillset of the women machinists. During the interwar period Elsie Driggs rendered monumental structures while capturing the essence of the airplane all in the Precisionist style as Sonia Delaunay used her theory of Simultanism on the inner workings of the Spitfire airplane. For WWII, photographers M. Thérèse Bonney and Ann Roesner both snapped pictures of women operators of the lathe and drill press. Ethel Gabain’s prints displayed women machining parts and Edna Reindel depicted women in shipyards. During the New Deal and WWII, Barbara Wright shot over 2,600 images of women. Finally, Laura Knight painted portraits of award winning women and to uplift the spirits of the public. These artists proved that women were more than capable of understanding this complex language of machines.
ContributorsLanakai, Diem (Author) / Fahlman, Betsy (Thesis advisor) / Brown, Claudia (Committee member) / Reilly, Maura (Committee member) / Cohen, Liz (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021