| DATE: | Saturday, September 13, 2008, 9:00 AM - 5:00 pm |
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| PLACE: | Museum Theater, Berkeley Art Museum, 2621 Durant Avenue |
| SPONSORS: | Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Korean Studies, Mills College Art Department, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Korea Foundation |
Note: Registration is free but required. For registration or lunch reservations, click here.
"Places at the Table: Asian Women Artists and Gender Dynamics," explores issues facing Asian women artists today. Speakers will seek to illuminate factors that foster and inhibit the creativity of Asian women artists from three perspectives: one, women whose art, implicitly or explicitly, serves an activist agenda; two, women who work within the framework of a traditional society and how they adapt to, challenge, or find their inspiration in its structures; and finally, the dynamics of participating in a global network of modern art as women artists.
Participants include Hung Liu, Honghee Kim, Margo Machida, Cheeyun Kwon, Midori Yoshimoto, Yong Soon Min, Zhang O, Youngna Kim, Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker, Mayumi Oda, Inson Choy, Hyungmin Chung, Sandra Cate, Joan Kee, Patricia Graham, Junghee Lee, Pamela Blotner, and Charlotte Horlyck.
The symposium, a collaboration between UC Berkeley and Mills College, will include discussions with artists represented in the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive exhibition "Mahjong"; the Mills College Art Museum exhibition, "The Offering Table: Korean Women Activist Artists"; and the solo show "Goddesses" in the Institute of East Asian Studies Gallery.
The afternoon prior to the conference, the Center for Korean Studies will host a special colloquium on Korean women artists at the Institute of East Asian Studies.
Following the symposium, attendees are welcomed to join a reception at the Mills College Art Museum.
Pamela Blotner
Under the Wire: Women Artists in Burma
This paper will focus on five contemporary Burmese artists — Phyu Mon, K.T. Zinn, Nann Nann, Ma Thanegi, and Htay Htay Myint — and the political, and cultural developments that have influenced their work over the past 20 years. Once known as the "Rice Bowl of Asia," Burma has degenerated into an isolated, desperately poor country where 26% of the population lives under the national poverty line. Since August 1988, when military troops crushed a student uprising, the ruling junta has tried to quash what it sees as potential rebellion fermented by artists and activists. Numerous women artists who worked with or befriended opposition leader and Noble Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi have been arrested or forced to flee the country. Upon release, these artists — women and men alike — face numerous restrictions in Burma, including bans on the exhibition of their work. Over the past two years, I have interviewed over 30 artists residing in Mandalay and Rangoon, including the five women artists mentioned above. Their struggles under a repressive regime and worsening economy speak of their resilience, creativity, and, ultimately, their desire to forge connects and share ideas with artists beyond their borders.
Sandra Cate
From Outside the Temple to Inside the Big Tent: How Thai Women Artists (Re)Negotiate their Place
Thai women have always claimed position for themselves in early modern and contemporary art practice, despite roots of an artistic tradition grounded in palace and temple — where male monks and male artisans have dominated sculptural and mural production. In addition, women increasing control Thai curatorial practices and have been prominent in gallery ownership and arts enterprises. Sculptor/painter Misiem Yipintsoi, muralist/painter Phaptawan Suwannakudt, painter/installation artist Pinaree Sanpitak, and video/performance artist Araya Rajdamnearnsook are four Thai women who have attained significant recognition both in Thailand and abroad. Curator-arts producers Klaomard Yipintsoi and Gridthiya Gaweewong provide just two examples of Thai women reorganizing the arts agenda in Thailand. This survey of Thai women in the visual arts examines both structural and practical impediments to their wider participation: restrictions on the position of women in Theravada Buddhist temples, the klum or clique formations established at Silpakorn University and throughout the Thai art world that organize exhibitions and provide mutual support, weak governmental arts infrastructure, and lack of public funding for the arts. I also examine Thai women's strategies for promoting their own work and Thai contemporary art generally — through sly and subversive art that furthers feminist perspectives, events such as Womanifesto, and in structural repositioning, both within Thailand and through global networking, education, and exchange.
Linda Inson Choy
Living the Change as Women Artists and Activists
The subject for my presentation will focus on the exhibition currently on view at the Mills College Art Museum, The Offering Table: Activist Women Artists from Korea. My paper will introduce the seven feminist artists in the exhibition who are activists in Korea. The realities of these artists necessitate negotiating the complexities that exists in a society steeped in Confucian tradition which is further complicated by their active engagement in the struggle to exert femininity into an ancient patriarchal moral system. In my presentation I will discuss the artists' history as a feminist art group and their past work projects as activists for women's issues. Their projects have included identity issues surrounding women as housewives and confronting the patriarchal discrimination against femininity as represented by the women's art festival at Jongmyo ancestral shrine in 2000. The project at the Jongmyo shrine irrevocably and permanently transformed the nature of the artists into an activist group evidenced by the nature of their subsequent collaborative projects. With support from the ubiquitous and iconic Guerilla Girls on Tour in 2004, the artists produced a performance art at the Busan Biennial (South Korea) for the women who survived and escaped from a remote island off the coast of Korea which had been a site of sex trafficking industry. Their more recent work involved reviving the lives of historical and anonymous women by giving voice to the women who had "disappeared" from society through malevolence and indifference. The women artists in the exhibition have participated in many international discourses on feminist art and activism and continue to be invited to various events both in Korea and abroad. My paper will conclude with a discussion on the works on view at the Mills College Art Museum and the importance of their activist work in Korea embroiled in the slow process of cultural evolution.
Hyung-Min Chung
Na Na Hye-sok (1896–1946): Being a Modern Woman-Artist
Na Hye-sok has been cited as the first feminist writer and modern painter who led a tragic life after her divorce, caused by her love affair with her husband's close associate. Her life story, literary works and paintings may be reflective of the time when Korea was witnessing both introduction of Western culture and transformation of traditional values. Na openly protested against the social demand for women, "wise mother and good wife" prevailing at that time, and this presentation will look at Na's writing and painting in the context of the development of modern Asian woman.
Patricia Graham
Eri Sayoko and Nakamura Kokei: Transforming Japanese Buddhist Painting into a Modern Art-Craft
Kirikane, the graphic technique consisting of luminous, minute patterns in cut-gold leaf, often applied in conjunction with mineral colors, is a distinguishing feature of many of the finest Japanese Buddhist paintings and sculpture. This technically challenging art dates back to the seventh century C.E, when it was introduced from China. How two talented and dedicated women — Eri Sayoko (1945–2007) and Nakamura Keiboku (active professionally since 1980) — have been working to preserve and revitalize this tradition in Japan today is the subject of this talk. Their achievements are significant because the art form in which they specialize was formerly dominated by men. Their ability to achieve success in this art hints at monumental changes to Japanese society in the post World War II era. Most well-known contemporary Japanese women artists work in non-traditional art forms and seek international recognition. But, as these two women reveal, women have also made inroads and assumed leadership roles in endangered, conservative craft traditions such as kirikane, from which they were formerly, publicly excluded. Tragically, Eri Sayoko passed away suddenly last year at the peak of her career, five years after being designated as a Living National Treasure.
Discussion of contemporary Japanese women artists rarely mentions women like Eri and Nakamura because of the structure of artists' organizations in Japan. Although old Japanese Buddhist paintings are considered fine art, the work of makers of Buddhist sculpture and painting today are designated by the Japanese art establishment as "art crafts" (bijutsu kogei). As such, artists who specialize in these art forms gain recognition for showing their work in domestic craft, rather than fine art, exhibitions. Rarely are these arts shown abroad. Furthermore, both Nakamura and Eri work closely together with their husbands (Mukoyoshi Yuboku and Eri Kokei respectively), both Buddhist sculptors, in their own small ateliers (of the sort traditionally headed by men), to create imagery for use by Buddhist institutions and their lay followers as sacred religious icons.
Yet Eri and Nakamura have themselves been quietly working to reinvigorate this conservative Buddhist painting tradition through their deep study and original conceptualizations of kirikane and Buddhist painting. Eri applied inventive variants of traditional Buddhist kirikane patterns on elegant, secular functional objects that harmonized with modern aesthetic sensibilities, including screens, wall hangings, and small boxes. Her original designs were highly acclaimed. Nakamura is now engaged in an approximately four year project to create a replica of a set of two large, rare, thirteenth century mandala paintings long ago removed from their home temple, which has requested the copy. Collaborating with religious studies scholars, temple priests, and conservators, she is recreating the original appearance of the much-damaged original through meticulous study of historical design motifs and technical analysis of pigments. Her completed mandala and the data she gathered to create it will prove an invaluable source for the understanding of the original appearance of the colors and designs on early Buddhist painting. The work of these two artists reveals a rarely addressed aspect of the contemporary Japanese art scene, namely that following a conservative artistic tradition can foster artistic creativity, offering both a window into the past and a path towards a future that still embraces tradition.
Charlotte Horlyck
The female artist — a pre-modern paradox?
Over the past two decades or so feminist art historians have highlighted the fact that canons on Western art have systematically and effectively excluded references to women artists and their works. Less attention has, however, been directed towards Asia, where references to women's contributions to arts and culture have been neglected in a largely comparable manner. As in Europe and in the States, some Asian women produced significant works of art while others were influential patrons and collectors of the arts. Discourses on pre-modern Korean material culture are a case in point as references to works by and for women are rarely made. Yet, textual and material sources testify to the significant role women played as makers and users of art objects in early Korean society, in particular during the course of the Joseon dynasty (AD 1392–1910). While a small number of women produced paintings, others were poets and musicians. Many were, however, subject to criticism as scholarly pursuits were rarely deemed appropriate for women. In some cases the paradox of the female artist took an extra turn as gisaeng became famous poets and musicians while being looked down upon as entertainers of men. In contrast, sewing, weaving and needleworking were activities which women could engage in without being chastised for it, not least as they were pursued inside the home and required no use of the calligraphic brush. It is the irony of the 20th then that such works are rarely valued as objects d'art and in being demoted to crafts items by 20th century art historians they have been excluded from canons of pre-modern Korean art. In other words, in their failure to fit within firmly established and pre-conceived notions of what art is and how artists should be defined, women artists and works by women have in essence been excluded from discourses on Korean art.
In focusing on female painters, poets and craftspersons of the Joseon dynasty, this paper aims to explore these issues by questioning how art historians have interpreted pre-modern Korean art and how they have identified the pre-modern Korean artist. It will be argued that the general lack of interest in and recognition of women as active makers and users of art in early Korea lies not so much in the quality of works produced but rather in how such artefacts have been categorised by art historians. Furthermore, the lack of interest in women's art works is not a recent phenomenon but is founded in traditional divisions of gender in much earlier times. Despite the fact that the roles attributed to and played by women did not remain static over time, women were generally seen as being inferior to men and were not granted the same opportunities as them. As for their art, in most cases it did not enter the public sphere and remained within the confines of their homes thus remaining largely anonymous like their makers.
Joan Kee
Closer: What Asian Women's Art Has to Say About Contemporaneity
Why do the works of Asian women artists matter? At stake in this question is not what these works say about the contemporary art field than what they have to say about contemporaneity. This paper explores this question through the idea of a putative "Asian women's art" in the mid-to-late 1990s. Specifically I look at this idea through its relationship to the discursive emergence of a contemporary Asian art field. While the expansion of the latter has often turned on notions of speed and (dystopian) progress, "Asian women’s art" insists upon the centrality of tropes of familiarity and intimacy. In so doing, artists centrally identified with the concept of "Asian women's art" propose contemporaneity not as a function of linear development but as a condition of proximity.
Honghee Kim
Contemporary Korean activist/feminist art
My paper will present the post 1950s Korean feminist/women artists who have engaged in activism and will attempt to diagnose the status and limitations of feminist art. Riding the waves of the 1970s modernism, women artists were engaged in the revival of the feminine subject, content and form in their art which had been taboo subjects and attempted to offer a corresponding femininity in modernism. In 1980s an off-shoot of the Minjoong art movement emerged as a feminist art group that was critical of the foreign influences prevalent in the modernist and male-centrist art. On the other hand, after 1990s a new generation of women artists with postmodern sensibilities focused their work on the issues of body, identity, and gender politics and continued to express their postmodern feminism (art). Through this paper, I will examine how the artists are confronting and reconciling within the mainstream art establishments and what are the meaning and the actual benefits of their aesthetical, political interventions.
Youngna Kim
Four Korean Contemporary Women Artists: Constructing and Deconstructing the Myth
Na Hye-Seok(1896–1951), the first woman artist in Korea during the early twentieth century was the quintessential modern girl of Korea, and was the object of great envy and curiosity. Not only had she graduated from the prestigious Tokyo School of Womens Art in Japan, she had participated in several exhibitions and also toured Europe for two years. However, her scandal with a married man, subsequent divorce, in addition to an unprecedented public declaration of divorce, created an image of herself as tormented female artist who was not able to adjust to the morals and social customs of Korean society. This myth of the woman artist as a lonely social outcast continued to Chun Kyung-Ja (1912–) and Choi Wook-Kyung (1940–85) as the years passed. As female artists who also received the best educations available at the time, Chun Kyung-Ja and Choi Wook-Kyung created their own individual personas through their unique worlds of art and extreme lifestyles, maybe as a way to challenge or to distinguish themselves in the male dominated art world of Korea.
This myth began to be deconstructed as the number of female artists increased and have taken an active part within the international art scene in the 1990s. Artists such as Kimsooja (1957–) and Nikki S. Lee (1970–) are no longer labeled as female artists. Although they identify themselves as women, rather than being engrossed within this singular identity, they show greater interest in experiencing other cultures and other people's lives as Asian women with multifaceted identities.
In this paper, I would like to focus on the transformations in the personal and social perception of the modern Korean female artist through the lives and art of Chun Kyung-Ja, Choi Wook-Kyung, Kimsooja and Nikki Lee.
Cheeyun Kwon
Reinterpreting the Korean Patchwork (Jogakpo) and Crafts by Contemporary Women Artists
Women in traditional Korea made various craft items such as wrapping cloths, sitting mats, bedding, and other household articles using pieced cloths or other organic materials such as paper. My paper will present five contemporary women fiber artists who are reinterpreting the traditional techniques and materials into contemporary works of new meaning and shapes. Oh Soonhee, Youn Soonran, Kim Jeeun, Lee Chunghie, and Kwon Hyuk, whose works are presently on display in the Korean galleries at the Asian Art Museum, combine traditional materials such as hemp fiber, ramie, silk, and mulberry paper with synthetic fabrics, stainless steel, and spray paint. These artists also employ knotting (maedeup), papermaking, the patchwork technique (jogakpo) of wrapping cloths, and other traditional methods, to create innovative designs in a renewed context. Trained in both the traditional crafts and contemporary fiber art, they amalgamate Korean aesthetics with that of Western art, creating unique works.
Junghee Lee
Refined Sexual Expression by Women Artists of the Choson Dynasty
Upper class Korean women during the pre-modern Choson period (1392–1910) had little freedom to express their desire and sexuality. This is because the government imposed a rigid Neo-Confucian ideology that espoused strict separation of men and women and obedience of women to men. Chastity was an important value, so upper class women were not allowed to remarry and their sexuality was considered a non-negotiable or non-tradable item, to be guarded at the risk of one's life. Women were not allowed to read and study, and were instead encouraged to take charge of the household and do sewing and embroidery. In essence, they were discouraged from independent thought, and from interests beyond family concerns.
Women of less status enjoyed more freedom than upper class women. Most other women artists were professional entertainers trained to paint, write poems and play musical instruments in order to attract the company of upper class gentlemen clients. They enjoyed freedom meeting men, but their lives were always shadowed with the sadness of low social status.
Flower and insect painting was a popular genre for female artists in the sixteenth century. An important artist working in this category was versatile painter Lady Sin Saimdang (1504–1551). Lady Sin is regarded as a virtuous woman par excellence and a successful mother who raised Yi I, one of the best Neo-Confucian philosophers of the Choson period. Lady Sin painted numerous close-up images of nature with sensitive observation, celebrating the life and beauty of ordinary plants, weeds, insects and animals shown in delicate movement and harmony. Examining works attributed to her in a social and cultural context makes me think that hidden within this harmony the law of nature is suggested through symbols of fertility that imply the erotic as insects and animals pursue the lush organic forms of flowers, fruit and dangling vegetables. She seems to have incorporated a Chinese tradition of erotic nature symbolism in art and poetry dating back to the Book of Songs. Lady Sin may have expressed her feeling about sexuality quietly in paintings such as Mice Nibbling Watermelon. The motif of mice nibbling seeds in the ripe opened melon might have symbolized family happiness and the natural phenomenon of reproduction resulting from sexuality.
Hung Liu
Women Warriors
While I have depicted Chinese and Asian women as the victims of violence of war, famine, social upheaval, and natural chaos, I have recently portrayed them as heroines who dared to challenge the old cannon and fight the vicious enemies of humanity — who willingly sacrifice themselves for a higher cause. Therefore in my work, women are not just victims, but also a fighting force.
Margo Machida
Engaged Acts: Art of Asian American and Native Hawaiian Women
Using gender as a pivot point, this paper considers some of the ways in which Asian American and Native Hawaiian women conceptualize their lives and position themselves as social, political, cultural, sexual, and historical subjects through the mediation of visual art. Articulating a sense of both an individual and collective presence, their work embodies polycentric sensibilities and complex contemporary identifications forged amid the convergence of the local, the global, the indigenous, and the diasporic, in a world where cultural and national cultural boundaries are becoming ever more fluid. In drawing out connections between gender relations, female labor, expanding capitalist economies, colonialism, Western imperialism, and militarism in Asia and in the Pacific, among others, their work underscores the historical and ongoing impact of globalization on women.
Based on research that I conducted between 1990 and the present, close attention is paid to the contexts and particularities of these artist's subjectivities, experiences, and locations as a grounded source of knowledge, and to the meanings they attribute to the works they produce. Taking a broad view of what constitutes "art that serves an activist agenda," this discussion touches upon work ranging from explicit expressions of social critique and resistance, to the more private, idiosyncratic, and oblique manifestations of an activist consciousness. The six artists I will briefly discuss — Tomie Arai, Genara Banzon, Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, Puni Kukahiko, Hanh Thi Pham, and Lynne Yamamoto — are of different generational and ethnic backgrounds (Japanese, Filipino, Native Hawaiian, and Vietnamese). Even as these women all continue to assert their presence as participants in and witnesses to their times, there has also been, in the wake of insights gleaned from ethnic and feminist studies and critical theory, a palpable shift away from the more overt approaches to visual representation born of earlier activist struggles associated with "identity politics" and U.S. multiculturalism, toward strategies that often point away from or complicate such issues. While no single master narrative could possibly encompass the breadth of these Asian American and Native Hawaiian women's concerns, and despite differences in their backgrounds and orientations, important thematic continuities and common impulses can nevertheless be traced among artists who address the historical, political, and economic conditions, regimes of representation, cultural mores, and institutions that continue to shape and circumscribe women's lives.
Yong Soon Min
Migrating Epistomologies
Yong Soon Min will present a discussion on the works of four artists: Tiffany Chung, Sowon Kwon, Lin + Lam, Song Sanghee. These are four of the 16 artists included in the exhibition, transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix who are variously situated in Vietnam, Korea and the United States. She will present a comparative exploration of their means of address and integration of aspects of history and female subjectivity.
Midori Yoshimoto
Gazing Back: Women Artists' Critique of the Japanese Cute
It is astounding to recognize the worldwide pervasion of the Japanese cute or kawaii culture, represented by female or animal characters in Japanese anime and manga and commercial goodies such as Hello Kitty. The problematic underlying such a rapid and vast cultural consumption is the seeming equation of the cuteness with femininity. While most of these characters appear to be innocent prepubescent girls, their sexuality is often revealed in fetishistic ways, through the often perverted imagination of the male otaku creators. Girls of the otaku fantasy world have become the subject of contemporary artists including Takashi Murakami and Makoto Aida. By furthering otaku-resque perversions to extremes, however, these male artists tend to reconfirm the sadistic tendency toward women among otaku men rather than critiquing it.
Overshadowed by these daring male artists are the female creators of about the same generation or younger who emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This paper examines various ways in which contemporary Japanese women artists critique their own cultural construction of the cute femininity. It will discuss works of Minako Nishiyama, Emiko Kasahara, Tomoko Sawada, and Tabaimo.
O Zhang
Being a Young Chinese Female Artist in a "New China" Era
O Zhang will talk about what it is like to be a young woman artist in China today. How is developing a career as a Chinese woman changing and what are some of the barriers they face that might not apply to men? O Zhang will also talk about her own experience of growing up as a female artist in China and her vision of how the eastern culture is encountering the west based on her own experience of studying and living abroad.
