6 Modern Asian Women Artists You Should Know
The early 20th Century – an age of modernity and metropolitan life. Buildings made of industrial steel next to towering arcades of glass filled with luxury trinkets filled the streets of modern cities with impressive speed in feat made possible by the toiling underworld of urban workers and labourers, whose growing frustrations gave fodder to the political ruminations of the early twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.
But there was another groups of individuals whose modern transformation captured the attention of the age’s most forward thinkers. High on the list of questions that modern society had to rethink in order to be truly modern was the status of women in a modern age. Who was the modern woman? What does she look like and what does she do? Where does she go to spend time, who are her peers, and what would she be thinking about the world around her?
Here are 6 artists who represent the many faces of the modern women in Asia and its diaspora.
1. Pan Yuliang 潘玉良
Self-Portrait (1945), National Art Museum of China
Lived from: 1895-1977
About her: Best known for her female nudes, Pan Yuliang was the first Chinese woman to undertake Western-style painting. She suffered the death of both her parents by age 8, and at 13 she was sold to a brothel by her gambling uncle. Working as a singing girl, she attracted the patronage of the welathy Pan Jianhua who took her under his wing as his second wife. He supported her artistic talent as she enrolled in the Shanghai Art Academy and sponsored her to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts (ENSBA) in Paris where she graduated in 1924. The next year she received a scholarship to continue her practice in Rome.
In 1929, she returned to Shanghai to teach painting at the invitation of famed pioneer of Chinese modern art, Liu Haisu. Though she was heralded as a true modern woman, rising from humble backgrounds and educated abroad, Pan scandalised conservative Shanghai society with her drawings of the female nude body. She relocated to Paris in 1937, and remained an active artist and ENBSA faculty member for the next 40+ years.
2. Na Hyeseok 나혜석/羅蕙錫
Self-Portrait 자화상 (c. 1928), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul
Lived from: 1896-1948
About her: One of Korea’s first oil painters, Na Hyeseok was also the country’s first female professional artist and its first published feminist writer, penning Korea’s first feminist short story Kyonghui (경희) in 1918. She was born into the aristocratic Naju Na clan, and spent her early years in Seoul at the Jinmyeong Girl’s High School, where she showed great promise particular in art. She went on to enrol in the Tokyo Art College in 1913 with a major in Western oil painting. It was in Japan that Na Hyeseok found her voice as an outspoken feminist and critic of Confucian gender norms, which underpinned unrelenting rumours spread by fellow Korean students who decried her personal relationships.
By 1919, Na Hyeseok was back in Seoul and joined the March 1st ‘Sam-il’ movement against Japanese imperialism, for which she was arrested. After her release, she co-founded the specialist magazine Pyeho in 1920 with several close friends, including feminist writer Kim Iryeop, her co-author on a number of influential articles for Korea’s first magazine for women Sinyeoja (‘New Woman’). In 1927, she made a notable trip to the US and Europe in 1927, staying longer in Paris to take classes and become fully immersed in the city’s artistic offerings.
Na’s ultimate fall from grace came in 1934 when she published ‘A Divorce Confession’, a searing condemnation of the ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ archetype, Korea’s entrenched patriarchical society, the marriage institution, and the repression of female sexuality. The backlash — the public still remembered her high-profile divorce amidst vicious rumours of her infidelity — combined with Na’s instransigence on the topic increasingly made Na Hyeseok a pariah. Her mental and physical health declined steadily as she struggled to make a living from selling her work in Korea, though she did receive some support from international collectors. In her latter years, she lived to see Korea gain independence from Japan (she had been surveilled by the wartime Japanese state for her feminist politics) and retired to a Buddhist temple, writing and painting to the end.
Na Hyeseok is also known by her art name, Jeongwol (정월, 晶月).
3. Guan Zilan 關紫蘭
Portrait of Miss L (1928), National Art Museum of China
Self-Portrait (1940s), sold by Sotheby’s
Lived from: 1903-1986
About her: Also known as Violet Kwan, Guan was a pioneer of Fauvism and the avant garde in China after studying Western painting in Japan. Gaining celebrity status as a ‘modern it-girl’ of the Republic, she stopped painting after the Cultural Revolution.
4. Georgette Chen 張荔英
Vegetables and Claypot (c. 1940-7), National Gallery Singapore
Self-Portrait (1934), National Gallery Singapore
Lived from: 1906-1993
About her:
A pioneer of Singaporean modern art and arts education, Georgette Chen lived through enough lifetimes’ worth of world events. She grew up between China and Paris where her father ran an antiques-trading business (and surreptitiously funded Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary campaigns), and spent her teenage years attending high-school in New York. In 1926, she enrolled in the Art Students League of New York but left within a year for Paris, preferring the social milieu of the glitzy French capital. Chen’s work appeared in the Salon d’Automne of 1930, and that same year she met and married the Trinidadian lawyer Eugene Chen Youren, a driving voice in Republican China’s foreign policy. She moved to Shanghai the next year to join him.
In the tumult of the next two decades, Georgette Chen was constantly on the move. She and her husband fled to Hong Kong in 1937 where they continued to engaged in anti-Japanese operations; they were ultimately placed under house arrest and moved back to Shanghai, where Eugene died of illness in 1944. Freed after the war, she spent time travelling between Asia via Shanghai, New York, and Paris and finally settled in Malaya and Singapore in the early 1950s. At the invitation of Lim Hak Tai, president of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, she went on to become a key educator in Singapore’s institutions with an indelible influence on the region’s artistic development and the ‘Nanyang School‘.
5. Lê Thị Lựu 樂氏琉
Lê Thị Lựu in Paris, c. 1947
Lived from: 1911-1988
About her: One of the first women to attend the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi, Lê was one of the 4 leading Vietnamese modernist painters who moved to France in the 1930s. Her work offers vignettes of modern femininity and the maternal gaze.
6. Amrita Sher-Gil
Young Girls (1932), National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi
Self-Portrait (1940s), sold by Sotheby’s
Lived from: 1913-1941
About her: Capturing gritty everyday scenes, Sher-Gil merged her Indian-Hungarian-Jewish heritage with Parisian training to set an important precedent that put Indian modern art on the world stage. Her works have been designated official National Treasures in India.
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March 2023 - Women’s History Month