Gendered bodies: Feminism and Chineseness in the work of Li Xinmo, Xiao Lu and Xie Rong

From its emergence in the post-Mao era of gaige kaifang (Reform and Opening) the performing body in Chinese xingwei yishu (‘performance art’) was most often assumed to be male. The representation of performance practices in exhibitions, festivals – and in the art historical literature – has too often been dominated by male artists. This article turns the gaze onto three women artists, examining their work through lenses of gender, feminism and ‘Chineseness’: Performance artists Xiao Lu (b. 1962), Li Xinmo (b. 1976) and Xie Rong (b. 1983) explore aspects of embodied lived experience in often-encoded ways. Li Xinmo explores experiences of gendered violence through theatrical, immersive performances that have often used ink or pigmented fluids as metaphors for blood and trauma – and through a series of paintings made with actual menstrual blood. In The Death of the Xinkai River (2007) she first explicitly links an embodied feminism with her distress at the destruction of the natural environment. Xiao Lu’s post-menopausal performances move beyond her previously more literal explorations of gender. Works such as Ren (2016) and Suspension () employ ink and water in poetic reference to shufa (‘calligraphy’) and shuimo hua (‘ink-wash painting’). Inserting herself into the visual language of literati scholar painters, an artistic lineage from which she would have been excluded by virtue of her gender, Xiao’s liquid materiality becomes a feminist embodiment. Xie Rong (also known until recently by her English name, Echo Morgan) ‘writes’ ink painting using her hair as her brush in I Am a Brush (2011), Painting Until it Becomes Marble (2019) and Anatomy of . She paints her naked body with images of birds and flowers and blue-and-white porcelain motifs to perform lamentations of grief, loss and longing in works such as Be The Inside of the Vase (2012) and Echo of Posidonia (2022). Framed by Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ‘ornamentalism’, Ella Shohat’s notion of a non-western ‘subterranean’ feminism and early twentieth-century anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen’s gendering category of nannü, the artists’ embodied practices are understood as creating nannü spaces that reveal female subjectivities and reposition them within the discourses of Chinese performance practice. Emerging from encounters with the artists, in studio visits and (during the pandemic years) online conversations, analysis of their counter-patriarchal work reveals not merely the ghostly presences and absences of women in narratives of performance art in China that have tended to marginalize them, but also the significance of their contributions.