ART VISION AND SINCERITY:
LAN JINY, AVANT-GARDE JOVIAL FEMINIST ARTIST
BY JUAN XU
"Human rights are impossible in a society where women have no rights. The awareness of equality on the part of the disadvantaged signifies the awakening of the awareness of human rights," Lan Jiny, as a feminist artist, replied to a human rights artist. Due to her unique and sharp cultural and social criticism, Lan Jiny, an active Chinese feministale artist on the current art scene in Germany, has become a representative of overseas avant-garde artists, a daring jovial feminist vanguard as well.
Pursuit of New Trends in Tradition
By the early 1990s, when Lan Jiny was a student at the China Academy of Art, contemporary art in China, after the '85 Star Exhibition and '89 Modern Art Movement had witnessed great changes. Like many aspiring Chinese artists, Lan Jiny welcomed the first test of contemporary art in the global context. In 1995 she gave up her job as an art editor at a famous newspaper in Beijing and went to study in Germany at her own expense.
In the world, oil painting, as an art form, was given a life sentence jointly by critics, collectors and artists after conceptual art, feminist art, earth art, performance art, which are popular in the 70s and those in the 80s, like neo-expressionism and neo-conceptualism. Film art and installation dominated almost all the large-scale international biennales and contemporary art museums. In face of such reality, however, Lan Jiny was not willing to conform to the art history, and rather, she got inspiration from the undercurrent. She insisted on searching for her unique art language in traditional oil painting and for transcendence over the time and the space, and also over herself. In the eight years from the failure of her first marriage in 1997 to the beginning of the second in 2005, she traveled a lot with the belief that "life is elsewhere". She left her footprints in Berlin, New York, Paris, Moscow and many other international metropolises and finished a series of works on life in these places. For some time, her oil paintings on paper were based on urban life reflected in the subway, a safe haven for the anonymous modern life that hide the luxury of loneliness in the noisy life. With her brush, she captured the breaks in the continuity of the busy life or the instant of loss. To be closer to realism and catch the rhythm, she used to paint on site, lending life to the works with improvisation. The natural flow of her imagination and expectation of free life faithfully reflected the characters she shared with her female peers in China of that time.
In the ten years' Bohemian life, she sticked to searching for inspiration and the self from the exterior to the interior world. After she settled down, she began to explore human nature and life from the inner world to the outer one. Her gender awareness was awakened when her first child was born in 2006, and she began to think about female identify. A series of works on female came out in this period, including some self-portraits. These portraits covered different stages in her life, a single, a bride, a divorced woman, a remarried woman and a mother. She searched for female sensibility, perplexities, biological growth and development of the mind. Centered on the theme of "who I am", typical of feminist art, these self-portraits are intended to show the conflict between beauty and ugliness, simplicity and ambiguity, vitality and decadence, hope and despair, so the viewers got torn between one extreme and another, or stay between the two extreme "selves", feeling surprised and upset by their own perplexity and the female diversity.
From 2005 to 2009 Lan Jiny worked in Schloss Moyland Museum, which experience enabled her to go beyond the inquiry of "who I am" as a limited being into the more profound and essential meaning of art and life. Then she did the group painting Pursuit. People watching Beuys’s works was chosen as the background, but his works were deliberately concealed. Grown under the influence of the Communist ideology, it was quite natural for her to resented sermons in any form, but Christianity, particularly "religiousness" that is independent of the religion, was a natural call to her. In Pursuit, she aimed to bring forth the two "pursuits" in parallel, i.e., pursuit in art and pursuit in religion. The viewers' puzzled look of uncertainty was reflected in the sharp contrast of color so as to highlight modern men's alienation and perplexity in face of life. The figures in the painting seem to be "in the pursuit" of the key to the puzzle of Beuys’s work. It is more about the inquiry of the essence of life or the heaven than gazing at a work of art. Without knowing it, there was subtle religiousness. The essence of art and religion lies in breaking away from conventions, in changing and rising above the reality. In this sense, art and religion have a lot in common. Art is a kind of metaphysical activity of the mind when it tries to rise above the reality. In the secular modern society, it is a modern religion to some extent, or we can say that art replaces religion. Therefore, "the religiousness" of Lan Jiny's works and the spirit of Beuys’s art converged in Pursuit in a subtle way. This work marked her initiation into the public sphere and beginning of the transcendence of the self.
Exploration and Review of the Female Body
The 1970s saw the feminist artists beginning to challenge the social prejudice against women. For thousands of years, both the West and the East, under the influence of Christianity and Confucianism respectively, required women to follow the rules exclusively for women, to be a good wife and mother, and to be "a good girl" that keeps her virginity. Such puritanical sermons not only stifled women's consciousness of self and creativity but also prohibited women from direct perception of their body which was considered only as carrier of the need in the patriarchal society and the family. Therefore, feminism started with the field where there is the strongest oppression, i.e., the female eros. They advertised the female body and even took the female sex organ as the code for women's freedom and independence.
As early as the 1960s, feminist ale artists' concern and expression of the female organ and the female body took on social and political meaning, so the relationship between the female body and pornography was greatly weakened. After the 1970s feminist artists began readily to explore their own psychology in the hope of redressing their image male artists created. Guerrilla Girls, a feminist movement came onto the art scene in America. The underground Guerrilla Girls posted posters with famous feminist pictures in New York. The girls in Ingres' The Turkish Bath with gorilla's mask, looked back at the audience. Do women have to be naked if they want to enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MOMAMA)? The caption put up this question. Among the collected works at MMA, those by female artists take up only 5%, and 80% of the collection which are nudes are female. With the statistics, the Guerrilla Girls pointed to the fact the female body had always suffered a lack of social and political meaning in the history of art.
After the 1960s, feminist artists began to review their identity as female, to make efforts to change the situation in which the female body was taken only as object and to focus on and explore the female body. They highlighted the subjectivity of the female body and celebrated the physical pleasure related to fertility and their biological and psychological pain in terms of the aesthetics of the sex. After the 1970s, the feminist art theory based on the human body was widely recognized both in politics and aesthetics. As was said by Annie Leclerc, a feminist vanguard, "I must talk about the pleasure of my body, oh, no, not those of my soul, my virtue or my feminine sensitivity, but the pleasures of my woman's belly, my woman's vagina, my woman's breasts." It is writing from the body. She believed that man has only its right as man. Linguistically, "penis" and "pen" share the same root, and "to penetrate" means "to pass into or through". She thought that a woman also had a pen, that is, the pleasure of her body.
Influenced by Annie Leclerc, Lan Jiny called on the Chinese women in the new age to enjoy the pleasure of the body. Her article in the forum of International Marriage on the website Wenxuecheng, the Chinese-man Complex of a Veteran Chinese Girl Who Married a Foreigner created a big stir. She described her own sexual craving and sexual experience in an exaggerated tone. This unconventional and shocking article became a sensation. The subsequent Chinese Girls Ought to be Amorous and Who Am I Afraid of as a Rouge, pointed out that Chinese women lacked self awareness as educated female and explained why the so-called "sex" was the first step toward feminist self consciousness. She gave a sketch of the duality of life and soul in her experience as a woman with international marriage, which is targeted at those overseas Chinese, particularly those married Chinese or foreigners. This article got as many as 30,000 hits, with both invectives and admiration. She realized that she was doing a performance art about the public dialogue in the virtual world.
Public Dialogue in the Virtual World: New Media Art
The marriage of media technology and digital art took place in the 1990s. New York New Media Association was founded in 1994. In the same year, New Media Art was first used as a concept by artists, curators and critics. This term covers a variety of art forms, like "multi-media interaction installation", virtual-real-environmental and exhibition on the digital web.
New media art made its debut at the 10th Kassel Document in 1997. It was then far off the center of the kingdom of art. Admittedly it stood for the new century, the new age and the new technology, but it was by no means new. Its aesthetic concepts dated back to Dadaism in the 1920s. As a concept of art, Dadaism rejected the assertive capitalist concepts and practiced new art approaches. As Dadaism is art's reaction to the industrialization and mechanization in the 1920s, New Media Art is the reply to information revolution and the digitalized culture phenomena. Dadaist art spirit easily finds expression in the new media art era in the form of digital simulation, collage, readymade art, political performance, irony and absurdity.
For artists in this digital age, the Internet and the computer are not only tools for the art practice and communication with their colleagues, critics and curator but also an important forum for them to express their understanding of art to the global art world. As a historic turn in the history of art, new media art movement not only reinterprets the concept of Happenings in the 1960s and 1970s that encouraged the audience to stop passively consuming art and to participate in art, but also engaged the artists and the audience in the art activity in a virtual and global context.
As a creative artist, she is very enthusiastic about new technology and new concepts. When new media first appeared in the 1990s, she was keenly aware that the digital and the Internet would be her new platform in art and began to search for new media on the Internet. Fluxus art in the 1960s blurred the distinction between different art forms, different media and material, such as art and music, art and performance, and highbrow and popular art, greatly expanding the techniques and boundaries of art. As a novel and essay writer, Lan Jiny, under the influence of Fluxus, tried bring literature into art practice in the hope of melting literature with art into an art of multiple boundaries. In the cyberspace, as the information about the ethnic background, gender and age can be invented; it gives more possibility to the study of the awareness and structure of the female identity in a more objective and neutral way. Thanks to the Internet, Lan Jiny was able to voice her feminist ideas on a new platform, sometimes as a man and sometimes a woman, and also with different pen names, and to start polemics in a bold and unusual way.
Nine and a Half Weeks, her work in 2010, is born of the dialogue in the cyber space. Seriously she played a game with the public in the context of contemporary art not only by questioning women's independence and confidence, passivity in marriage and lack of awareness of gender and their own body, but also by expressing her unconventional opinion about "sex". Several articles she posted on the International Marriage Forum at www.wenxuecheng.com, like The Chinese-Man Complex of a Veteran Chinese Girl Who Married a Foreigner, together with readers' message, were projected on the wall in the exhibition hall, so that the visitors could enjoy and read this dialogue between an artist and the public in the form of literature as if they were seeing a film. In this case all the participants automatically become part of the artist's project. Here literature and the Internet were combined in a creative way to reveal, both perceptually and rationally, how art achieved sensational effect and changed the public's view of value about life. The work is in the category of feminist art, a combination of traditional painting, "literary painting", and new media.
Modern Art and Public Dialogue
Defamiliarization and alienation have been two key words in modern art since Baudelaire. Representative artists like Kafka and great painters like Van Gogh were all exclusively isolated and lonely geniuses. Refusing to mix with the vulgar, they did not care if they could be understood, so they isolated themselves. Their art are consequently solitary "interior monologue", the highest achievement of modern aesthetics.
In the Western tradition, men worked outside to earn a living for the family, whereas women took care of the family at home. In other words, men belonged to the public sphere and women to the private one. In order to give women more the living space, Western feminists believe, women have to leave the secure greenhouse and step into society and the public space, thus achieving freedom and independence.
Feminist artists started with unconscious art practice as individuals. Therefore, in most of their works we can identify such so-called female qualities as gentleness and delicateness. In the 1970s, feminism began to examine the female identity and they realized that the so-called sex was no more than "social gender", in other words, they were women because society has assigned them the role as women, and it was their parents coupled with the current mechanism that turned them into women.
In the late 1970s and the 1980s, feminist artists gave up the rules of game in modernist art and often turned the interior monologues in modernism into "pubic dialogues". The dialogues, between art and society, art and audience, modern artists and artists of the previous generation, aimed at cooperation and interaction. Feminist art in combination with the concept of public dialogue, enriched by public and social elements, lent art aesthetic and sociological qualities and deconstructed the story about the avant-garde modernist aesthetic genius, therefore rewriting the current art scene.
After stepping out of the ivory into the art market, Chinese art has become absolutely commercial. Most of the artists, avoiding public dialogues with society, are bent on the so-called "essence of art". "'Art for Art's sake’ in Western modernism, which is in reaction to religion, politics and literature, has become their pretext for ignoring social and political life. Respect for plural cultures and mass culture typical of postmodernism became a shelter for the shallowness and vulgarity. “(Kang Xueru)
Artist- Ti si ta, her video performance art turned upside-down and inside-out the aesthetic principle that traditionally Chinese women do not show much concern for public affairs. As to the relationship between art and social reality, she ironically showed her understanding in her project plan, "The so-called pure scholars and artists do not care about current affairs, and neither do they get involved in politics. They are only interested in splitting the hair."
Art is part of life, and contemporary art focuses on man and society in our age, so it usually reflects the dominant trend. Beuys's "social sculpture" aims to restore the lost human nature, to liberate human beings from the narrow and rigid mentality, and to encourage them to take on the social responsibility of building a world of human warmth as a grand "social sculpture”. Under the influence of Beuys, Lan Jiny keeps alert and keen to public current affairs. Artist- Ti si ta, which, like a parody, integrated the art concepts in "social sculpture" into feminist art, holds a dialogue with the system, challenging our imagination about contemporary art in China. This work is an embodiment of her feminism implied in "public dialogue" and Beuys's "social sculpture" that is intended to bring changes to the reality.
Jovial Feminism
Feminists in the 1970s questioned their role and identity by asking "who I am", followed by Chicago feminism who pointed out that women should not base their questioning about their identity on personal experience, and rather, they should shift to women as a group in the human condition, so their question should be "who we are". They believed that women, as a social group, should focus on their common plight as a result of their "social gender”, and therefore, the study of the distressing society and its political systems was their major concern as feminists. In this case, women ought to integrate their personal experience into the entire human culture. Then come( ?)ame their feminist slogan "The personal is political".[1] (Laura Meyer: Form Finish Fetish to Feminism：Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in California Art History)
As a feministale artist, Lan Jiny arranges her private life in the perspective of Chicago feminism, which is her practice of feminism in life — her life experience can be compared to a classic feminist work. Exposed to Western theories of art and literature, she got unique aesthetic experience that is different from her contemporaries in China. In Europe, where feminists have become more moderate after the polemic 1960s, Lan Jiny, seems not to be as anxious to upset the status quo. In this relatively mature cultural environment, she directly benefits from the positive aspects of Western feminism. As a women with a story of divorce, a mother with three children and a wife with a husband ten years younger, she does not want to take everything as it is, so instead of reducing herself to a housewife, she actively engage herself in art not only for her own right but also for all the female citizens. Western women are now turning to jovial feminism after the painful struggle. Like a spokeswoman of the new age, this new woman, a caring mother, attractive wife and a successful carrier woman, her jovial feminism is one that is in agreement with her private life and helps her to claim more right for her female peers in a peaceful way.
________
[1] Laura Meyer: Form Finish Fetish to Feminism：Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in California Art History
"Human rights are impossible in a society where women have no rights. The awareness of equality on the part of the disadvantaged signifies the awakening of the awareness of human rights," Lan Jiny, as a feminist artist, replied to a human rights artist. Due to her unique and sharp cultural and social criticism, Lan Jiny, an active Chinese feministale artist on the current art scene in Germany, has become a representative of overseas avant-garde artists, a daring jovial feminist vanguard as well.
Pursuit of New Trends in Tradition
By the early 1990s, when Lan Jiny was a student at the China Academy of Art, contemporary art in China, after the '85 Star Exhibition and '89 Modern Art Movement had witnessed great changes. Like many aspiring Chinese artists, Lan Jiny welcomed the first test of contemporary art in the global context. In 1995 she gave up her job as an art editor at a famous newspaper in Beijing and went to study in Germany at her own expense.
In the world, oil painting, as an art form, was given a life sentence jointly by critics, collectors and artists after conceptual art, feminist art, earth art, performance art, which are popular in the 70s and those in the 80s, like neo-expressionism and neo-conceptualism. Film art and installation dominated almost all the large-scale international biennales and contemporary art museums. In face of such reality, however, Lan Jiny was not willing to conform to the art history, and rather, she got inspiration from the undercurrent. She insisted on searching for her unique art language in traditional oil painting and for transcendence over the time and the space, and also over herself. In the eight years from the failure of her first marriage in 1997 to the beginning of the second in 2005, she traveled a lot with the belief that "life is elsewhere". She left her footprints in Berlin, New York, Paris, Moscow and many other international metropolises and finished a series of works on life in these places. For some time, her oil paintings on paper were based on urban life reflected in the subway, a safe haven for the anonymous modern life that hide the luxury of loneliness in the noisy life. With her brush, she captured the breaks in the continuity of the busy life or the instant of loss. To be closer to realism and catch the rhythm, she used to paint on site, lending life to the works with improvisation. The natural flow of her imagination and expectation of free life faithfully reflected the characters she shared with her female peers in China of that time.
In the ten years' Bohemian life, she sticked to searching for inspiration and the self from the exterior to the interior world. After she settled down, she began to explore human nature and life from the inner world to the outer one. Her gender awareness was awakened when her first child was born in 2006, and she began to think about female identify. A series of works on female came out in this period, including some self-portraits. These portraits covered different stages in her life, a single, a bride, a divorced woman, a remarried woman and a mother. She searched for female sensibility, perplexities, biological growth and development of the mind. Centered on the theme of "who I am", typical of feminist art, these self-portraits are intended to show the conflict between beauty and ugliness, simplicity and ambiguity, vitality and decadence, hope and despair, so the viewers got torn between one extreme and another, or stay between the two extreme "selves", feeling surprised and upset by their own perplexity and the female diversity.
From 2005 to 2009 Lan Jiny worked in Schloss Moyland Museum, which experience enabled her to go beyond the inquiry of "who I am" as a limited being into the more profound and essential meaning of art and life. Then she did the group painting Pursuit. People watching Beuys’s works was chosen as the background, but his works were deliberately concealed. Grown under the influence of the Communist ideology, it was quite natural for her to resented sermons in any form, but Christianity, particularly "religiousness" that is independent of the religion, was a natural call to her. In Pursuit, she aimed to bring forth the two "pursuits" in parallel, i.e., pursuit in art and pursuit in religion. The viewers' puzzled look of uncertainty was reflected in the sharp contrast of color so as to highlight modern men's alienation and perplexity in face of life. The figures in the painting seem to be "in the pursuit" of the key to the puzzle of Beuys’s work. It is more about the inquiry of the essence of life or the heaven than gazing at a work of art. Without knowing it, there was subtle religiousness. The essence of art and religion lies in breaking away from conventions, in changing and rising above the reality. In this sense, art and religion have a lot in common. Art is a kind of metaphysical activity of the mind when it tries to rise above the reality. In the secular modern society, it is a modern religion to some extent, or we can say that art replaces religion. Therefore, "the religiousness" of Lan Jiny's works and the spirit of Beuys’s art converged in Pursuit in a subtle way. This work marked her initiation into the public sphere and beginning of the transcendence of the self.
Exploration and Review of the Female Body
The 1970s saw the feminist artists beginning to challenge the social prejudice against women. For thousands of years, both the West and the East, under the influence of Christianity and Confucianism respectively, required women to follow the rules exclusively for women, to be a good wife and mother, and to be "a good girl" that keeps her virginity. Such puritanical sermons not only stifled women's consciousness of self and creativity but also prohibited women from direct perception of their body which was considered only as carrier of the need in the patriarchal society and the family. Therefore, feminism started with the field where there is the strongest oppression, i.e., the female eros. They advertised the female body and even took the female sex organ as the code for women's freedom and independence.
As early as the 1960s, feminist ale artists' concern and expression of the female organ and the female body took on social and political meaning, so the relationship between the female body and pornography was greatly weakened. After the 1970s feminist artists began readily to explore their own psychology in the hope of redressing their image male artists created. Guerrilla Girls, a feminist movement came onto the art scene in America. The underground Guerrilla Girls posted posters with famous feminist pictures in New York. The girls in Ingres' The Turkish Bath with gorilla's mask, looked back at the audience. Do women have to be naked if they want to enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MOMAMA)? The caption put up this question. Among the collected works at MMA, those by female artists take up only 5%, and 80% of the collection which are nudes are female. With the statistics, the Guerrilla Girls pointed to the fact the female body had always suffered a lack of social and political meaning in the history of art.
After the 1960s, feminist artists began to review their identity as female, to make efforts to change the situation in which the female body was taken only as object and to focus on and explore the female body. They highlighted the subjectivity of the female body and celebrated the physical pleasure related to fertility and their biological and psychological pain in terms of the aesthetics of the sex. After the 1970s, the feminist art theory based on the human body was widely recognized both in politics and aesthetics. As was said by Annie Leclerc, a feminist vanguard, "I must talk about the pleasure of my body, oh, no, not those of my soul, my virtue or my feminine sensitivity, but the pleasures of my woman's belly, my woman's vagina, my woman's breasts." It is writing from the body. She believed that man has only its right as man. Linguistically, "penis" and "pen" share the same root, and "to penetrate" means "to pass into or through". She thought that a woman also had a pen, that is, the pleasure of her body.
Influenced by Annie Leclerc, Lan Jiny called on the Chinese women in the new age to enjoy the pleasure of the body. Her article in the forum of International Marriage on the website Wenxuecheng, the Chinese-man Complex of a Veteran Chinese Girl Who Married a Foreigner created a big stir. She described her own sexual craving and sexual experience in an exaggerated tone. This unconventional and shocking article became a sensation. The subsequent Chinese Girls Ought to be Amorous and Who Am I Afraid of as a Rouge, pointed out that Chinese women lacked self awareness as educated female and explained why the so-called "sex" was the first step toward feminist self consciousness. She gave a sketch of the duality of life and soul in her experience as a woman with international marriage, which is targeted at those overseas Chinese, particularly those married Chinese or foreigners. This article got as many as 30,000 hits, with both invectives and admiration. She realized that she was doing a performance art about the public dialogue in the virtual world.
Public Dialogue in the Virtual World: New Media Art
The marriage of media technology and digital art took place in the 1990s. New York New Media Association was founded in 1994. In the same year, New Media Art was first used as a concept by artists, curators and critics. This term covers a variety of art forms, like "multi-media interaction installation", virtual-real-environmental and exhibition on the digital web.
New media art made its debut at the 10th Kassel Document in 1997. It was then far off the center of the kingdom of art. Admittedly it stood for the new century, the new age and the new technology, but it was by no means new. Its aesthetic concepts dated back to Dadaism in the 1920s. As a concept of art, Dadaism rejected the assertive capitalist concepts and practiced new art approaches. As Dadaism is art's reaction to the industrialization and mechanization in the 1920s, New Media Art is the reply to information revolution and the digitalized culture phenomena. Dadaist art spirit easily finds expression in the new media art era in the form of digital simulation, collage, readymade art, political performance, irony and absurdity.
For artists in this digital age, the Internet and the computer are not only tools for the art practice and communication with their colleagues, critics and curator but also an important forum for them to express their understanding of art to the global art world. As a historic turn in the history of art, new media art movement not only reinterprets the concept of Happenings in the 1960s and 1970s that encouraged the audience to stop passively consuming art and to participate in art, but also engaged the artists and the audience in the art activity in a virtual and global context.
As a creative artist, she is very enthusiastic about new technology and new concepts. When new media first appeared in the 1990s, she was keenly aware that the digital and the Internet would be her new platform in art and began to search for new media on the Internet. Fluxus art in the 1960s blurred the distinction between different art forms, different media and material, such as art and music, art and performance, and highbrow and popular art, greatly expanding the techniques and boundaries of art. As a novel and essay writer, Lan Jiny, under the influence of Fluxus, tried bring literature into art practice in the hope of melting literature with art into an art of multiple boundaries. In the cyberspace, as the information about the ethnic background, gender and age can be invented; it gives more possibility to the study of the awareness and structure of the female identity in a more objective and neutral way. Thanks to the Internet, Lan Jiny was able to voice her feminist ideas on a new platform, sometimes as a man and sometimes a woman, and also with different pen names, and to start polemics in a bold and unusual way.
Nine and a Half Weeks, her work in 2010, is born of the dialogue in the cyber space. Seriously she played a game with the public in the context of contemporary art not only by questioning women's independence and confidence, passivity in marriage and lack of awareness of gender and their own body, but also by expressing her unconventional opinion about "sex". Several articles she posted on the International Marriage Forum at www.wenxuecheng.com, like The Chinese-Man Complex of a Veteran Chinese Girl Who Married a Foreigner, together with readers' message, were projected on the wall in the exhibition hall, so that the visitors could enjoy and read this dialogue between an artist and the public in the form of literature as if they were seeing a film. In this case all the participants automatically become part of the artist's project. Here literature and the Internet were combined in a creative way to reveal, both perceptually and rationally, how art achieved sensational effect and changed the public's view of value about life. The work is in the category of feminist art, a combination of traditional painting, "literary painting", and new media.
Modern Art and Public Dialogue
Defamiliarization and alienation have been two key words in modern art since Baudelaire. Representative artists like Kafka and great painters like Van Gogh were all exclusively isolated and lonely geniuses. Refusing to mix with the vulgar, they did not care if they could be understood, so they isolated themselves. Their art are consequently solitary "interior monologue", the highest achievement of modern aesthetics.
In the Western tradition, men worked outside to earn a living for the family, whereas women took care of the family at home. In other words, men belonged to the public sphere and women to the private one. In order to give women more the living space, Western feminists believe, women have to leave the secure greenhouse and step into society and the public space, thus achieving freedom and independence.
Feminist artists started with unconscious art practice as individuals. Therefore, in most of their works we can identify such so-called female qualities as gentleness and delicateness. In the 1970s, feminism began to examine the female identity and they realized that the so-called sex was no more than "social gender", in other words, they were women because society has assigned them the role as women, and it was their parents coupled with the current mechanism that turned them into women.
In the late 1970s and the 1980s, feminist artists gave up the rules of game in modernist art and often turned the interior monologues in modernism into "pubic dialogues". The dialogues, between art and society, art and audience, modern artists and artists of the previous generation, aimed at cooperation and interaction. Feminist art in combination with the concept of public dialogue, enriched by public and social elements, lent art aesthetic and sociological qualities and deconstructed the story about the avant-garde modernist aesthetic genius, therefore rewriting the current art scene.
After stepping out of the ivory into the art market, Chinese art has become absolutely commercial. Most of the artists, avoiding public dialogues with society, are bent on the so-called "essence of art". "'Art for Art's sake’ in Western modernism, which is in reaction to religion, politics and literature, has become their pretext for ignoring social and political life. Respect for plural cultures and mass culture typical of postmodernism became a shelter for the shallowness and vulgarity. “(Kang Xueru)
Artist- Ti si ta, her video performance art turned upside-down and inside-out the aesthetic principle that traditionally Chinese women do not show much concern for public affairs. As to the relationship between art and social reality, she ironically showed her understanding in her project plan, "The so-called pure scholars and artists do not care about current affairs, and neither do they get involved in politics. They are only interested in splitting the hair."
Art is part of life, and contemporary art focuses on man and society in our age, so it usually reflects the dominant trend. Beuys's "social sculpture" aims to restore the lost human nature, to liberate human beings from the narrow and rigid mentality, and to encourage them to take on the social responsibility of building a world of human warmth as a grand "social sculpture”. Under the influence of Beuys, Lan Jiny keeps alert and keen to public current affairs. Artist- Ti si ta, which, like a parody, integrated the art concepts in "social sculpture" into feminist art, holds a dialogue with the system, challenging our imagination about contemporary art in China. This work is an embodiment of her feminism implied in "public dialogue" and Beuys's "social sculpture" that is intended to bring changes to the reality.
Jovial Feminism
Feminists in the 1970s questioned their role and identity by asking "who I am", followed by Chicago feminism who pointed out that women should not base their questioning about their identity on personal experience, and rather, they should shift to women as a group in the human condition, so their question should be "who we are". They believed that women, as a social group, should focus on their common plight as a result of their "social gender”, and therefore, the study of the distressing society and its political systems was their major concern as feminists. In this case, women ought to integrate their personal experience into the entire human culture. Then come( ?)ame their feminist slogan "The personal is political".[1] (Laura Meyer: Form Finish Fetish to Feminism：Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in California Art History)
As a feministale artist, Lan Jiny arranges her private life in the perspective of Chicago feminism, which is her practice of feminism in life — her life experience can be compared to a classic feminist work. Exposed to Western theories of art and literature, she got unique aesthetic experience that is different from her contemporaries in China. In Europe, where feminists have become more moderate after the polemic 1960s, Lan Jiny, seems not to be as anxious to upset the status quo. In this relatively mature cultural environment, she directly benefits from the positive aspects of Western feminism. As a women with a story of divorce, a mother with three children and a wife with a husband ten years younger, she does not want to take everything as it is, so instead of reducing herself to a housewife, she actively engage herself in art not only for her own right but also for all the female citizens. Western women are now turning to jovial feminism after the painful struggle. Like a spokeswoman of the new age, this new woman, a caring mother, attractive wife and a successful carrier woman, her jovial feminism is one that is in agreement with her private life and helps her to claim more right for her female peers in a peaceful way.
________
[1] Laura Meyer: Form Finish Fetish to Feminism：Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in California Art History