Julian Teng

ML513

Understanding Tagore’s Punishment – Intertextuality

Option III:
In response to Ai Weiwei’s blog posts, select a painting, artefact, photograph or any artistic medium
unique to Chinese contemporary art and write a blog post (550 – 750 words) how the art piece resonates
with Tagore’s Punishment, with a focus on how art embraces universality and overcomes cultural
boundaries.

Bovey Lee, Sewing Highways (2011)

Created in response to the extraordinary pace of development in China, Sewing Highways uses traditional
Chinese paper cutting techniques contrasting the modernity of its contemporary subject. Sewing Highways
portrays a female labourer whose quiet industriousness has been a crucial part of the country’s progress –
one so rapid that highways are seemingly built as fast as fabric passes through a sewing machine.
Response:

At first glance, Bovey Lee’s Sewing Highways appears to pay homage to traditional Chinese art of
the past, making use of traditional paper cutting techniques and art styles. Yet conversely, it is equally a
rebuttal of the present. By weaving clouds fashioned similarly to the most ubiquitous of traditional Chinese
paintings into a scene synonymous with 21st century China which has the largest highway system in the
world, Lee highlights how China’s culture has been unable to keep pace with its rapid economic
development. Yet apart from art, Lee wants others to recognize the stagnation of social culture in China by
underscoring the often unseen and unrecognized efforts of China’s women. Lee places a female labourer in
the background, squinting and bent over a sewing machine, working in the light of the moon, her
industriousness enabling China’s rapid development, here manifesting itself in the form of highways, built
as quickly as fabric can be sewn. Lee aims to bring to light the importance of working women in China in
contrast to the inequalities that they face when compared to their male counterparts.

Lee’s work rides on the wave of contemporary Chinese art flooding the Chinese cultural scene
established by pioneers such as Ai Weiwei. In his blogpost titled “Chinese contemporary art in dilemma
and transition”, Ai Weiwei asserts that “most works still evade issues of politics and society, or address
such issues only via cynical asides, equivocation or ambiguity, evasion, self-mockery, ridicule, self-
flagellation, introverted self- regard, or an almost monastic focus on one's personal awareness.” This much
is true in Sewing Highways as well. Themes of female empowerment, gender inequality and stagnant
social culture are brought up by Lee subtly, even covertly, perhaps its only defence against the wary eye of
anti-Westernism. To the unthinking eye, this art piece could be interpreted to be a celebration of the
industrious nature of China, contrary to its intent. This reflects the aversion to discourse that underpins and
plagues many modern societies today, most unable to hold mature conversations about difficult topics such
as gender equality, forcing art and literature to adopt more cautious means of expressing dissatisfaction.

However, Lee’s work is not only a reflection of the struggles of women in China but rather the
struggles of women across cultures and across centuries. The role of women in society across time and
space is often underplayed and more often than not forgotten. The silent and diligent woman working is
not unique to China. It could be said that women are the foundation of society. Their contributions to
economies equally important to those of their male counterparts. Yet the injustices faced by women,
despite their contributions to society, are an unfortunate universality. In Rabindranath Tagore’s
Punishment, the female characters play an important role in the upkeep of the family fields and yet are
subject to the will of their husbands. When Chandara is forced to take the blame as scapegoat to protect
Dukhiram for the murder of Radha, it is a betrayal of Chandara’s efforts as a good wife. Seen to be of
secondary importance to Dukhiram, Chidam forces the injustice of taking the blame onto Chandara
without consultation or her input, casting Chandara aside as though she were dispensable, going so far as
to say “If I lose my wife, I can always get another one”. Women being seen as dispensable is an
unfortunate reality in many cultures. In China, due to the One Child Policy, many female babies were
subject to infanticide due to Chinese culture’s preference for male heirs, resulting in over 30 million
missing women today and a skewed sex ratio. Despite being written between the 19 th and 20th centuries,
Tagore’s Punishment reflects the stance of Lee’s Sewing Highways in how the importance of women in
society goes unseen. Despite the efforts of those women in building and maintaining societies, women
unfairly remain inferior to men and even dispensable, very much a betrayal of generation after generation
of women.

Art is perhaps thus the best medium to communicate universal injustices as it does in this case,
transcending cultural nuances and boundaries to recognise the unchanging inequalities that women face
and have faced through the centuries. Unapparent on the surface, Lee’s Sewing Highways reflects many
commonalities with regard to women’s rights and roles in 21 st century society that were highlighted two
centuries earlier in Tagore’s Punishment. Perhaps one day, our art might be able to depict a better society
with which no parallels can be drawn, either to Tagore’s Punishment or Lee’s Sewing Highways.