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Monica Merlin

Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

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MMerlin JCCA5 1
Monica Merlin

Troubling t he Gaze: T he writ ers and zhiyin of ‘Women’s art ’

Yvonne Low

'Reclaiming T heir Bodies: Cont emporary Chinese Women Art ist s'
Roy Forward
 JCCA 6 (1) pp. 5–15 Intellect Limited 2019

Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

Volume 6 Number 1
© 2019 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/jcca.6.1.5_2

EDITORIAL

Monica Merlin

Gender (still) matters in

chinese contemporary art

Discussions of art by women, feminist art, or gender politics within

the Chinese contemporary art world have largely been relegated to the
margins of the narrative.
(Welland 2018a: 130)

For decades studies in Chinese art have resisted gender (xingbie or nannü) as
a theoretical framework and method of inquiry, yet this issue of the Journal
of Contemporary Chinese Art testifies that the field is changing. Starting from
Sasha Welland’s recent statement above, the next paragraphs provide a brief
critical mapping of the most significant artistic, curatorial and scholarly prac-
tice which has contributed to understanding the complexities of gender in
Chinese contemporary art, with a focus on the PRC. When I began research-
ing gender in Chinese art in 2006/07 the best sources available were several
articles authored by curators and art historians centred on reassessing the
work and practice of women artists (Dal Lago 1999, 2001; Erickson 2001;
Karetzky 2005), and thus emphasized the need to further recognize the inter-
plays of gender and contemporary art. In the mid-1990s within a growing
discourse around women’s art (nüxing yishu) several exhibitions in the PRC
pivoted around women and ignited discussions around the meanings of their
work (Xu Hong 1994, 1995); one often overlooked volume is the seminal book
Nüxing yishu: Nüxing zhuyi zuowei fangshi (Women’s Art: Feminism as Method)
by the Chinese curator and scholar Liao Wen (Liao 1999), which followed up

5
Monica Merlin

her 1995 exhibition Women’s Approach to Chinese Contemporary Art (Liao 1995).
These and other similar contributions are the foundation of the scholarship on
gender in Chinese contemporary art with a focus on women, and epitomize
the sheer potential of what can be done in the field.
The scarcity of research in the early 2000s did not reflect the discursive
possibilities offered by the artistic practice from the 1990s experimentations
which overtly challenged gender stereotypes, assumptions and expecta-
tions within the normativity of a binary gender system. For instance Shitou
(b.1969), a painter in the Yuanminyuan village in the early 1990s, confronted
women’s masculine attributes and their prescriptive heterosexuality (see Bao
in this volume); Ma Liuming (b.1969) famously performed in 1994–95 in
his gendered-fluid Fen-Ma Liuming alter-ego, wearing dresses and make-
up; some exposed the male body such as Zhang Huan (b.1965) and female
body such as painters Feng Jiali (b.1963) and Yu Hong (b.1966); others as Yin
Xiuzhen (b.1963) played with conventional feminine attributes and traditions
associated to women. In 1994 Lin Tianmiao (b.1961) exhibited her first instal-
lation work at the Open Studio in Baofang Hutong, where she lived with her
husband the video artist Wang Gongxin (b.1960) after they resettled in Beijing
from New York. The installation titled Sheng Teleisa de youhuo (The Temptation
of Saint Teresa, Figure 1) consisted of seven wooden boxes of different dimen-
sions hanging in a line on a wall, and filled with seven kilograms of pink and
white facial moisturizer. The title as well as the number seven bear a Christian
flavour: the Spanish saint Teresa of Avila, was a nun known for her mystical
experience with God and for having founded several convents and monaster-
ies in Spain. In her many writings Saint Teresa discussed how to fight against
the temptation of evil. In this work Lin Tianmiao subverts the normative

Figure 1: Lin Tianmiao, 1994, Sheng Teleisa de youhuo (The Temptation of

Saint Teresa), installation, mixed media. Photo courtesy of the artist.

6 Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

 Gender (still) matters in Chinese contemporary art

hierarchical power of some gendered specific materials and objects: the

hard-wood boxes traditionally used to carry tools by male workers and build-
ers are set in contrast with the soft, dripping and bright moisturizer, a signi-
fier of beauty pampering typically associated with women. Hardness against
softness, a defined shape against the malleable nature of the cream, which can
only but take the shape of its container. Yet the artist confirmed that in expe-
riencing the work the smell of the moisturizing cream pervaded the room and
the contained became more forceful than its container, thus subverting the
expected power and gender relationship (male–female, container–contained,
sight–smell). In this work, Lin also engaged with new expectations around
female beauty, appearance and consumerism heavily advertised and commer-
cialized in 1990s women’s magazines (see also Pittwood in this volume).
From the ‘contemporary turn’ in the 1990s (Wu Hung 2014: 126–78) artists
used their work to engage with gender whether overtly or subtly, created alter-
natives to ‘gender fatalism’ as defined by Sara Ahmed (2017: 55), and countered
the conventions of prescriptive gendered behaviours and feminine beauty.
This is evident in the phenomenology of the female body represented in Chen
Lingyang’s (b.1975) photographic series Twelve Flower Months (1999–2000) in
which the artist provokes her viewers by showing her menstruating vagina and
her legs streaked with blood. The use of the body, as the one of most obvi-
ous gendered signifier, carries an undeniable transgressive potential as demon-
strated in performance already in 1989 when Xiao Lu (b.1962) used a real gun
to shoot her own installation at the opening of the China Avant-Garde exhi-
bition, the first solo performance by a Chinese woman artist. This transgres-
sive dimension of performance and gender was later in 2001 reiterated by He
Chengyao (b.1964) when in her Opening the Great Wall (Figure 2) she walked

Figure 2: He Chengyao, 2001, Opening the Great Wall, performance. Photo

courtesy of the artist.

www.intellectbooks.com 7
Monica Merlin

1. The reference is here to

Joan Kee (2011).

Figure 3: Display of the installation Dialogue by Xiao Lu (1989) at Tate Modern

(London). Photograph by author.

topless on the Chinese monument and desecrated its historical masculinity

while challenging the taboo of women’s public (semi)nudity. Both these artists
had to deal with a rather conservative attitude in the predominantly male art
circles which challenged their (in)ability to accept a re-engendering of experi-
mental creativity as Xiao Lu struggled to prove her sole authorship for the 1989
piece (2010) now collected by Tate (Figure 3), and He Chengyao was heavily
criticized for using nudity for nudity’s sake (Wang 2007).
Over the last decade, also due the creation of the shengnü (leftover
women) stereotype and the more recent #metoo campaign (Hong Fincher
2014, 2018) gender (as equality/inequality/justice/violence) has been often
discussed in popular culture and the public arena in the PRC. Gender
matters not only as a logic of interpretation, but also as conceptual motiva-
tion and address as evident in the performance pieces by the abovemen-
tioned Xiao Lu and He Chengyao, in Ma Yanling’s (b.1966) body in bondage,
by younger performance artists such as Chen Tianzhuo (b.1985), Li Xinmo
(b.1978) and Sun Shaokun (1980–2016).1 In the gender-fluid icons of her
videos, artist Lu Yang (b.1979) fights gendered assumptions by propos-
ing the anime asexual hero Uterus Man (2013), while the moving image
created by Shitou and Fan Popo (b.1985) both of whom work with queer-
ness and queer communities, document alternative gendered identities and
behaviours. There is an evident desire to discuss gender as spectacle and
a performative act in Cui Xiuwen’s (1967–2018) videos Ladies Room (2000)
and TOOT (2001); her manipulated photographic series One Day in 2004
(2005) and Angel (2006–09) raised awareness of the discrimination against
girls and women who deal with a long heritage of gendered expectations.
Other artists propose to rethink local history and the role of women as in

8 Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

 Gender (still) matters in Chinese contemporary art

the ethnographic work of Women’s River (2005) and The Secret Language 2. This has been widely
reported in English-
of Women (2008) based on biographies and stories of local rural women written international
and women’s language by Tao Ai’min (b.1974). By using diverse materials newspapers such as
and methods these works, and many others, also discussed in the articles The New York Times
and The Guardian
included in this volume, resonate with issues of advocacy and freedom, and (https://www.nytimes.
connect to the brave activities of feminist and LGBTQIA groups working com/2015/12/03/world/
in the PRC whose actions in the last few years have augmented the neces- asia/questions-follow-
closing-of-beijing-art-
sity to discuss gender particularly in relation to women’s and queer rights show-on-violence-
at a local, regional and global level. Nonetheless, the difficulties posed by against-women.
html; https://www.
a strict governmental control over activism as well as artistic and cultural theguardian.com/
productions do not make the work of activists, artists and intellectuals easy. world/2015/nov/26/
As we know the prominent gender activist Ye Haiyan was made homeless beijing-shuts-down-art-
exhibition-on-violence-
in 2013, five feminists were arrested and detained in 2015, the Weibo and against-women).
WeChat accounts of Feminist Voices (Nüquan zhi sheng) was forcibly shut
down in 2016 and advocacy groups for LGBT rights live in a state of peren-
nial uncertainty (Hong Fincher 2018). Similarly in the art world exhibitions
which tackle potentially uncomfortable issues related to gender are rather
vulnerable in the PRC as testified by the closure of the large show at the
private Beijing gallery Gingko Space Jian: Gender Violence Cultural Codes
(where jian means ‘rape’) which was organized by artist Cui Guangxia and
closed before its opening on 25 November in 2015, the International Day for
the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and was planned as a Heforshe
exhibition. Jian, which encompassed the works by 64 artists (half female,
half male) around the theme of violence against women, attempted to show
gender equality in the 50/50 balance of men and women artists and a united
front in tackling gender violence and discrimination (Cui 2016).2
Some recent proposals to (re)historicize Chinese contemporary art (see
Wu Hung 2014; Gladston 2014), including the timeline suggested by the 2017
Guggenheim exhibition and its accompanying catalogue Art and China after
1989: Theater of the World (Munro et al. 2017), seem to convey that gender is
not necessarily relevant to artistic practice; at the same time they hint to be
unaware of the engendering of the histories they propose, in which women
have a very marginal role. Even though it cannot be said that the scholar-
ship has responded promptly to the dynamism of the artistic practice around
gender in the last ten years, several important contributions have solidified
the use of gender in the field, most noticeably the Chinese art historian Tong
Yujie (2011) who investigates the relationship between feminist art (speci-
fied as nüxing zhuyi yishu, not nüxing yishu), sexuality and rhetoric in relation
to gender, body and queer (ku’er) politics, thus embracing an intersectional
understanding of gender and feminism. In a conversation I had with Tong in
2013 she explained the institutional difficulties she encounters and pressed
on the need of bentu (local) discourses in feminism, art and gender research
in order to surpass the difficulties of dealing with global/local language and
expectations.
Besides some relevant articles (such as Archer 2012 and in Wiseman and
Liu Yuedi 2011), two recent must-read volumes (in English) confirm the impor-
tance of gender in the study of Chinese contemporary art and add some depth
to the research – mostly with a focus on women: Gendered Bodies. Towards
Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China by Cui Shuqin (2015), Professor
of Asian Studies at Bowdoin College, and Experimental Beijing. Gender and
Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art by Sasha Su-Ling Welland (2018b),
associate professor in gender, women and sexuality studies at the University of

www.intellectbooks.com 9
Monica Merlin

3. For a review of Cui Washington. In Gendered Bodies Cui Shuqin provides an overdue look into the
Shuqin’s volume read
Welland (2018a) and
practice of women artists with a focus on the body which ‘as a visual medium
also Parke (2018). the female body presents artists with a site of representation for projecting
4. The book comes
female desires, bodily pains, sexual pleasure, and confusion and problems’
supplemented (Cui 2015: 9). Cui proposes a re-engendering of notions related to historiog-
by a website raphy, sexuality, pain and space in the four core sections of the book which
experimentalbeijing.
com. successfully offers to rethink how women artists contribute to re-inscribe
the history of Chinese contemporary art.3 Experimental Beijing is an ethno-
5. The artists included are:
Bu Hua, Cui Xiuwen, graphic project which brings together the role of the author/scholar and her
Cao Fei, Xiao Lu, Gao own experience of art, gender and feminism in the PRC, which began with
Rong, Lin Jingjing, Lin her participation in the Long March project organized in 2002 in Chengdu
Tianmiao, Yin Xiuzhen,
Li Tingting, Shi Zhiying, by Judy Chicago and which saw the participation of Chinese women artists.
Gao Ping and Bingyi. From this crucial moment for feminism and gender in art, Welland creates a
6. See this article on the new relational epistemology of Chinese contemporary art by using women’s
show https://ilga.org/ artworks, and masterfully provides critical insights into the contextual back-
difference-gender-
china-s-first-queer-art-
ground from the 1990s onwards with a focus on the work of three women
exhibition. artists: He Chengyao, Li Tianpian (1969–2001) and Yan Lei (b.1965).4 Welland
7. See the show webpage
does not look into more recent examples of feminist art, such as that by the
https://drexel.edu/now/ self-declared feminist Beijing-based artist Li Xinmo. A third publication
archive/2011/October/ worth mentioning here is the less strictly academic volume Half the Sky by
Half-the-Sky/, accessed
20 January 2019. Luise Guest (2016), Manager of Research at the White Rabbit Collection in
Chippendale, Australia; Guest’s beautifully illustrated volume engages with
8. The showcased artists
are Cheng Juanzi, Chi her fieldwork in China and is based on conversations the author entertained
Peng, Cui Zi, Fan Popo, with twelve women artists around their practice and gender, with the ultimate
Gao Brothers, Han objective to offer to the readers to ‘hear’ their voices and ‘see’ their work.5 This
Meichao, Jiang Qigu, Li
Guangxin, Li Xiaofeng, particular project, which resonates with a previous show bearing the same
Li Xinmo, Lin Zhipeng, title, was followed by the eponymous exhibition and will be discussed in
Ma Liuming, Mu Xi,
Qiu Jiongjiong, Ren
depth by Low later in this volume.
Hang, Song Jianing, In the last ten years several exhibitions held both in China and abroad
Shi Tou, Wang Zi, Wei contributed to rethink gender in curatorial and discursive practice, particu-
Jiangang, Xiyadie, Yang
Guowei, Zhang Yuan larly worth signalling here are: Gender-Difference exhibition curated by Yang
and Zheng Bo. See the Ziguang in 2009 at the Civilian Film Studio in the Songzhuang Art District
website http://www. (Beijing) in which sixteen artists from different backgrounds and with different
varldskulturmuseerna.
se/en/exhibitions/ practices were set together as ‘DIFFERENCES of GENDER should not entail
secret-love/secret-love/. a gladiatorial combat, but a serendipitous coexistence in a common world’
(emphasis in original); the itinerant Wo-Men, which showcased the works of
women and LGBT artists, first opened in Shanghai in 2011 and then travelled
to San Francisco (Patel 2013); Half the Sky: Women in the New Art of China at
Drexel University in 2011 co-curated by the National Art Museum of China
and the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery of Drexel University, claimed to be the first
of its kind in the United States included 22 woman artists working in differ-
ent media.6, 7 One show which tackled gender and LGTB is Secret Love initially
hosted at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm in 2012. It has
since then been travelling to other European venues and it includes some of
the most provocative artists working on gender and queerness, such as the
previously mentioned Shitou, Fan Popo and Li Xinmo, and also photogra-
pher Ren Hang (1987–2017) and paper-cut artist Xiyadie (b.1963).8 The 2013
group exhibition Breakthrough: Work by Contemporary Chinese Women Artists
at the Bowdoin College of Art (Montross et al. 2013) and Fire Within: A New
generation of Chinese Women Artists (Wang Chunchen 2016) at the Broad
Art Museum in Chicago solidified the role of the US in presenting Chinese
contemporary art. Most recently the first UK exhibition solely dedicated to
Chinese women artists NOW: A Dialogue on Female Chinese Contemporary

10 Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

 Gender (still) matters in Chinese contemporary art

Artists (16 February–29 April 2018) was held at the Centre for Contemporary
Chinese Art (CFCCA) in Manchester as part of a multi-venue collaborative
project on Chinese women artists (Guo 2018).
These curatorial projects signal the necessity of rethinking the discursive
relationship between gender and art in China, where women have been often
thought to produce work characterized by ‘child-like fantasy; apathy toward
politics, history, and philosophy’ (Welland 2018b: 20) as proposed by Jia
Fangzhou who has been the major curator of art by women in the PRC since
the late 1990s. Despite the important contributions laid above, the academic
research needs to catch up in addressing a spectrum of old and new gender-
related queries which have been mostly ignored.

Why ThiS VolUMe anD WhaT iT DoeS

The incidental inspiration for this special issue of the Journal came in February
2018 when I participated at the Tate Symposium titled Gender in Chinese
Contemporary Art, organized at Tate Modern in London (Guo 2018). Despite
the title, the symposium was to focus specifically on Chinese women artists
in connection to the abovementioned NOW exhibition at CFCCA which was
organized alongside UK-wide celebrations of the centenary of the suffragette
movement. As a speaker at that symposium I felt the immediate necessity to
continue and expand the conversations ignited during the event by offering an
inclusive space for scholars, curators and artists to offer their own research and
share their practice on gender (not limited to women). The articles selected for
this issue focus (alas once again) on mainland China with some brief excep-
tions, and include contributions by young scholars, academics, curators and
one artist. The prevailing response from early career scholars in this volume
clearly indicates the desire to deepen the understanding of gender and its
complexities within a growing field of research.
Gender flows through this journals’ seven interdisciplinary articles, which
contemplate its multiple meanings and propose to use it as a method of
inquiry to interpret and understand the work of Chinese artists male and
female, or above binary-distinction, feminist and non-, queer and non-, while
including reflections on artistic, curatorial and art historical work. The variety
of methods used by the authors demonstrates the complexity of gender as
an approach, and includes discursive analyses which intersect with theoreti-
cal frameworks usually attributed to other so-called disciplines, such as film,
feminist and postcolonialist studies.
The first two articles address gender in relation to the relevance of intimate
spaces, such as those of the house/home and family in a call for revaluat-
ing the micro versus the macro, and at the same time rediscover the political
and gendered dimension of familiar objects and the ordinary in contemporary
artistic practices. Liu in her ‘The spectral interior: Gender and representations
of household objects in the work of three Chinese artists’ explores the connec-
tion between memory work, both collective and individual, and the mate-
riality of household items in the art produced by a male artist Song Dong,
and two younger women artists, Gao Rong and Dong Yuan. Liu convincingly
discusses how these artists crucially show the importance of the politics of
gender and the feminine in interpretations of memorial and cultural herit-
age which preserves the (hi)stories of women while rethinking the intimacy
of the quotidian and memory work in a dynamic and fluid motion vis-à-vis
the cultural fabrication of meanings. Within the intimacy of the family and
home, gender(ed) relationships can be seen as catalysts of artistic motivation

www.intellectbooks.com 11
Monica Merlin

and practice and Jiang’ article ‘Soft archives: Motherhood and daughterhood
in post-socialist China’ investigates the ubiquitous and contentious relation-
ship between the artist/daughter and her mother, which is seen as a focal
point to understand the practice of three selected women artists who grew
up within the new families of post-socialist China: Ma Qiusha, Qin Jin and
Huang Jingyuan. Jiang proposes a fresh view on discourses around mother-
hood and daughterhood in Chinese contemporary art which have been so far
only addressed in relation to interpretation of specific artworks and individual
practices, such as those of Lin Tianmiao or Song Dong, rather than as a larger
discursive concern.
Gender and the complicacies of queerness and its definitions as well as
their associations with artistic practice are explored in Poelzl’s article which
offers a fresh view into the rarely discussed work of Chen Tianzhuo, and in
particular looks at two of his works, Ishvara (2016) and An Atypical Brain
Damage (2017). Poelzl suggests to use the framework of hyperculturality to
interpret his work and evaluate how it contributes to the queer discourse in
China. Poelzl also raises the crucial interconnectedness of gender with other
notions such as that of ‘Asianness’ in a globalized and commercialized world.
Within the understanding of queerness and art, the article by Bao Hongwei
rethinks the relevance of Shitou, artist and filmmaker, well known for being
the first self-declared lesbian artist in mainland China and a crucial supporter
of LGBT rights in the PRC since homosexuality was de-hospitalized in 2001.
Shitou has been left at the margins of the narrations of contemporary art and
the explicit queer nature of her films is controversial in a country which has an
ambivalent relationship with LGBTQIA groups. Bao reminds us at the end of
his article that ‘sexuality, ethnicity, space and place also intersect with gender
in significant ways’ and ‘a diverse and more inclusive feminist politics would be
impossible to imagine without queer interventions’ (see Bao in this volume).
The next two articles refocus on women artists; while Pittwood rethinks
the relationship between gendered subjectivity, art and women in post-social-
ist globalized China, Low proposes to consider women’s art and recovery
projects with an interregional perspective. In ‘Flipping through a magazine:
The consumed and consuming “woman” in contemporary Chinese art’
Pittwood emphasizes the need of having a proper nannü approach that takes
both self-identifying female and male artists into perspective (that of Chen
Lingyang and Yang Zhengzhong) to analyse works which employ as their
main source of imagery representations of women taken from magazines. By
proposing to use the Foucauldian concept of parrhesia to reflect on the truth-
fulness of the translation of artists’ values and biographies into their work,
Pittwood’s method could be seen as a proposal for the ultimate and fair inter-
weaving of women artists into the multiple histories of Chinese contemporary
art. The sixth article expands the borders of China with a critical comparative
study around two exhibitions of art by women: Indonesian Women Artists:
The Curtain Opens (2007) and Half the Sky: Conversations with Women artists
in China (2016). Low’s analysis successfully emphasizes the politics of writ-
ing about gender, art and artists, while reassessing the ‘personal’ dimension of
women writing and creating for women and about women. Her article deliv-
ers a self-reflective message for our practice as researchers and writers, and
makes us revaluate how we as authors/scholars engage with the engendering
of art and art history.
The last yet crucially important contribution included in this volume, is
a series of conversations with the London-based Chinese performance artist

12 Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

 Gender (still) matters in Chinese contemporary art

Whisky Chow whose practice challenges the normative understanding of

femininities and masculinities, the assumptions and cultural expectations
attached to them and the limitations of their meanings within the common
binary gender framework. Whiskey’s position as a Chinese graduate of the
Royal College of Art (London) who now works in the British artistic milieu,
and is closely connected with feminist, queer and artistic communities in the
PRC, complicates notions of gender, ethnicity, local/global, belonging, migra-
tion, cultural stereotypes, feminism, activism and postcolonialism, and moreo-
ver contributes to rethink the complexities of inter/trans-cultural practices and
languages. Whiskey has enacted performance pieces in major institutions in
the United Kingdom, including Tate Modern and the V&A in London bringing
a provocative and experimental dimension of Chinese art outside the PRC.
All the articles in this volume raise new debates and clearly demonstrate
that there are further ramifications and implications, more hidden corners to
be explored and questions to be unravelled when it comes to gender in Chinese
contemporary art. All the contributions converge on avoiding to reduce gender
to one single concept, while pointing at the complexity and fluidity of a wide
set of notions which intersect it. Future research should consider further the
interplays of gender with notions of class, ethnicity and activism, the creation
of timelines and histories, Internet art and social media (Holmes 2018), affect
and effect of artistic practice on audiences, as well as connect the PRC with the
wider sinophone area and the surrounding region. I would like to thank all the
contributors for their work, which I hope will continue to make the practice and
scholarship of Chinese contemporary art more inclusive and diverse.

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14 Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

 Gender (still) matters in Chinese contemporary art

conTriBUTor DeTailS
Dr Monica Merlin is currently a research associate of CCVA and Birmingham
City University (BCU), where she previously worked as programme leader
and lecturer for the MA Contemporary Arts China (2017–18). Before joining
BCU she taught for the MA Arts of China at Christie’s Education (London),
validated by the University of Glasgow. Monica lived and worked in Beijing
for two years after a BA in Chinese Studies specializing in Chinese Art and
Archaeology at Ca’ Foscari University (Venice). She returned to Europe to
pursue an MA in Asian Art at SOAS (2007) and worked for two years as cura-
tor in a contemporary Chinese art gallery in London. In 2009 Monica contin-
ued her studies gaining a D.Phil. (2013) at The University of Oxford with a
thesis on early modern Chinese art.
She conducted a funded post-doctoral research (2013–14) at the Tate
Research Centre: Asia with a project on contemporary Chinese women artists,
which led to the publication of her research interviews on Tate website (see
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/tate-research-centre-asia/
womenartists-contemporary-china). Monica’s main research interests lie in
Chinese contemporary art and visual culture, women artists, gender and femi-
nism, socially and politically engaged art.
E-mail: monica.merlin@bcu.ac.uk

Monica Merlin has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

www.intellectbooks.com 15
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Journal
of Illustration
ISSN 2052-0204 | Online ISSN 2052-0212
2 issues per volume | First published in 2014

Aims and Scope Principal Editor

Desdemona McCannon
Illustration is a rapidly evolving field with an excitingly broad Manchester School of Art
scope. Despite its cultural significance and rich history, illust- D.McCannon@mmu.ac.uk
ration has rarely been subject to deep academic scrutiny. The Associate Editors
Journal of Illustration provides an international forum for scho- Adrian Holme
larly research and investigation of a range of cultural, political, Peter Lloyd
Sheena Calvert
philosophical, historical, and contemporary issues, in relation Jim Walker
to illustration. The journal encourages new critical writing on Jaleen Grove
Chris Glynn
illustration, associated visual communication, and the role of
the illustrator as maker, visualizer, thinker, and facilitator, within
a wide variety of disciplines and professional contexts.
Call for Papers
Papers from a range disciplines, and a variety of research
methodologies, are welcome.

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