Full Description
Examines the career and message paintings of the feminist conceptual artist Jiny Lan, analyzing a cross-section of works that invite literary, historical, socio-political and transcultural interpretations.
Jiny Lan is an avant-garde Chinese artist based in Germany. A founding member of the feminist art collective "Bald Girls," she infuses astute, politically charged, and iconoclastic criticism into her conceptual and visual art. Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion provides a hermeneutic and critical analysis of Lan's idiosyncratic, provocative, and ingenious artwork. "Subversion" refers not only to her political and cultural subversiveness but also to her iterative technique of reproduction and repainting, which she uses to create a series of genealogically related "sub-versions" of her own paintings.
As an émigré and immigrant artist, Lan is profoundly influenced by both eastern and western cultures and traditions. Her immersive experience and extensive knowledge of two contrasting national histories, cultures, and political systems endows her with a unique intersectional positionality. Her artwork is at once figurative and abstract, realistic and fantastic, chaotic and logical, appropriative and creative. It interrogates serious issues such as censorship, authoritarianism, democracy, human rights, sexism, racism, war, migration, and Covid-19, but in a dynamic and often humorous manner. This book lays a foundation for evaluating Lan as an artist whose work invites discussions about portraiture, power, temporality, space, corporality, and sex.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Message Painting: "I use my paintbrush to be heard!"
Part One: Artistic Contexts and Concepts
1. From "Bad Girl" to "Bald Girl": Lan's Journey to the West
2. From Maoist Posters to Political Pop: Artistic Methods and Influences
Part Two: Feminist Art
3. The Bald Girls: Feminist Visual and Performance Art
4. Selbstverfraulichungwith the Master's Tools: A Double-Edged Reception of Joseph Beuys
5. Contending with the "Painter Princes" of Germany: Lan's Masterpieces (2018-2019)
Part Three: Political Art
6. Modernizing or Moldering: Criticism of Autocracies
7. Only Possible in a Democracy: Paintings of German Chancellors
8. Visualizing Sino-European Politics: Transcultural Art about the New Silk Road
Coda: Deterritorialized and Reterritorialized Messaging: Émigré and Immigrant Art
Appendix: Hanzi Equivalents for Words and Phrases Given in Pinyin
Bibliography
Index
