The first monograph devoted to women artists of the Republican period, The Golden Key recovers the history of a groundbreaking yet forgotten generation and demonstrates that women were integral to the development of modern Chinese art.

Bringing to light the largely overlooked female participation in domestic and international art worlds, this book offers the first comprehensive study of how women embroiderers, traditionalist calligraphers and painters, including Shen Shou, Wu Xingfen, Jin Taotao, and members of Chinese Women’s Society of Calligraphy and Painting, shaped the terrain of the modern art world and gender positioning during China’s important moments of social-cultural transformation from empire to republic. Drawing on a wealth of previously unexhibited artworks, rare artist’s monographs, women’s journals, personal narratives, diaries, and catalogs of international expositions, Doris Sung not only affirms women’s significant roles as guardian and innovator of traditionalist art forms for a modern nation, but she also reveals their contribution to cultural diplomacy and revaluation of Chinese artistic heritage on the international stage in the early twentieth century.

Invaluable resource for anyone who wants to understand contemporary Chinese art, one of the most fascinating art scenes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

A redefinition of contemporary Chinese art from the last forty years in the context of unprecedented cultural, political, and urban transformation, written by an authority on the subject. Contemporary Chinese art is a subject of sustained and growing significance in present-day culture across the globe. This new volume in the World of Art series reframes Chinese art since the end of China’s Cultural Revolution more than four decades ago, placing it in the context of the nation’s unprecedented cultural, political, and urban transformation. Based on original research by writer, curator, and leading scholar in the field of contemporary Chinese art, Jiang Jiehong, this volume explores the area through firsthand materials and in-depth interviews with more than thirty artists. Providing the most up-to-date understanding of contemporary Chinese art, Jiang includes a variety of media, ranging from painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography to installation, video, performance, and participatory art. Featuring over 150 color images of artworks by more than fifty internationally renowned Chinese artists, including Ai Weiwei and Zhang Peili, as well as emerging artists, such as Zhao Zhao, The Art of Contemporary China presents a wide variety of practices through curatorial discussions and images of original installation views and historical art events. What emerges are revelations on art, and new insights into contemporary China. Fulfilling a need for an accessible, affordable introduction to contemporary Chinese art, this volume offers a concise but far-reaching survey of the movement.

This book presents in eight chapters the work of over 75 Chinese female artists, both pictorial and poetic. Their art is viewed within a framework of eight themes. The broad topics explored include the body; life; the representation of the experience of being a woman; home and the world; a view of children and other women; clothes; social conscience; fantasy; and abstractionâ "nonfigurative work and its viability as a medium to express the spiritual. These themes provide several lenses through which to enjoy and compare these artistsâ (TM) approaches and outputs. The volume is unique in its inclusion of poetry by contemporary women whose voices articulate so many of the same concerns as the visual artists. In China, poetry has always been the prime form of artistic expression, and it remains so today. Looking at this poetry affords us a different means of appreciating the art of women in contemporary society.

In Parting the Mists, Aida Yuen Wong makes a convincing argument that the forging of a national tradition in modern China was frequently pursued in association with rather than in rejection of Japan. The focus of her book is on Japan’s integral role in the invention of "national-style painting," or guohua, in early-twentieth-century China. Guohua, referring to brush paintings on traditional formats, is often misconstrued as a residual conservatism from the dynastic age that barricaded itself within classical traditions. Wong places this art form at the forefront of cross-cultural exchange. Notable proponents of guohua (e.g., Chen Hengke, Jin Cheng, Fu Baoshi, and Gao Jianfu) are discussed in connection with Japan, where they discovered stylistic and ideological paradigms consonant with the empowering of "Asian/Oriental" cultural practices against the backdrop of encroaching westernization. Not just a "window on the West," Japan stood as an informant of China modernism in its own right. The first book in English devoted to Sino-Japanese dialogues in modern art, Parting the Mists explores the sensitive phenomenon of Japanism in the practice and theory of Chinese painting. Wong carries out a methodologically agile study that sheds light on multiple spheres: stylistic and iconographic innovations, history writing, art theory, patronage and the market, geopolitics, the creation of artists’ societies, and exhibitions. Without avoiding the dark history of Japanese imperialism, she provides a nuanced reading of Chinese views about Japan and the two countries’ convergent, and often colliding, courses of nationalism.