Asian women artists: A local and global perspective

Abstract

In this paper, I focus on contemporary Asian art that deals with images of women, by women or about women. I canvas issues pertinent to the position of women and art production in the social setting of contemporary Asia and Asian Diaspora. I begin with a brief historical discussion of images of Asian women as traditional, masculine and Western. In recent times nudity and eroticism has had mixed reactions in the Asian public realm. Many contemporary Asian women artists have turned to the female body as a primary subject of the female experience. Gender, sexuality and power are distinct sites of struggle in the politics of difference for Asian women artists. Western modernist and colonialist presumptions, however, still persist in many cultural institutions. The local and global contexts of Asian women artists and their creations are seen as contested sites. As an exemplar in this paper, the exhibition Text and Subtext: Contemporary Art and Asian Women provides a critical framework that suggests provocative ways of rethinking contemporary art created by Asian women in which identity and cultural practice are to be conceived. Contemporary women artists in a local and global realm have demarcated a critical space for the articulation of a transnational Asian culture.