Panel Three - Authority & Agency
Authority & Agency: April 7th, 11am - 12:35am EST
This panel explores modes of female agency in the natural environment, from its empowerment through subtle interventions to its brutal abuse. The female voice, here taken both in literal and abstract terms, manifests in the atmosphere of ruins or as the earthly and divine force that bestows male rulership. Artistic evidence reveals both the strength of female agency and the challenges to it: while a woman may exercise agency in painting the flora of her homeland, she may also be exploited through the natural environment. Through Angkorian inscriptions, film, plein-air gouache painting, and Indian miniatures, the papers in this third panel bring to light the many shades of gendered authority and agency.
Discussant: Rae Erin Dachille, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Arizona
Authority & Agency
“Her Murmurs Among Ruins: The Gendered Soundscape in Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town (1948)”
Mia Liu (Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins University) - “Her Murmurs Among Ruins: The Gendered Soundscape in Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town (1948)”
This paper discusses the profuse use of female voice-over in Fei Mu's film Spring in a Small Town (Xiao cheng zhi chun, 1948), and the tension it creates over the images of ruins on screen. The discourse of ruins in Chinese art history is generally male-centered. In the dominant literati tradition, ruins are understood as a lamentation of a past and a memorial of an absence, and that past is a dynastic and national concept, a patriarchal structure of power, and the person who does the lamenting is with no exception a male. However, the film Spring interjects in the classic poetics of ruins with a woman’s healthy body and especially a woman’s sane voice. The film’s ruins, if appearing first as an allegory of the shattered state and a broken culture, become a gendered polity. This paper examines this female soundscape and its intervention in the visual history of ruins, and argues towards the film medium's transformatively gendered intervention in modern Chinese art and visual culture.
“Nature and Gender: Women Artists Depicting Plants in Colonial Taiwan”
Chinghsin Wu (Associate Teaching Professor, Rutgers University) - “Nature and Gender: Women Artists Depicting Plants in Colonial Taiwan”
Ruling Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, the Japanese colonial government mobilized painters to depict the landscapes of Taiwan as symbols of the expanse and extent of the Japanese Empire. While seeking out new subject matters, these artists, on the one hand, explored the native plants and living creatures endemic to Taiwan; on the other hand, the "nature" that they depicted paralleled and imbricated the modern, scientifically cultivated land and cityscapes that the Japanese colonial government sought to construct on the island.
This paper focuses on plant paintings by one of the most significant Japanese-style artists in Taiwan during this period, Gōhara Kotō, as well as works by his Taiwanese students at the Third Girls' High School in 1920s and 1930s Taiwan. Beginning from the late 1920s, Kotō and other artists successfully promoted a government-sponsored fine arts exhibition that eventually stimulated themselves and local painters, including many of his female students, to explore the local scenery of Taiwan, especially its plant life.
While Kotō explored a wide variety of landscapes in Taiwan, including mountains, seashores, and forests many of his students from the Third Girls' High School remained focused on plant motifs. This paper first analyzes Kotō’s exploration of plants, which reflect the changing biota of Taiwan, especially newly implanted species that formed the new landscapes of the main colonial entrepôts. It will then examine the paintings produced by Kotō's female Taiwanese students, focusing on the range and sources of the plants they depicted, the societal expectations and limitations regarding their choices of how to depict nature, and how they reacted to the changing botanical environment of their home island.
Anisha Saxena (Assistant Professor, SUNY Cortland) - “Trees, Mountains, Rivers, and Rapes: Medieval Miniature Paintings and Scenes of Sexual Assault Amidst Natural Environments”
In Sanskrit poetry, drama, and literature uddīpanavibhava or secondary excitant is a condition that motivates emotion, especially sexual desire. This emotion is expressed and enhanced through the beauty of natural environment including water bodies, flowers, mountains, moon, or the seasons. In my research on early South Asian Sanskrit literature, I have argued that uddīpanavibhava is often employed to justify rape. Interestingly, this pattern extends into the genre of South Asian miniature paintings.
My paper will discuss miniature paintings from medieval South Asia that depict scenes of sexual assault of women taking place within the natural environment. Additionally, I will examine the patterns of patronage and motives for these paintings. Furthermore, my paper will consider the connections between the elements of nature and painted scenes of sexual assault. I argue that these miniature paintings by placing scenes of sexual assault of women in a natural environment reduces women to being a part of nature, and by making women part of nature they become man’s right to obtain, desire, enjoy and conquer.
