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Ongoing Forum---“Gender and Multi-cultural Space” by Tao Yongbai |
Oct.27, 2010—Art critic Tao Yongbai delivered a lecture entitled “Gender and Multi-cultural Space” at Gao Minglu Contemporary Art Center.
Tao began her talk with the definition of “feminism” and traced the development of the women’s art in China. Since the 1980s, due to the involvement of feminism, gender became a sensitive issue within the realm of Chinese contemporary arts. What exactly, then, is the relationship between gender and art? According to Tao, sexuality, although originally a strictly biological concept, has evolved into a social property along with the advancement of mankind in history. Thousands of years of male dominance in human society led to the social attribute of gender that distinguishes the ways of thinking and behavior by men and women. Meanwhile, this dichotomy in sexuality also is a constraint on the free artistic expression by men and women artists. No matter men or women, gender is a force of inter-gender harmony instead of the opposition between the two genders. As a human being, we must always seek for harmony and complement between elements of yin and yang within a framework of interaction in order to achieve perfection. Therefore, the target of criticism by feminists is the traditional value formed through the historical forces of social gender division. Its goal is to set us free from the constraints of mind, to get back to the inborn nature of the human kind, a real freedom in the spiritual space. Several women artists participated in the discussion after the talk of Tao, who called for the delimitation of the artistic modes of expression in female arts and a “revolution of sentiment” in the 21st century.
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