New Geographies of Feminist Art: China, Asia, and the World

November 15-17, 2012

New Geographies of Feminist Art is an international conference that addresses the practice, circulation, and cross-cultural significance of feminist art from Asia. Through a lively, intellectual exchange and consequent publication, we seek to understand how Asian women have negotiated changes in the contemporary art world and intervened in politics of visual representation. By staging an interdisciplinary conversation among art historians, anthropologists, historians, and Asian and cultural studies scholars, as well as artists and curators, the conference explores a feminist art history grounded in a comparative framework and the Asian context.   

The conference reorients scholarly discussion from Western to nonwestern art world centers like Beijing and Delhi, Taipei and Tokyo, Hong Kong and Hanoi, Seoul and Shanghai, Guangzhou and Jakarta, by examining the role of women artists, the history and future of feminism, and the visual representation of gender and sexuality. 

The conference is timed to coincide with Elles, a major exhibition of feminist art originally organized by the Centre Pompidou, which will be on view at the Seattle Art Museum from October 2012 to January 2013. New Geographies of Feminist Art provides a unique opportunity for critical dialogue with this exhibition, aimed toward rewriting national art histories and global feminist art history. 

Conference panels and roundtables are organized around six interlocking themes—the city and the country; art markets and art worlds; sites and structures — to rethink dominant narratives of feminist art.

Sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities; the Divisions of Arts and Social Sciences; Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies; Division of Art History, School of Art; Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies; Center for Global Studies; East Asia Center; China Studies; South Asia Studies; Southeast Asia Studies; the Henry Art Gallery; and the Gardner Center for Asian Art and Ideas of the Seattle Art Museum, with generous support from the American Council of Learned Societies, funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

Participants

• Julia Andrews, Ohio State University
• Jennifer Bean, University of Washington
• Susan Bean, Peabody Essex Museum
• Meiling Cheng, University of Southern California
• Parul Dave-Mukherji, Jawaharlal Nehru University
• Ingrid Dudek, Christie's New York and Hong Kong
• Patricia Failing, University of Washington
• Katherine Hacker, University of British Columbia
• Binghui Huangfu, University of New South Wales, Sydney
• Kajri Jain, University of Toronto
• Namiko Kunimoto, American University
• Maud Lavin, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• Hung Liu, Mills College
• Catharina Manchanda, Seattle Art Museum
• Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker, Mills College
• Navjot, Mumbai and Bastar
• Laurie Sears, University of Washington
• Shu-mei Shih, University of California, Los Angeles
• Doris Ha-Lin Sung, York University
• Nora Taylor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• Shu-chin Tsui, Bowdoin College
• Winnie Wong, Harvard University
• Astri Wright, University of Victoria
• Chin-tao Wu, Academia Sinica
• Wu Mali, Kaohsiung Normal University
• Karin Zitzewitz, Michigan State University

Image: Wu Mali, Secret Garden, 1999, installation view. Photographed by Leo Lee. © Wu Mali