It was Chairman Mao who said, ‘Women hold up half the sky.’  

The artists in Half the Sky are grouped in the following chapters…

1 ALTER EGOS AND AVATARS

Bu Hua
Cui Xiuwen
Cao Fei

2 TWO GUNSHOTS IN BEIJING

China/Avant-garde and
Xiao Lu

3 NEEDLE AND THREAD: MATERIAL PRACTICES

Gao Rong
Lin Jingjing
Lin Tianmiao
Yin Xiuzhen

4 ‘BLACK AS LACQUER’: REINVENTING INK

Li Tingting
Shi Zhiying
Gao Ping
Bingyi

5 PAINTING THE ZEITGEIST

Yu Hong
Xie Qi
Han Yajuan

6 PAST AND PRESENT

Dong Yuan
Wang Zhibo
Huang Jingyuan

7 INSCRIPTIONS ON THE BODY

He Chengyao
Yingmei Duan
Ma Qiusha

8 Nüshu: A SECRET LANGUAGE OF WOMEN

Tao Aimin
Ma Yanling

9 A WINDOW OPENS

Chen Lingyang
Zhou Hongbin
Liu Shiyuan
Fang Lu

10 BLURRED BOUNDARIES

Liang Yuanwei
Li Shurui
Qin Fengling

Chapter 1, Alter Egos and Avatars, includes Bu Hua whose alter ego is sometimes dressed as a schoolchild of the revolutionary past in a red Young Pioneer scarf and short skirt to represent contemporary female experience (see cover image). Also in Chapter 1 are Cui Xiuwen’s Angels who mirror Cui Xiuwen’s journeys through a changing Chinese landscape.  

Chapter 4 on contemporary ink and brush painting includes Li Tingting, who paints unconventional subjects in a traditional manner, and Bingyi, whose vast ink paintings become immersive, site-specific installations. Amongst other paintings are Yu Hong’s contemporary figures floating on backgrounds of gold leaf, the thousands of figures squeezed from the paint tubes of Qin Fengling, and Huang Jingyuan’s black-and-white Gossip from Confucius City, an ongoing project examining how China presents itself to the world. Working in other media, Half the Sky also presents many sculptors, photographers, video artists and performance artists.

Recently there has been considerable interest in women artists in China, with major survey shows of Lin Tianmiao and Yin Xiuzhen. Gao Rong and Yin Xiuzhen were selected for the 2013 Moscow Biennale, Cao Fei for the 2015 Venice Biennale. In 2016, several more of the artists featured in Half the Sky have developed stellar international careers.

Luise wrote, ‘I wanted to allow the artists a space to reveal their ideas about what drives their work, in their own words, whilst at the same time placing their works in historical, social and political context.