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

The University of Washington presents a conference that addresses the practice, circulation, and cross-cultural significance of feminist art from Asia.

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.