Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
Lei Yan 雷燕, whose artistic practice was shaped by a decades-long career in the Chinese military, began a period of transition through participation in a 2002 restaging of the Communist Red Army’s 1934 Long March as a multi-sited international art project. Her resulting encounter with US feminist art icon Judy Chicago raised questions about the potential neocolonial influence of global feminist art. The work Lei subsequently produced performs an autoethnographic excavation of the sociohistorical categories—woman soldier, military artist, and woman artist—that made her as both artist and woman. She works from within a national representational corpus, subjecting it to various experiments to reveal the fields of violence it has enacted from the Sino-Vietnamese War to the Great Sichuan earthquake. Lei Yan’s meditation through photography upon national, revolutionary iconography evolved into soft sculpture objects in cloth and paper. Their arrested ephemerality decenters the human subject, drawing attention to haunting absences in conventional stories of art, feminism, and nation. In comparison with the monumental work of Ai Weiwei 艾未未, who also created pieces in response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Lei’s art serves not to admonish but to bring back into consciousness lost lives and camouflaged histories.
positions – Duke University Press
Published: Feb 1, 2020
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.