The Female Nude as Epistemological Citation
Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, images of the female nude quickly became the focal surface of projection of modern China’s cultural transformation into a modern state. A great deal of recent art historical scholarship on the Chinese modern art addresses the visual production of nude paintings, a genre formed at the confluence of self-fashioning art academy, market needs, and a burgeoning media industry. This paper pinpoints the photographic nude as a key site of knowledge production, and traces the historicity of the nude images’ propagation in the popular journals of the Republic of China (1912-1947). It asks: In what ways can these photographs function as the ‘epistemological images’? In what ways did the Chinese photographic nude ‘cite’ and challenge its foreign sources? How did global resources of nude photographs interacted with local discursive practices of art, aesthetics, biological determinism, and eugenics? In what ways did women and female artists empower themselves through the subversive images? Ultimately the Chinese female nude sheds new light on the nature of transcultural knowledge production of modern Chinese art and visual culture, while also contributing a crucial piece to the broader mosaic of modern feminist history and female body images’ global history.