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As suffrage movements unfolded around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women in Asia also fought to enter the public sphere. In these contestations, art emerged as a critical tool at the disposal of policy makers and women alike, to restrict or promote women’s liberation accordingly. This panel explores these images, and the producers of them, to examine the conceptualization and realization of women’s emancipation in East Asia. Alison Miller’s paper argues that Meiji woodblock prints of women silk mill workers promoted state-controlled modern industry while preserving the patriarchal social order by means of aestheticized factory images. Sunglim Kim investigates an entire generation of largely forgotten women painters from Colonial-period Korea and illuminates how their education and careers intertwined with changing socio-political contexts. Focusing on women oil painters in late 1920s China, Amanda Wangwright’s paper analyzes public perception and insider discourse surrounding these artists’ efforts to advance women’s rights and the nation at large. Doris Sung examines a women’s art society in Shanghai and identifies the ways in which its members intended their activities to contribute to society and the nation, while simultaneously improving the social standing of women artists. Aida Yuen Wong, expert on East Asian art and gender, will open discussion. With reoccurring themes of commerce, nationalism, modernity, and the popular press unfolding across a regional context, this session seeks to reassess the ways in which visual art and its makers wielded the power to promote, control, or oppress women’s rights.