Transmedia Imagery: Asian Women Artists and Feminism Beyond Fluxus

This article examines the critical yet underrecognized contributions of Asian women artists to the New York avant-garde in the late 1950s, with a particular focus on how they shaped the Fluxus movement led by George Maciunas. It places these artists in dialogue with wartime and postwar Chinese women artists active during the same period, drawing on Asian and Asian diasporic feminist frameworks to explore transnational feminist artistic practices within political, cultural, and historical contexts in Japan and China from the 1960s to the 1980s. Most transmedia artworks—including performance, music, poetry, and all other visual art forms—by Fluxus male artists are well studied and widely known; much less is known about Asian female artists and what they have in common, specifically those with postwar trauma. Existing Fluxus historiographies often view the work of Asian women artists through a Western-centric lens of Neo-Dadaism, largely neglecting how their practices resonate within broader dialogues in Asian and diasporic art. By engaging with the works of Japanese artists such as Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015), Yoko Ono (b. 1933), Takako Saito (b. 1929), and Mieko Shiomi (b. 1938), alongside Chinese artists including He Xiangning (1878–1972), Pan Yuliang (1895–1977), and Guan Zilan (1903–1986), this study situates their practices within Cold War-era avant-garde movements and articulates a decolonial and feminist critique that challenges the current art historical narratives.