Nüshu: The Hidden Script of Women and Its Rebirth in Contemporary Feminist Art

Nüshu is probably the only known writing system in the world developed and used exclusively by women. Emerging in Jiangyong County, Hunan, China, this phonetic script allowed generations of rural women who were excluded from formal education and written Chinese to write autobiographical poems, letters, and songs. These texts were often composed in a distinctive three-line verse form and circulated through marriage exchanges, embroidery, and communal rituals where they were sung aloud. Through Nüshu, women created a private sphere grounded in grief, resilience, and mutual care.

Despite its historical and cultural significance, Nüshu remains largely absent from contemporary discussions in feminist theory, art history, and visual language. In both academic and artistic contexts, it is often treated as a folkloric phenomenon rather than as a subject of conceptual inquiry. This presentation proposes to reposition Nüshu within the framework of contemporary text-based art, not as an object of cultural preservation but as a resource for feminist artistic strategies.

I will examine how artist Tao Aimin reconfigures Nüshu through her conceptual use of washboards and domestic materials, embedding the script within surfaces that evoke female labour, bodily memory, and the invisibility of women’s writing. In parallel, I will present my own project Manual of Domestic Law, which reimagines Nüshu’s poetic form as scripts of domestic obedience, recontextualised through pseudo-documentary. By combining visual fragmentation, fictionalised interviews, and embroidered erasure, the work investigates how normative language is internalised and how Nüshu’s rhythm and materiality can be reactivated as a feminist critique of everyday regulation.