Gendered Mediations: Materials, Mediums, Artistic Practices in Twentieth-Century East Asia

Throughout the twentieth century, East Asia underwent drastic transformations—including colonialism, war, and nation-building. Artists across China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan navigated shifting ideological terrains. In the arena of artistic production, one witnessed the introduction of oil painting, the formation of art societies, and the rise of a burgeoning mediasphere. Within these contexts, the question of how art was made—its medium, form, and materiality—often carried gendered connotations and political stakes. Considering recent advances in scholarship by Hongwei Bao, Sunglim Kim, Alison J. Miller, Doris Sung, and Amanda Wangwright on the intersection of gender and artistic practices in East Asia, this panel invites papers that explore how gender and medium intersected in shaping artistic production in the region throughout the twentieth century.

We are particularly interested in how gender shaped the adoption, perception, and at times subversion of artistic media: from traditionally “feminine” crafts like embroidery to “masculine” forms such as ink painting and oil painting. How did women artists assert agency through material practices often dismissed as trivial or domestic? How did male and queer artists challenge or reinforce gender norms through medium-specific or mixed-media experimentation? How did transnational exchanges—via art schools, colonial policies, or personal networks—reshape the gendered meanings of artistic labor? Furthermore, how might the complex mediations of artistic media offer aesthetic capacities that exceed and reconfigure gendered structures? This panel aims to foster cross-regional, cross-media dialogue and to rethink East Asian art history through the intertwined lenses of gender, material practice, and historiography.