Who is She?
她是谁？
About Us
We are a collective of University of Leeds, Performance and Cultural Industries postgraduate students. Our project is inspired by Roger Fry's Portrait of Nina Hamnett (1917) exhibited as part of the Michael Sadler Collection in The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery. Fry's portrait sensationalises Hamnett, advertising a bohemian lifestyle that was unconventional for the time. However, we were inspired by the story of Nina Hamnett's artistic career, a story left absent by the painting and one often unexplored in comparison to her hedonistic lifestyle. Our project strives to celebrate the female artist for her career and for her contributions to the art world. Furthermore, we wanted to challenge how largely the media continues to treat contemporary female artists, much like Hamnett was treated in the early twentieth century, by speculating upon their private lives or doubting their success. As a group made up of students from the UK and China we wanted to make sure our project had an international scope, reflecting upon the situation of female artists across cultures.
Group members:
Elise Evans, Linqi Duanmu, Qingxi Wang, Rebecca Thornalley, Shixuan Wang & Yunmeng Du
Nina Hamnett (1890 - 1956)
Born: Tenby, Wales
Nina Hamnett’s life is a confusing story, subject to much speculation and surrounded by myth, constructed by both herself and others. Roger Fry’s Portrait of Nina Hamnett (1917), the inspiration for our project and part of the Michael Sadler collection in The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, tells the story of the ‘Queen of Bohemia’, which she was often nicknamed. He depicts an extravagant bohemian figure and transforms the young woman into a visual spectacle that is in keeping with the many stories about Hamnett’s hedonistic lifestyle. Although Hamnett was herself an artist, studying at schools in Dublin, London and Paris, her personal life has attracted far more attention than her art and her talent has rarely been acknowledged. She was the creator of many portraits that she intended to be psychological, focusing on the nature of the age in which she was active and in 1919 she was described as 'one of the most interesting of the younger generation of British artists’ (The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs).
However, it has often been suggested that her lifestyle choices, ‘promiscuity’, ‘partying’ and a ‘desire to shock’ were of detriment to her work (Wilson, 'Bohemian Dress and the Heroism of Everyday Life',1998). But where has this opinion stemmed from, was it not possible for the female artists to be successful and enjoy a hedonistic lifestyle?
In her later life, she began to practise art less and less. It has often been commented that she turned to alcohol and supposedly spent much of her time relaying anecdotes about her life in exchange for drinks. Hamnett's life ended in 1956, when she mysteriously fell forty feet from her apartment window (ArtLark, 2020). Is Hamnett a victim of early-twentieth century gender politics? Would her artistic career have been perceived in the same light if she were male?
Roger Fry - Portrait of Nina Hamnett (1917)
Image © University of Leeds Art Collection
References
Unknown. 1919. ‘Nina Hamnett’. The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs. 35.200, pp.224-225.
Wilson, E. 1998. ‘Bohemian Dress and the Heroism of Everyday Life’. Fashion Theory. 2.3. pp.225-244.
ArtLark, https://artlark.org/2020/02/14/artist-nina-hamnett-jazz-ages-wildest-party-girl/
Fry, R. 1917. Portrait of Nina Hamnett. [Painting]. At: Leeds: The University of Leeds, The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery. LEEUA 1965.001.
Xiao Lu (1962)
Born: Huangzhou District, Huanggang, China
Installation and performance artist Xiao Lu, born in 1962, arguably created China’s first major feminist contemporary art, Dialogue,1989, for The China/Avant-Garde exhibition. Lu gained attention after having shot a gun at her own installation just two hours after its opening in 1989. Xiao Lu and her performance in 1989 signified a very important moment in Chinese history. A historical milestone in two ways: firstly, it broke new ground in contemporary Chinese performance art; secondly, it is a statement that female artists exist in China. However, Xiao Lu feels her own artwork is not valued when it comes from her emotional experience. However, she feels her artworks gain attention and value when placed in a socio-political context. This occured when male speculator Tang Song interpreted Dialogue. Xiao Lu argues that contemporary Chinese art is often deemed worthless if it is born from emotion, but if it is born from female emotion, it is even more worthless again.After a period of silence, Xiao returned to Beijing in 2003 and has since spoken out about her earliest piece, and has produced works with highly personal as well as strong socio-political messages. Under the entrapment of Chinese collectivism, individuals are insignificant, not to mention women's subjective consciousness. Xiao Lu's performance art was said to be inspired by her embodied experiences as a woman in China and has struggled both as a woman and as an artist against the collective consciousness in Chinese art. Her works often stem from intuition and are full of confrontation and aggression, sometimes against herself, and sometimes against unfair surroundings.
References
Tate,https://www.tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/tate-research-centre-asia/women-artists-contemporary-china/xiao-lu
Tracey Emin (1963)
Born: Croydon, England
London based artist Tracey Emin is a prominent member of the Young British Artists who rose to fame in the late 1980s. Emin’s poignant works mine autobiographical details, an example of using herself as the artwork through a variety of media. In 1999 Emin was nominated for the Turner prize and exhibited perhaps her most recognised work, My Bed (1998) – ‘a readymade installation, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed, in which she had spent several weeks drinking, smoking, eating, sleeping and having sexual intercourse while undergoing a period of severe emotional flux.’ My Bed was inspired by a sexual yet depressive phase in the artist's life when she had remained in bed for four days without eating or drinking anything but alcohol. When she looked at the vile, repulsive mess that had accumulated in her room, she suddenly realised what she had created. Her relationship with sex is a dominant theme and aspect of her work. Although sex has been presented in art for centuries, even in the late 1990’s Emin’s confessional work exploring her own body, sexuality and domestic spaces caused controversy. Today, over twenty years later there are not many female artists who choose to present their sexuality in the same way Emin has. My Bed (1998) and her other seminal pieces of work such as Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995) has been claimed to have provocatively contributed to feminist discourse due to the confessional nature of her art.Similarly, just as Emin has explored the taboo of female pleasure, she also presents issues of her own mental health and self-torment. Emin delved into the darkest times of her own life and presented them on display between the white walls of galleries for thousands to see. The first time she created My Bed, at a show in Japan in 1998, Emin mentions she included a noose “with a hangman’s knot” suspended above it. By the time it was shown in the Turner prize exhibition a year later, she’d removed that gory detail, but for her this artwork will always be the “ghost” of a time that felt like “the end”, when her life was disintegrating around her, around her bed. In February 2013, she was named as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4, yet despite her success, Emin is almost always portrayed as a Diana-esque femme tragique. It's rare to get a glimpse of the successful person she's become.
References
The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/16/tracey-emin-artist-1998-installation-my-bed-tate-liverpool-merseyside
Saatchi Gallery, https://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/tracey_emin.htm
The South Bank Show, 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxaoAy9oNtY&t=80s
Yu Xiuhua(1976)
Born: Hubei, China
Yu Xiuhua(1976), a female poet with cerebral palsy from rural Hubei Province, has emerged as a major new voice in contemporary Chinese literature. Yu Xiuhua (余秀华) became an overnight celebrity poet when her sensationally titled poem “Crossing Over Half of China to Sleep with You.” “Chuan guo daban ge zhongguo qu shui ni” (穿过大半个中国去睡你) went viral online in 2014. Although this poem was successful, the work also received vast media attention and criticism as it was a female poet writing about erotic longing, which was considered to be 'lewd'. Because of Yu Xiuhua's disability (cerebral palsy), gender, and background as a farmer in central Hubei, her poetry was initially popularized over the internet as the work of a "brainparalyzed peasant woman poet." However, In the New York Times Xiuhua once claimed that she is indifferent to these labels. The labels that are applied to her and the criticism she receives for writing on sexual subjects highlights the difficulty of being a woman artist. After the success of 'Crossing Over Half of China to Sleep With You' she divorced her husband, an act for which she also received much criticism from the public. For example, ABILITY Magazine claimed '[s]he can write poetry, but she forgets her own family name and disowns her husband' and '[n]ow I am famous. Now I have money. I don’t need my husband anymore.'Yu Xiuhua through her poetry provides a voice for women with disabilities and articulates in her verse something new and unique in the Chinese literary tradition: a female and disabled perspective. Yu Xiuha has published three books of poetry that have sold over 400,000 copies. This figure is indicative of a fascination with new poetry in China, the likes of which has not been witnessed in China since the 1980s Cultural Fever.
References
https://www.questia.com/magazine/1P4-2171120817/featured-poet-yu-xiuhua
The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/world/asia/china-poet-yu-xiuhua.html
ABILITY Magazine, https://abilitymagazine.com/poetic-documentation-yu-xiuhua/
Yayoi Kusama (1929)
Born: Matsumoto, Nagano, Japan
In 1939, when Yayoi Kusama was less than 10 years old, she suffered from neurological audiovisual disorders and often had hallucinations. The world she saw was covered with a huge net, so she kept drawing and tried to show her illusion with repeated dots, mental illness and artistic creation almost accompany her life. In 1957, she moved to the United States, spent most of her time in New York City, and began to be known as the " Polka-Dot Queen of the Avant-Garde". In the 1960s, she took part in many anti-war movements. In 1962, she participated in a joint exhibition of seven people at the green art gallery in New York City. In 1965, the Infinity Mirror Room was exhibited in New York. Its characteristics (red dots on white background, large mirrors, artists standing in the centre) attracted considerable attention. In 1966, the artwork "Love Forever", which uses the spatial device of the small round bulb and the large mirror infinite reflection, created quite a visual psychedelic work, which can be said to be the famous work of Kusama. In the same year, she was invited to attend the 33rd Venice Biennale. The work is called "Narcissus Garden". In 2003, a long-term retrospective tour was held in Japan and the United States. Her dress is often highly homogenous with her works. She is famous for her short coat and very strong eye shadow make-up. Kusama once explained that these visual features all come from her illusion. She thought that these points constituted an infinite net, representing her life.Kusama has became a globally celebrated artists, well known for her Infinity Room installations and her patterned artworks. However Kusama's rise to fame has been slow. Scott Wright argues for The Guardian that this has been due to her being 'a woman, and a Japanese woman. She just wasn’t recognised in the way the white male artists were.' But now it is 'clear she was a very important figure both in minimalism and in pop art. Her work provided a link between the two, which was unique.'
References
The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/sep/23/yayoi-kusama-infinity-film-victoria-miro-exhibition
Helen Chadwick (1953-1996)
Born: Croydon, England
Helen Chadwick was a British artist, working primarily as a photographer, sculptor and creator of installation works. In her art, Chadwick sought to question gendered stereotypes. She studied at The University of Birghton and completed a Master's at Chelsea College of Art. Her graduate performance, Domestic Sanitation (1976) featured female performers wearing latex skin while they carried out what are considered to be typically feminine activities. In 1977 she moved to Beck Road, where a number of other artists chose to live, creating a hive of artistic creation and studios. She entered the public eye with her work Ego Geometria Sum (1983), a series of sculptures that were printed alongside Chadwick’s naked form. The sculptures she argued reflected significant points in her aging process as an artist. She became an increasingly prominent figure in the art world following her first solo exhibiton Of Mutability (1986-1987). In the nineties she created her works Loop My Loop (1991) and Piss Flowers (1991-1992). Chadwick was one of the first female artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize, receiving her nomination in 1987.Despite her success Chadwick has received media criticism. The use of her own naked body in her work has been referred to by many as 'narcissism' and she has been accused of creating images for the voyeuristic male. However, Chadwick’s work has aimed to explore female identity. Critics perceptions of her work as pleasing to the male eye have only replicated the exact perceptions of the female body that Chadwick attempted to critique and dismantle in her work. It is unlikely that such critical perceptions of Chadwick's own body in her work would be the same if she were not a woman artist.
References
Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/helen-chadwick-2253
The Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/what-a-swell-party-it-was-1335102.html
The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery
The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery is a free admissions gallery based inside the Parkinson Building. Though tucked away, the gallery offers an exceptional art collection including stunning examples of European and British painting, drawings, and prints from the 17th century to the present day, as well as small collections of sculpture, ceramics, miniatures, and photographs. The Micheal Sadler Collection is a selection owned by Sadler, who was the former Vice-chancellor of the university in the early twentieth century. Each piece specially selected, has a fascinating story behind it, including Roger Fry's Portrait of Nina Hamnett (1917), the inspiration for our project. Therefore, we believe the gallery not only displays exceptional art but also offers a rich history of the founding of the university. So next time you go to get a new book out of Brotherton Library, or perhaps you have a long lunch break, spend some time discovering the incredible art that is available and learn more about the history of the university where you have chosen to study.
To find out more visit:
https://library.leeds.ac.uk/info/1905/about/117/the_stanley_and_audrey_burton_gallery