Shock of the Nude: Pioneering Women Artists and the Cultural Politics of Modern China

The bare, naked, nude, and tradition-defying body constituted one of the most radical sites of cultural transformations in China’s pivotal historical transition from the last imperial dynasty to a new Republic. This lecture reveals how the female nude – at the intersection of art, medicine, and science – became deeply entwined with the cultural politics of nationalism and modernisation, structured new racial, gender, and class relations, and simultaneously, shaped the genesis of modern art and visual culture in China.