As a title, Bald Girls, homonymic to The Bald Prima Donna, a famous play by Eugène Ionesco, a French playwright of the Theatre of the Absurd, is metaphoric of the absurd and awkward current multiple reality in China. To replace "song" with "dagger-axe", we aim to imply that in the present Chinese context where Feminist Art is still something new, artists have to turn to arms instead of to entertainment.
The exhibition will feature three representative contemporary domestic or overseas female artists of different age groups.
Li Xinmo, a most controversial and rebellious feminist artist in the contemporary art scene in China, refers mainly to body performance and examines the relationship between performance and film, between performance and painting. What she advocates as "liberal women's rights" includes human rights into women's rights and encourages pursuit of freedom and equality, reaction against the established rules and conventions, independence of women as an individual, and freedom from any bonds of the mind, which are all necessary for liberal women.
From its outset, contemporary feminist art in China was connected with a feminist artist, Xiao Lu, who shot at her own diploma work. Her recent body performances absolutely challenge the social morals and imagination of the audience. Her works reveal her quality as a critical feminist who tries to reexamine the possibilities and forms of feminism in China and reflects on the relationship between women and social codes in contemporary art.
Before leaving China, Lan Jiny had been strongly influenced by the '89 modern art movement and had got the same life experiences as Li Xinmo and Xiao Lu had. Exposed later to a social context characterized with relatively developed cultural elements, Lan Jiny does not seem to be as anxious as the other two artists to upset the status quo. To some extent, she benefits from the Feminist Movement in the West. By making use of different art media, she interprets her new feminism of pleasure embodied in "enjoying the physical well-being, maintaining the balance between career and family, and assimilating the essence of both the East and the West".
Different from their predecessors who used to express the pain and pleasure their bodies experienced as female, the three feminist artists in this exhibition, with their unique art media, question the conventional female identity and the concept of gender in China in a revolutionary way and review and interpret their role, both internal and external, as women from the perspectives of cultural sociology and psychology. As female artists, they not only express their unique cultural perplexity in the age of consumerism and the global context but also try to catch any opportunity in the great social changes to have their independent and equal voice as women.
Bald Girls is more than an exhibition due to the embodied concept of feminist art, i.e., to react against sexism, expose the real nature of social gender, to advocate the spirit of rebellion as "bald girls" and fighting will as "guerrilla girls", and to usher in a new age when gender difference is put into oblivion.
