The title of Women across Asian Art cannot do justice to the edited volume’s rich and varied content. Ranging over 3,000 years, the book is not only about women, but also gender. It is not limited to “art”, but takes on a more wide-ranging body of material culture and its associated disciplines, including archaeology and architecture. Geographically, it spans East and South Asia and beyond, albeit skewing sinocentric.
The volume’s breadth might be experienced as an asset by some readers and as a lack of coherence by others. But the book, which is full of high quality illustrations, undoubtedly fills some gaps. As stated by the co-editor Allysa B Peyton in the introduction:
There is a persistent need for book-length assessments of the roles of women in the arts of Asia. It is imperative to examine women’s involvement in visual art as creators, curators, collectors, scholars, archaeologists, and indeed subjects, not only because this field is still evolving but also because the thoughtful analysis of gender and identity continues to inform our understanding of the visual arts.
The book’s eleven chapters are grouped into three sections. “Part 1: The Feminine and the Goddess” includes two chapters that examine gendered iconography and symbols in a Qing dynasty mandala and in ancient Chinese script and tomb artifacts. “Part 2: Pioneers and Trailblazers” begins with a chapter on vernacular women’s calligraphy in Joseon Korea, and then proceeds with four biographically-oriented chapters centered on elite women of remarkable talent: the Qing dynasty poet and painter Luo Qilan, early female archaeologists active in Republican era China, the British collector of Chinese art Brenda Zara Seligman, and the architect Lin Huiyin. “Part 3: Modern and Contemporary Makers” broadens the book’s focus beyond East Asia, though it begins with a study of the role of Seibu Department Stores in promoting women artists in late twentieth century Japan. Chapter 9 and chapter 11 examine two contemporary South Asian artists, the neo-miniaturist Saira Wasim, who is from Pakistan, and the Bangladeshi artist Tayeba Begum Lipi. The penultimate chapter is on Tseng Yuho, an acclaimed Chinese-born artist who spent most of her career in Honolulu.
The strongest chapters of the book are those that foreground an analysis of gendered material culture. These chapters are not about, or not only about, women, but about the things and characteristics that mark women as feminine, as well as the things that women make, own, or use. Junko Uchida’s “Gender Roles in Bronze Age China” reads like a detective story, aimed at answering the question of why the Chinese character fu 婦, or lady, combines the radical for woman with the radical for broom. Uchida shows that the broom was a gendered status symbol before it became associated with domesticity. Shang dynasty elite women possessed feathered brooms attached to bronze stands shaped like bird feet, not for sweeping house, but for exhibiting their closeness “to the kings, or to the Divine, who appeared in the shape of birds.” Only later in Chinese history did commonplaces like “A lady should use a dustpan and a broom to take care of housecleaning” emerge. Gendered material culture is, we see here, deeply rooted but also malleable.
A similar insight emerges from Saleema Waraich’s chapter “The Decorative, the Feminine, the Disruptive: Neo-Miniatures and the Satirical Paintings of Saira Wasim.” Indo-Persian manuscript illustrations and serial paintings in albums (dubbed “miniatures” by British colonialists) were long associated with male artists. But modernist condescension toward the “decorative” and Victorian-era assumptions that the decorative is the domain of women, led to a re-gendering of the medium. The artist Saira Wasim, as demonstrated by Wairach’s analysis and the chapter’s compelling illustrations, plays with and subverts these gendered expectations in her politically topical and satire-drenched neo-miniature paintings.
It is hard to meaningfully link all the diverse contributions to this book. In the introduction, Peyton seems to underscore the section and framing of “Pioneers and Trailblazers” when she writes
an overarching theme that emerges is how women have, with varying degrees of success, navigated spheres traditionally dominated by men.
The spatial metaphor is too limiting. If women have navigated male spheres, they have also manipulated male- and female- gendered things. They have co-created the meanings of things, and things have also defined them.