Becoming Visible: Women Artists in the NMH Collection

In 1971 the American art historian Linda Nochlin published the essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ She answered the question not with individual talent but with institutional obstacles: women were long barred from studying the nude model, which kept them out of history painting, then the highest-ranking genre in the academies. What held women back, she argued, was above all the lack of political, social and financial support, not a lack of ability. The essay is regarded as foundational to feminist art history, and it prompted a new focus on women artists, their work and their experiences. In Taiwan, Chen Chin was the first woman to go to Japan to study painting. In 1927 three of her works were selected for the Eastern-style painting section of the first Taiten, and in 1932 she and Liao Chi-chun became the exhibition’s first Taiwanese jurors; born into a gentry family, she came to be called the leading ‘guixiu’ (gentlewoman) painter. The National Museum of History’s exhibition Becoming Visible: Women Artists in the NMH Collection brings together ink painting, calligraphy and Western-style painting by 60 women artists, and tells the development of women’s art in twentieth-century Taiwan as a passage from being ‘the object looked at’ to being ‘the subject who speaks’.

Read the date and the artist’s biography on the label, and think about where she could study and exhibit at that time.

• Taiten 臺展→Chen Chin was selected for the first Taiten, which has its own card.

Ink painting emerged in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907), reached its height in the Song and Yuan dynasties, and developed in its own ways in China, Korea and Japan. Ink is the main pigment, sometimes with a light wash of colour. Another kind of ink-only picture, plain line drawing (baimiao), relies on outlines; what marks ink painting is its use of gradations and blurring of ink to render surfaces. Japan’s Nipponica encyclopedia notes that Zhang Yanyuan’s Lidai minghua ji, written late in the Tang, said of the early Tang painter Yin Zhongrong that he used ink and yet had all five colours: there is nothing on the surface but lighter and darker black, and the viewer takes it as a picture in colour, a way of looking that ink painting needed before it could stand on its own. The two basic ways of handling ink are ‘broken ink’ (破墨) and ‘splashed ink’ (潑墨), which have been explained in various ways; as Nipponica describes them, broken ink lays down pale ink first and adds dark ink over it, building volume from the contrast, while splashed ink ignores outlines and pours ink onto the surface to bring out a form in one go. The brushes and ink are the same as those used for calligraphy, and a stroke, once made, cannot be changed or erased. Landscape is by far the most common subject, and the scenes are usually imagined or only loosely based on real views.

Find the darkest and the palest ink, then look at the areas left blank: are they sky, water or mist?

• Literati painting 文人畫→Literati painting, the scholars’ tradition of painting mostly in ink, has its own card.