The Paradox of Xiang Jing

Hang Chunxiao: Zhai Jing, I felt you have exaggerated this point. Why do we always criticize an artist from the issue of gender? I don’t feel it necessary to focus on the topic of Xiang Jing as a woman, because the art history today is a history of genre. Whether a work will enter the art history is decided by the kind of genre that it adopts. Also, feminists writing art history often use gender factors as the criteria. I find it something totally unnecessary. Whether an artist will be distinguished in art history is determined by his artistic skill, not gender. If you want to look for concealed artists and new possibilities in art history, you shall also look for hidden stylistic factors, instead of individual factors. What’s the point of using gender as criteria in entering art history?
Zhai Jing: I guess you totally misunderstood me. In fact, what I tried to do is not to make you focus on the fact that ‘Xiang Jing is a woman’, nor using gender as a criterion in entering art history. As we all know, feminism, and post-colonialism in broader sense, is not an art history issue, but a sociological one. For instance, it makes no sense for feminist art historians only to compile a feminist art history based on gender, independent of the mainstream art history. But why they still do it and are tolerated by others, despite the fact that everybody knows its narrowness? This is exactly because the notion of a history of genre as you just mentioned is also not objective and universal. It also holds some presumptions as to what is good, what is sublime, what is great, what is a master, what are the genres and innovation that worth promoting. You cannot call it an objective criterion, because it is made up of various complicated factors and judgments, and these judgments often have nothing to do with art itself. There is no such thing as pure eyes. That’s why some female artists are re-discovered. They may not make high artistic achievements, or perhaps many of them may even be proved to be valueless. But the fact that they are veiled is undeniable, and it is mainly because of their gender. We have to firstly recognize the existence of this group before we talk about their values. Maybe the current work went a bit too far, but it is certainly needed. Even if all these artists turned out to be of no value, at least one thing is confirmed: they bring about social issues that have seldom been concerned or never learnt