As part of the Ostasiatisches Seminar “Landscape of Progression: Art and Visual Culture in the Seventeen-Year Period in China" at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Yuning Teng will hold a lecture on: 

"Seeing State Projects through a Woman Artist’s Eyes"

This lecture takes the female artist and educator Xiao Shufang as a case study. It examines Xiao’s trips for drawing from life in the 1950s to several hydraulic engineering projects, including the Foziling Reservoir, the Sanmenxia Dam, and Ming Tombs Reservoir, as well as other sites associated with socialist infrastructure. These experiences, undertaken in response to the state’s call for artists, not only led Xiao to adapt her artistic language and choice of subject matter to the political and pedagogical demands of the period, but also shaped her perception of the social environment and the construction of her self-image.

In existing histories of the institutionalization of art academies in China, women artists have often been marginalized. Xiao Shufang, for example, is frequently remembered primarily as the wife of Wu Zuoren, the former director of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, rather than as an artist and educator in her own right. By focusing on her artistic practice, this lecture not only examines how a female artist navigated and adapted her artistic expression under the political constraints of the early socialist period, but also seeks to recover overlooked voices and challenge a singular historical narrative of the institutionalization of art in socialist China.