Description

Ideals of beautiful and desirable bodies are historically contingent and shift in response to a range of social, economic, technological and political changes. The dramatic changes that took place in China at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries directly impacted on corporeal aesthetics. Powerful new conceptualizations of “the past” and “the present”, the “foreign” and the “Chinese” circulated in China’s transition from Imperial dynasty to Republican state. This paper examines the 100 Beauties genre in commercial illustrated publications from the late Qing and early republic and argues that the beauties depicted reflect the uniquely Chinese sense of modernity that was circulating at this time. The seminar will feature artwork by Ding Song, Wu Youru, Shen Bochen and Dan Duyu.

Louise Edwards is Professor of Modern China Studies at HKU. Her publications include Gender, Politics, Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford, 2008). She is currently working on gendered cultures of war and her article “Drawing Sexual Violence in Wartime China: Anti-Japanese Propaganda Cartoons” recently appeared in Journal of Asian Studies.