Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion

Chinese-German Culture and Politics through a Feminist Lens
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64014-222-0
Verlag: Camden House

Buch, Englisch, Band 257, 258 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 730 g

Reihe: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

Examines the career and message paintings of the feminist conceptual artist Jiny Lan, analyzing a cross-section of works that invite literary, historical, socio-political and transcultural interpretations.

Jiny Lan is an avant-garde Chinese artist based in Germany. A founding member of the feminist art collective "Bald Girls," she infuses astute, politically charged, and iconoclastic criticism into her conceptual and visual art. Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion provides a hermeneutic and critical analysis of Lan's idiosyncratic, provocative, and ingenious artwork. "Subversion" refers not only to her political and cultural subversiveness but also to her iterative technique of reproduction and repainting, which she uses to create a series of genealogically related "sub-versions" of her own paintings.

As an émigré and immigrant artist, Lan is profoundly influenced by both eastern and western cultures and traditions. Her immersive experience and extensive knowledge of two contrasting national histories, cultures, and political systems endows her with a unique intersectional positionality. Her artwork is at once figurative and abstract, realistic and fantastic, chaotic and logical, appropriative and creative. It interrogates serious issues such as censorship, authoritarianism, democracy, human rights, sexism, racism, war, migration, and Covid-19, but in a dynamic and often humorous manner. This book lays a foundation for evaluating Lan as an artist whose work invites discussions about portraiture, power, temporality, space, corporality, and sex.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Shen, Qinna

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunststile Asiatische Kunst
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Studien zu einzelnen Ländern und Gebieten

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Message Painting: "I use my paintbrush to be heard!"

Part One: Artistic Contexts and Concepts
1. From "Bad Girl" to "Bald Girl": Lan's Journey to the West

2. From Maoist Posters to Political Pop: Artistic Methods and Influences

Part Two: Feminist Art
3. The Bald Girls: Feminist Visual and Performance Art
4. Selbstverfraulichungwith the Master's Tools: A Double-Edged Reception of Joseph Beuys
5. Contending with the "Painter Princes" of Germany: Lan's Masterpieces (2018-2019)

Part Three: Political Art
6. Modernizing or Moldering: Criticism of Autocracies
7. Only Possible in a Democracy: Paintings of German Chancellors
8. Visualizing Sino-European Politics: Transcultural Art about the New Silk Road

Coda: Deterritorialized and Reterritorialized Messaging: Émigré and Immigrant Art

Appendix: Hanzi Equivalents for Words and Phrases Given in Pinyin
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Shen, Qinna
QINNA SHEN received her PhD in German from Yale and is Associate Professor and Chair of German at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films (2015) and co-edited volumes Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia (2014) and Charting Asian German Film History (2025). She is on the editorial board of German Studies Review and is currently co-editing the special issue marking the German Studies Association's 50th anniversary in 2026.