Tamed: Hair and Female Subjectivity
Abstract
This thesis explores the continued discrimination against women in China today, and examines my art research throughout the study of the Master of Fine Arts degree at University of Calgary. Although, since 1949, Mao Zedong had proclaimed that “women hold up half of the sky,” in fact societal pressure on women to conform is so great that even women’s association have co-opted the derogatory term “leftover women” (shengnü) for defining the unmarried women. Sociologist Leta Hong Fincher has studied this phenomenon and her results are the scientific foundation for my artistic exploration. Through using the image of hair as a metaphor, my art practice concerns the social and cultural containment imposed on women, revealing the dilemmas and obstacles that women experience in their lives. Technically, I have investigated ways of coalescing Western drawing methods and Chinese line art together, and have reoriented the traditional Chinese scrolls into installation art.
Description
Keywords
Fine Arts
Citation
Lin, Z. (2017). Tamed: Hair and Female Subjectivity (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27976