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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until December 16, 2024

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Networks Sketched in Ink: Wu Shujuan (1853-1930) and the Business of Female Celebrity in the Shanghai Art World

David, Elise
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3437-3580
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1574694405893491

Abstract Details

2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, History of Art.
This dissertation excavates a pivotal moment in the professionalization of women painters in turn-of-the-century Shanghai, just as concepts of “art,” “tradition,” “modernity,” “womanhood,” and even “China” were undergoing radical redefinition as unstable markers of identity. It was here, on the battleground of a port city art market rife with tensions and excitement, under pressures of foreign incursion and national upheaval, that indomitable female ink painter Wu Shujuan (1853-1930) established her reputation as the most famous woman artist of her day. Among the first to adopt the grassroot trappings of the new modern artist, Wu self-published her oeuvre using imported print technologies, mounted solo Western-style exhibitions, served as a judge for burgeoning art societies, and became an icon for positioning Chinese painting in a global world. By retrieving and revalorizing her career and oeuvre from historical debris and male-dominated canons, this dissertation posits an unprecedented query into the art historical field: how was the history of modern Chinese painting co-written by women? Object-based and drawing on distinct art historical, historical, and feminist paradigms, each chapter illuminates the cast of visible and invisible agents through whom Wu engineered her fame: the colleagues and newswriters who shaped her life story into a veritable hagiography of collectible womanhood; the editors who splashed her paintings across national magazines; the sometimes-shady dealers and interpreters who repackaged her art into greater cultural narratives; and the ghostpainters who covertly copied her hand. In each case divesting her legacy of early twentieth-century misogynist stereotypes, this dissertation investigates gendered practices of inclusion and exclusion, and the (in)direct forms of agency through which the female artist negotiated her mobility and visibility across the nationscape. It not only delivers a complex portrait of Wu Shujuan as a historical subject and painter, prompting new explorations of Shanghai visuality in the genres of landscape and gongbi painting, but examines what was at stake in the post-Qing rebuilding of elite cultural identity and the reformulation of the art world as a modern institution. With the old literati lifestyle shattered, and cultural leaders feeling pressed to produce a national cultural narrative, this dissertation argues Wu reconceptualized modern Chinese art and its marketing in her publications, responding to the nostalgia and ambitions of evolving group identities, discourses of national patrimony, and the commercial concerns of an increasingly anonymous market. Extant paintings by Wu in museum collections further demonstrate the complex intermedial relationships that emerged between original, print, forgery and fake in the early twentieth-century, lending fresh insight into the collecting practices and aesthetics of repetition that developed in the metropolitan market. Most fundamentally exposing the cogs and wheels that drove the machine of artistic celebrity in Shanghai, this dissertation counters any lingering fiction of the heroic modernist ego. It reveals, instead, the networks and shrewd entrepreneurship that transformed Wu Shujuan from artist to commodity to industry.
Julia Andrews (Advisor)
Namiko Kunimoto (Committee Member)
Ying Zhang (Committee Member)
281 p.
Art History
Wu Shujuan; modern Chinese art; women artists; Shanghai painting

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • David, E. (2019). Networks Sketched in Ink: Wu Shujuan (1853-1930) and the Business of Female Celebrity in the Shanghai Art World [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1574694405893491

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • David, Elise. Networks Sketched in Ink: Wu Shujuan (1853-1930) and the Business of Female Celebrity in the Shanghai Art World. 2019. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1574694405893491.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • David, Elise. "Networks Sketched in Ink: Wu Shujuan (1853-1930) and the Business of Female Celebrity in the Shanghai Art World." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1574694405893491

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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© 2019, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.