I was very pleased to receive a comment on my blog and project from Tianxin Peng, who has obviously spent a lot of time researching and analysing my project and subject matter, and I am very grateful for the valuable comments he made on my article, which have been very beneficial.
Firstly, I think the things that he commented on very well and that caused me to reflect on were.
- the issue of audience. The audience for my project was people interested in feminist art, women art practitioners, students from Edinburgh University, etc. His idea was that “art exhibitions doing justice to female protagonists need to be open to the whole community, not only to celebrate the contribution of women in art but also to raise public awareness and consciousness of gender equality and women’s rights.”
Indeed, this is a good pattern; women’s art is oriented towards society in order to better promote social understanding and recognition of women. I agree with this point. I admit that this is due to my narrow-mindedness, such as “I don’t want to cause a lot of trouble”, and with the rise of cool kids’ ideas and anti-feminism at the end of the last century, I think it’s really tempting for me to avoid some of the problems of simply making content about women’s suffering. But the fact is that “conflict is what makes a conversation”, as Xiaotong impressed me when I commented on his article. Conflict means that there is a difference of opinion, and this is an area worth discussing, which generates conversation and makes it easier for the audience to enter the context I have created.
- There is a need for a more diverse range of artists. Most of the artists I have used are women, with only one cisgender male. This is something that I have not yet considered, partly because I do not currently recognize any transgender artists who fit my ideas, and partly because I cannot directly adopt transgender artists because it would lead to confusion in the main idea of my work. I think feminism and coolie-ism is still very different thing, can the suffering of secular women be empathetically represented in this one group? I understand that nothing is pure and absolute, including the definition of femininity. But the idea of the female as an object, when it becomes a symbol, there is a stereotypical image of the secular bound to it – that is what I want to attack from within.
- the channel through which the audience communicates with the artist. This idea had never occurred to me before, and I had been confused for a long time about how to construct effective communication with the audience, so I am grateful to Tianxin Peng for reminding me of this. In this way, the exhibition and I will become a bridge between the artist and the audience, and this will lead to a very harmonious interaction.
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