Feminist art is art made by artists consciously in response to feminist art theory developments in the early 1970s.
Linda Nochlin, an art historian, published a seminal essay titled Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? in 1971. She looked into the social and economic factors that kept talented women from achieving the same status as their male counterparts.
By the 1980s, art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker were going even further, questioning the language of art history and its gender-laden terms like 'old master' and'masterpiece.' They questioned the centrality of the female nud in the Western canon, questioning why men and women are depicted so differently. Marxist critic John Berger concluded in his 1972 book Ways of Seeing, 'Men look at women. 'Women are aware that they are being observed.' In other words, Western art reproduces the unequal relationships that exist in society.
Women artists revelled in feminine experience in what is sometimes referred to as First Wave feminist art, exploring vaginal imagery and menstrual blood, posing naked as goddess figures, and defiantly using media such as embroidery that had previously been considered 'women's work.' Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, 1974–9, and Tracey Emin's Bed 1998 are two of the most iconic works of this period of feminist art.
Tracey Emin, Bed, 1998
Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–9
These works respond to the traditional concept (women should handle housekeeping and men should be responsible for working outside) and Engels' theory that women's productivity is excluded from the capital production system (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884), and they have strong and distinctive feminist features and viewpoints.
Works from this period present an effort to expose traditionally feminine private spaces to traditionally masculine public spaces.
Later feminist artists rejected this approach in favour of attempting to uncover the origins of our conceptions of femininity and womanhood. They were interested in the concept of femininity as a masquerade – a set of poses adopted by women to conform to social expectations of womanhood. This feminist work responds to the 1960s debate on feminist ontology. The artist achieves the goal of identity and subject establishment by combining so-called very "feminine" elements.
In my opinion, Feminine Art and feminist art must be very different. Feminist art must explain the artist's personal feminist views. Combining the above understanding of feminism, I believe that the current feminist art should step out of the stage of exposing women’s private space, engage in practical activities that can arouse and consolidate the deconstruction of gender power, and strive for a fairer artistic discourse space for women, sexual minorities, and marginalized groups，and to create more diverse ways of expression (should break the stereotype of feminist works defined by the elements of the works).
Thinking about the inner expression logic of the early feminism art going out of the private space inspired me to analyze the issues concerned by feminism from the perspective of spatial power distribution.
I realized that feminism art and feminism have the same core of thinking about social structural issues, not just focusing on gender issues, but more discussion on the distribution of social power in spatial relations.
I hope that my works are social, and feminism is just my way of thinking, not a limitation on the form and elements of my works. I don't want to use the so-called traditional "feminine elements" to pile up my works.
I choose to conduct further research on space and power relations.