This is the mission of art, epoch, and identity. Confronting 20th-century abstract art—a seminal yet allegedly concluded practice—Chinese female artists born in the 1970s-80s defy both mainstream art historiography and the frenzy of ‘Zombie Formalism.’ Instead, within a long-exiled state of feminine labor, they practice a ‘non-dramatic,’ ordered repetition, realizing the fluid ‘inter-subjectivity’ between creator self and material as theorized by Bracha L. Ettinger. In doing so, they naturally fuse abstract art with gendered identity.
Before delving into the theme, we must contextualize the era. The generation born in the late 1970s to early 1980s emerged during a profound historical transformation. Strangled and imploding in the fissures of discursive and visual renewal, they unfolded like a fan of transitional hues, bridging the previous generation’s devotion to grand narratives and humanist enlightenment with the younger generation’s individualism and emotional expression. Intense historical moments forge connections through overlap and fusion. Thus, this generation’s artistic practice retains a sense of intellectual and cultural-historical destiny while existing as a rebellious individual romanticism, amplifying their unique expressive will.
This is reflected in the abstract works of Zhang Xuerui (b. 1979), Li Shurui (b. 1981), and Ju Ting (b. 1983). Their rational, comprehensive perception of ‘how to paint’ cannot be divorced from modernism’s intellectual legacy or Western abstract art’s formalist concepts. Whether through Ju Ting’s meticulous exploration of materiality, or Zhang Xuerui and Li Shurui’s’s relentless investigations into light, color, and space, their works embody this impact. Li Shurui’s pieces and exhibition titles, such as Springtime after the Pandemic and Monadology, directly inherit social concerns and intellectual interests from earlier generations. Compared to the stormy passion of younger female abstract artists, their works appear restrained, yet through subtle repetition and order, they make the themes of personal memory, private emotion, and domestic life to be outstanding, achieving a willful yet rightful arrogation and a gendered revision of abstract art.
Enduring progress and enlightenment have not alleviated institutional and temporal violence. Western abstract art, rooted in rational and logical traditions, inherently excluded the ‘irrational’ and ‘emotional’ feminine. As in other fields, women initially had to adopt male language, rhetoric, and rules—a ‘Mulan-style predicament,’ as Dai Jinhua described, where woman writes from a masculinized viewpoint. From imitation to detachment, and finally to reclaiming feminine experience and stance, this rupture and rebirth remain ongoing.
From artificial light simulations to aggressive materiality in shallow planes, from Eastern meditative spirituality to bodily spatial awareness, from formal and psychological orientations to intersections of emotion and concept, Zhang Xuerui, Li Shurui, and Ju Ting contribute diverse ideas, methods, and visual languages. They offer viewers an experience—a poetic, ordered exploration that begins with the eyes, then move the body, engages knowledge, and culminates in spiritual immersion. This is a feminine alternative to abstract art.
Yet few methods manifest feminine language and experience more powerfully than repetitive labor. Day after day of laborious work—from household chores to textile crafts—historically silent and invisible, has been redefined as an art form that subtly rewrites social discourse. Recognizing the value of feminine labor is foundational to contemporary moral wealth.
Though Zhang, Li, and Ju may not intentionally politicize art, their shared labor-intensive methods undeniably contribute a feminine lexicon. Precise, repetitive bodily and manual work forms the core of their visual outcomes. Zhang Xuerui’s color gradient grids emerge from meticulous brushstrokes on every minute detail, requiring countless micro-movements, reflect a physical intimacy with the canvas. Similarly, to recreate a cyber-urban landscape experience, Li Shurui aligns light points and color sequences with exactitude across monumental canvases. Each luminous dot records the repetition of fundamental gestures, where hands, motions, and pigments merge into a psychedelic rhythm. Ju Ting’s relief-like surfaces, originate from larger bodily engagements. She layers acrylic on the board, then carves or cuts into the accumulated strata. Exploring strategies of stacking, folding, layering, and flowing with raw materials, her process demands patience—waiting for the paint to settle, then resuming action at the precise moment.
These processes resonate with Bracha L. Ettinger’s ‘Matrixial Aesthetic Theory,’ where repetitive gestures and layered colors practiced by the artists who project emotion and subjectivity into their works through sustained bodily labor. The fusion of bodily labor and material energy creates a fluid, transversal subjectivity, achieving a ‘trans-subjectivity’ between the self and the artwork. Ettinger’s theory transcends traditional subject-object dichotomies, weaving humans and things into a ‘non-othering’ resonance relation. By affirming the significance of feminine-maternal care and labor, she redefines a structure of subjectivity. In conventional philosophical and historical frameworks, women were often reduced to objects. Yet through all the actions which are always under repression—including the repetitive labor mention above—women not only introduced a philosophy of interconnected coexistence to the world via maternal-like acts of ‘production’ and ‘creation,’ but also established a uniquely feminine law, necessity, and, ultimately, an indisputable subjectivity.
A plot of land tilled daily for a decade differs profoundly from an untouched field. Knowing the laborer’s persistence, we are pierced by a shared essence. Ettinger’s ‘trans-subjectivity’ bridges not only artist and material but also artist and viewer. Before Zhang, Li, and Ju’s shimmering works, one must recognize the bodily labor of daily time to grasp the duality of spirit and matter, to reach the artist, and to touch the ordinary yet independent self.
In this moment, there is no Other. This is unequivocally a feminine moment.
Text / GAN Ting