GUO Qingling graduated from the Stage Art Department of Shanghai Drama Institute, was born in Henan province and now lives and works in Shanghai. Her works which boast for its strong social practicality and intervention mainly focus on exploring women from different dimensions in life through paintings, videos, installation arts and radio dramas.

For instance, the images of women in the street life created from 1999 to 2002 were saturated with exaggerated outlooks, vibrant colours and vigorous brush-works. The SEAFOOD Series (2002-2005) with liberated style and fluid lines portrayed a group of women constituting the class of consumers who willingly embrace fashion in the urban. The Grey Series (2006-2009) studied the women suffering from physical and mental illnesses. This series appears to be gloomy and depressed. The Second Series (2012-2014) focused on the independent and professional female intellectuals who have made significant contributions. Since 2014, GUO has started to create the images of factory girls from lower class and single women in the cities, which reflects the complex social issues through portraying the anxiety and upset deep inside.

The Artists

Qingling GUO

Yue LIANG

Lise YUEN

Impressions

The workshop ‘Precariously Yours: Gender, Class, and Urbanity in Contemporary Shanghai’ took place between December 4-6 2014 in various locations in Shanghai. In this workshop we have extended the notion of precarity towards the domains of gender, love and sexuality. The topic ‘single women’ served as a prism to explore the complexities which surround precarity, urbanity and class. The HERA SINGLE members and their invited guests aimed at answering the following questions: How do single women negotiate the multiple expectations and demands that society imposes upon them? What are their tactics of resistance against normative gender roles and expectations? How do they negotiate the gendering of urban space? How to love in a city that never stays the same? How to navigate through the city, as a young woman without getting lost or feeling unsafe? How to imagine the city as a more intimate and fragile space? What is to be lost and gained in remaining a single woman?
The workshop zoomed in on how tropes like shengnü (leftover women) can be read as imaginations of a ‘new’ Asian femininity, how different modes of love and desire are explored in diverse creative and sexual cultures in Asian cities, and how art and activism attempt to intervene in hegemonic understandings of love, gender and sexuality.

Here you can download the programme flyer of the SINGLE workshop (Pdf, 0.4 Mb).

 
Further information

– Workshop Concept Note

– Workshop Programme

– Abstracts

Impressions from the Shanghai workshop (December 4-6 2014) and the art exhibition (December 6′, 2014)