Women, Labor, and Textiles in Contemporary Asian Art

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Textiles are an artistic media distinguished by their tactility and inherent functionality. Associated with identity, certain garments, motifs, and colors can be a synecdoche for a community or nation. Textiles today occupy a liminal place between “contemporary art” and “craft,” a position affecting perceptions of value and status of their creators, the majority of whom have been women.

Contemporary Asian artists of diverse socio-economic contexts work with cloth and fiber to allude to the gendered nature of textile manufacture across Asia. This border-crossing panel moves beyond textiles themselves to critically examine their social, financial, national, and global roles, and the gendered identities of their producers or users.

Cathleen Cummings investigates how tourists imagine rural Gujarati women embroiderers as emblematic of "real" India, ambassadors of national values. Melia Belli Bose explores Bangladeshi artists’ responses to a deadly garment factory collapse and gendered labor in the country’s garment industry. Locating sericulture in its gendered place in Chinese history, Lara C. W. Blanchard examines a contemporary female painter who evokes associations between silk and “women’s work.” Miriam Wattles considers how the revival of “traditional” patterns and practices factors along with gender in a cosmopolitan fashion firm and in selections of “Living National Treasures” in the textile category.

These papers investigate confluences of gender, community/nation, globalization, and capitalism, considering how textiles and their production are gendered in Asia today, what tensions exist between Human Capital and the market, and whether art can play a role in improving gender and economic inequality Asian textile industries.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Melia Belli Bose, University of Texas at Arlington

Chair

• Cathleen Cummings, University of Alabama, Birmingham

Individual Presentations

• Women Artists of Kutch and the “Woman-as-Nation” - Cathleen Cummings, University of Alabama, Birmingham

• Playing upon the Concept of Women’s Work: Silk as Gendered Medium in the Paintings of Yu Hong - Lara C. W. Blanchard, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

• Spinning, Dyeing, Weaving, Patching: The Gender of Craft and Fashion in Japan - Miriam Wattles, University of California, Santa Barbara