Court Ladies or Pin-Up Girls? Chinese Paintings from the MFA, Boston

Emperor Huizong
Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (detail)
Early 12th century.
Ink, color, and gold on silk.
Special Chinese and Japanese Fund.

Court ladies or pin-up girls? Chinese paintings in Boston ‘Court Ladies or Pin-Up Girls?’ Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, takes a close look at women in Chinese paintings. December 20, 2014 – July 19, 2015.]]>

Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA)

Whether subtly seductive or overtly erotic, artists of many cultures have a long history of suggestively depicting women in order to titillate and entice patrons. “Court Ladies or Pin-Up Girls? Chinese Paintings from the MFA, Boston” (December 20, 2014–July 19, 2015) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), features more than 30 Chinese paintings, prints, posters and photographs of women from the 11th through the 21st centuries.

The finely crafted works, including recent MFA acquisitions, depict fantasies of male artists and their diverse patrons. Although many initially appear to be modest depictions of beautiful women, recent research indicates that some may have been considered highly suggestive when first created. On view in the Asian Paintings Gallery, the exhibition highlights include one of the MFA’s great masterpieces of Chinese painting, “Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (Picture of Pounding Silk)” (early 12th century, Emperor Huizong), as well as turn-of-the-century hand-colored photographs of courtesans, 1930s advertisement posters, 20th-century propaganda posters and 18th-century erotic albums. Instead of reflecting traditional Confucian ideals of painting women as embodiments of virtue, these works illustrate the realities of how artists have imagined women throughout the centuries.

“Although many may be more familiar with Chinese landscape painting, figure painting also has a rich, varied and equally expressive role in Chinese culture,” said Nancy Berliner, Wu Tung Curator of Chinese Art at the MFA. “In a sense, this exhibition is not about women, but about men. How men imagined or desired women to be. The paintings here, all by men —women artists usually painted birds and flowers— whether evoking virtue or sensual pleasures, reflect perspectives, or really fantasies, of the male artists and their male clients.”

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