Peoples Liberation Army-inspired Erotica
- Thread starter asiastudios
- Start date
Interesting stuff - but to me, a lot of the women in the paintings (esp the 2004 works) look like trannys...wonder if that's intentional
"At school in China during the Cultural Revolution Hu Ming was allowed to draw only Mao Zedong’s portrait. In 1970 she joined the army, where she worked in a hospital as a broadcaster and librarian. In the library she found a book of Michelangelo’s life drawings of human anatomy that was banned at the time as pornographic. Her website says that it changed her life forever; it also says that because women could not ‘display their femininity’ during the Cultural Revolution she ‘did not see shampoo until the mid 1980s, hence the womanliness of her army girls in her painting.’ She then trained as an army nurse, spending much time studying anatomy in the morgue. She attributes ‘a reason for the prevalence of bottoms in her painting’ to the year she spent jabbing needles in soldiers’ rear ends. Also, ‘During this time as a nurse Ming witnessed daily the dead and withered bodies of illness, so consequently she loves to paint the healthy voluptuous bodies. She came to hate the view of an ill body.’ Between 1979 and 1983 she studied at art school, and then worked on army films for five years before leaving to study English in New Zealand, moving to Australia in 1999. ‘Her paintings express dearly her worship of the female form depicting both physical strength and feminine beauty’ : they are also clearly lesbian in their sexuality, as though inspired by Anchee Min’s autobiographical novel set in the Cultural Revolution, Red Azalea. "
quote from http://www.shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/texts/id/433
