CAST OUT LOUD

Discourses of Feminine Ideals in China: Literati Fantasies and State Politics

Prof Eva Kit Wah Man, Chair Professor in Humanities, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Director, Hong Kong Art School

An educational partner of the RMIT School of Art

Co-hosted by RMIT CAST and the Australasian Network for Asian Art an4aa.org

Location: RMIT University, Cinema Theatre 080.01.002 and on Zoom

RMIT School of Art and the HKAS have had an educational partnership for over 25 years now, building a shared community of art school graduates since the 1990s. To welcome HKAS, Director, Professor Eva Man during her visit to Australia, we present Eva’s talk on ‘Discourses of Feminine Ideals in China: Literati Fantasies and State Politics’.

This keynote lecture examines the intersection between the development of female aesthetics and the notion of the feminine ideal in China. Interrogating the ways in which Chinese traditions and the patriarchal system have informed the male imagination, this lecture considers the construction of the idealised woman as the product of male wishes, regrets, and fantasies. These projections have been captured and represented over the years by the literati. Exploring the development and construction of the feminine ideal from the courtesan culture of late Imperial China through to contemporary Chinese society, this lecture concludes with a comparative study of gender representations in China and the cosmopolitan West.

*Please arrive 10 mins before the start of the event.

About Eva

Prof. Eva Kit Wah Man is currently the Director of the Hong Kong Art School, Hong Kong.

She is a great contributor to the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, M+ and the West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong Museums Advisory Committee and Hong Kong Jockey Club’s Arts and Cultural Heritage projects. Academically she was Chair and Professor of Humanities at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Hong Kong Metropolitan University. She publishes widely in comparative aesthetics, comparative philosophy, woman studies, feminist philosophy, cultural studies, art and cultural criticism. She was a Fulbright scholar and conducted research at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She was named AMUW Endowed Woman Chair Professor of the 100th Anniversary of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2009. She is Kiriyama Professor of The Center for Asia and Pacific Studies at University of San Francisco in 2023.