In the art business, we have seen a lot of trends, over the years.  Now, that we are in China, dealing in Chinese art, we have noticed some trends, here, one of which is an obsession with paintings of girls.  You might respond that, in portrait painting, there are only two choices, but there are some deeper forces at work.

Having cut itself off from the rest of the world, in the middle of the twentieth century, China is playing catch up, economically, technologically, socially, and in fashion and home decoration, for the past two decades.  Living here, observing, listening, and conversing, we have discovered a number of things.

Not only did China miss out on the cultural and sexual revolutions that took place, in the West in the late 1960’s to early 1970’s, but women were, actually, encouraged to not be feminine, during Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution, which took place around the same time.  While girls, in the West, were wearing makeup and miniskirts and developing feminine walks, females, in China, were wearing short hair and clothing that deemphasized their curves and were taught to walk with heads hug down to further hide their femininity.

Thus, while other fads and trends entered the cultures of the rest of the world, China was kept in the dark for around four decades and only began to get a glimpse of what had happened in the rest of the world, beginning in the late 1980’s.  Since then, it has been playing catch up, and even that has been slowed down due to a lack of information flow into the country.   The internet has helped, but most Chinese are still cut off because they cannot read the European alphabet, and there is a lot of unreal stuff on the internet, in China, anyway.

I grew up with older sisters and a lot of girl cousins, and, as a result, I guess, I have had an easy time talking to girls.  I have always treated girls as people, rather than looking at them as sex objects, and girls react by treating me as a friend and someone they can talk to about anything.  Indeed, most of my friends over the past several decades have been female.  I have been teaching at an expensive university, in China for the last five years, so I meet girls from the wealthier class, but I am also friendly with the local village workers who work at the school, and I have spent time in villages, larger towns that seldom see foreigners or things Western, and I live in Guangzhou, which is near Hong Kong and is in the heart of the area that is responsible for producing many of the products exported to the West.  From what I can see and have observed, since China opened up, in the late 1980’s, it has started around where it was stopped, around mid-twentieth century.   Moreover, the lag in catch up with revolutions in fashion, morals, and other trends has been further prolonged because many Chinese have been raised, mostly, by their grandparents because many Chinese move in with their parents when they get married, and the grandparents do most of the rearing.

I am a student of everything, having been trained as a physicist for eight years, I am constantly looking to see what makes things, and people, tick, and I have made a number of conclusions and conjectures based on what I have observed and have been heard or have been told by Chinese and expatriate males and females of various ages from college age on up.  To begin with, many girls talk of themselves as “traditional”, which is the equivalent of “old fashioned” or “good girls”, in the U.S., in the 1960’s to early 1970’s.  Girls who are more “loose” are referred to as “open”, sometimes, even for just holding hands with a guy in public.  College girls have told me that it is ok to make love with a boy, if she is “in love”.  A Girl who was just out of college told me that her mother had a boy expelled from middle school because he passed her a note in class, in the late 1990’s.  In contrast, we passed each other love notes in grade school, and by the time we got to middle school, we gave rings to girls and “went steady”.  I have been told by others that girls were not even allowed to wear makeup or high heels, in college, when she attended college in the early 2000’s.

In contrast, in my mother’s generation, towards the end of the first half of the twentieth century, in the U.S., girls and women wore lipstick, but other make, like eye shadow, were considered floozy, and high heels were a must.  When I was in grade school, little girls, in my neighborhood, played dress up, wearing their mother’s high heels and maybe a little smeared on lipstick.  When my sisters were in junior and senior high school, makeup was becoming “in”, and by the time I got to junior high school, in the mid-1960’s, almost all of the girls wore makeup.  The mod era was taking off, in England, and white lipstick, false eyelashes, and dark eye shadow were in: the “slutier”, the better.  By the time I got to college, it was free love and the hippie era, and, in my first year of college, after making love with a hippie girl, in the cow pastures at Penn State, and blurting out “I love you” (as a result of conditioning with the high school girlfriend I left behind), in the middle of it, she left and never wanted to see me again.

Back to China.  Many college age girls have little experience with both high heels and makeup.  It takes practice from those early years of playing dress up to really get the hang of it, at least, from what I have observed.  When I lived on Christopher Street, which was in the heart of the gay area, in New York City, in the 1980’s, I could pick out the best of the drag queens, who would parade through my neighborhood, by the way that they walked and carried themselves, in high heels.  Even today, in a large and more advanced city, like Guangzhou, there are not many girls or women who wear make up: it is just beginning to catch on as a fashion trend.  Moreover, I hear from men, women, boys and girls, alike, that Chinese men do not like to see their women or any women wearing makeup: the males tend to think that it is slutty.

So, lets take a closer look at those male attitudes.  Back in the early 1960’s, in the U.S., guys wanted to find a “good girl”, who was a virgin, to marry.  That seems to be the attitude of men, at least as young as late-twenties and up, here, in China, today.  I have even heard of girls who have had hymen reconstruction after having been a little looser and played around but were starting to think about marriage.  My assistant and her sister like to wear makeup, now, that they have discovered it when they were in their twenties, but they cannot wear it when they go home to visit their father, who is a successful merchant, in Shenzhen where they grew up: a progressive boom town, more open to influence by things Western since it is right next to Hong Kong.  My observation about the general reaction to this social-norm-behavioral structure, imposed by grandparents, parents and the man-boys that they are looking to marry, is that a more common style is to dress, look and act cutesey: no makeup and demure little-girlish clothing.  On the other hand, when my assistant or other girls with whom I am friends wear a denim miniskirt or makeup or a slightly low cut top, although not even like the amount of makeup or sexiness of dress that I have been used to since the early 1970's, Chinese men of all ages will oggle them; some will even assume that they are hookers.

Moreover, over the past several decades, male and female have lived separated existences, while growing up.  In the generation of little grade school kids playing around my building, there is some mixing of playmates.  As some of our previous anecdotes suggest, that has not been the case, even with much of those who are college age, now.  When I go to a party, in the West, there is a lot of mixing, but when I go to a party, here, males and females are usually separated.  I even went to weddings where I was seated at one of the men’s tables, whereas, in the West, I would be seated with men and women, usually, purposely, next to a female.  That, too, has contributed to the Chinese male mentality.  In fact, much like wealthier European men of the middle of the twentieth century, many wealthier Chinese men also have mistresses who live as kept women in pied-a-terre's: my neighborhood is full of them.

Since art is a reflection of the society, in many ways, portraits of girls and women is a large part of the art that we see, in China, today.  You might respond that there are only two choices for subjects of paintings: male or female, but what we do see is heavily weighted towards the feminine.   We see, in the press and in email from artists who want to be included in our gallery, Betty-Boop-type paintings of girls or women with long false eyelashes and brashly-colored lipstick on exaggerated lips.  From others we see portrait after portrait of nudes.  A number of the artists whom we have included, in our gallery, also, paint portraits of females, in a number of different styles and settings, and for a number of reasons.  Da Zhong Zhang (Zhang Da Zhong), for example, has done his Red Guard Girl series in reaction to the way that women were told to be during the cultural revolution: his sister and his friend were real Red Guard girls.  Certainly, he does use beautiful models for his paintings because he knows men will like that, and he tends to pose them in situations and poses that he thinks will be attractive to Chinese men: little girlish.  Of course, his paintings have political undertones and stories, but mostly, Chinese men buy the paintings because of the cutesy girls, not because of the meaning, which they would never even guess.  Foreign buyers, while certainly also drawn in by the pretty face, also, buy because of the story, too.  Yi Xing Ma (Ma Yi Xing) includes both a horse and a beautiful woman in many of his paintings: the horse, because he feels that men, like horses, are controlled; a beautiful woman, because at least his mind is his own, and he can dream of whatever he pleases, so, it might as well include dreams of beautiful women.  The theme of the horse is lost on most people (who might just assume that it is because his last name, Ma, means horse), while the beautiful girl sells the painting.  Ri Dong Ou (Ou Ri Dong) has painted a number of paintings of Hillary Clinton, just like Warhol painted Marilyn Monroe: blonds are not common, in China.  He also has painted pretty young women as military commandos: lipstick and a rifle are part of their arsenal of weapons.  Jin Ming Lee (Li Jin Ming) has done a number of portraits of minority girls from China, like the Zang, the Yi, and the Miao, all of whom just happen to be very pretty, too.  He also likes to paint portraits of “traditional” girls, complete with bandanas on their heads, like Audrey Hepburn might have worn in a movie from the early 1960’s.  Again, although their paintings have additional appeal for non-Chinese buyers, they know exactly what they are doing when they use the faces of beautiful Chinese girls, in all of those portraits.  Most of those artists also have a nude or three in their inventories, also, to appeal to the libido of Chinese men, who are the major buyers of their works.  Indeed, Feng Wu Sui (Sui Feng Wu) does his more serious portraits, using the faces of men, while all of the female paintings that we have seen from him are, exclusively, nudes.  We always say, in the U.S., that sex sells.  Here, in China, it is the same, although the avenue is usually more subliminal.

Of course, we like the paintings of those artists for their additional subsurface appeal, although we do also appreciate a beautiful girl, as we appreciate beauty in anything.  We also appreciate a well-done nude.  Indeed, we appreciate the other Chinese girls that other of our artists have portrayed.  Jian Bai Xu (Xu Jain Bai), an artist from the earlier days of late-impressionism in Chinese art has done some wonderful portraits of women, in the honest revealing style of other impressionists, like Van Gogh.  Her portrait of a simple fishmonger from the 1950’s is one of her masterpieces.  Xin Ming Xuan (Xuan Xin Ming), too, has done both portraits and nudes of real women, as they are, not as some beautiful perfect vision of fantasy.  Dapu (Zhang Ai Min) has done some wonderful portraits of the real women of Xinjiang, in China’s western desert, and from the Tibetan plateau, one of which has been chosen for inclusion in a book celebrating the 60^th anniversary of the Peoples Republic of China, in art.  Those kind of portraits have appeal more for the serious collector or aficionado of art, not for the locals with a little extra money looking to invest in art and choosing nothing but portraits of pretty girls.

In the end, though, whatever the motivations, we have sold dozens of portraits of beautiful Chinese girls, over the last several months, as the art market has been emerging from the doldrums.  In fact, they represent the bulk of our sales, in number of paintings sold, during the period.  So, it seems that Chinese girls are very popular with buyers from both China and from the West.  They have been popular with me for many reasons for much longer than that.

    

   

   

We have included some of the various paintings of Chinese girls, currently available in the Leona Craig Art Gallery.  To see more, you can use this link to go to the By Artist Page of our website and do some further exploration of portraits of Chinese girls and other works by the artists mentioned in this article: http://www.leonacraig.com/Wall_Art_intro.htm 

© 2009 Red Hill Capital Corporation, Delaware, USA, owner of Leona Craig Art, Guangzhou, China.  All worldwide rights reserved.