The Images Of Females In The Republic Of China

The Republic of China, which witnessed a great collision between the old and the new, theeast and the west, is an important revolutionary stage in the whole history of China. The change ofthe society leads to the change of the social status of its members. With their rising status, Womenbegan to fight for freedom and equality under the feudalist tradition that women belong to men,which was reflected in arts also. Many artists and scholars’ have exerted great efforts on theresearch of Females’ image at this stage, which is still of great significance nowadays. Thus, it’s atough task for today’ scholars to rearrange and comment on their research.In this essay, the author firstly starts with the oppression and resistance between thefeudalism and females. Only in Tang dynasty’ there is a healthy esthetic on women and they have acomparative higher social position. In the later dynasty, especially Qing and Ming, femalessuffered a greater discrimination and oppression. Females are usually metaphorically therepresentation of the unsuccessful literates. In late Qing dynasty, the throng of western culture andthe revolution in China had greatly ponded the traditional Chinese culture. This also hastened theawakening of females and reflected in female images of this period.Secondly, the author focuses more on the images of females in the Republic of China. Beautypainting, mostly depicting the life of the upper class females, was a great important part intraditional Chinese painting. However, there are great differences betweenfigure paintings, especially females in the Republic of China, and the ancient beauty paintings.Females start to show their talent in the early20thcentury and can even receive modern educationopenly in the twenties of20th century. Those first received modern, over-rounded education starta unique new era for female arts, that is, their own experiences on life. Shanghai Arts Academy’sfirst using of figure-modeling provoked great uproar in China at that time. Being a metropolitan inthe thirties,20th century, Shanghai expanded in a unbalanced way, which greatly speed up thedevelopment of calendar paintings—a good fusion of eastern and western painting. Their imageschanged subtlety like commodities: from housewife to fashionable lady. Both the development of the era and the evolution of calendar paintings have contributed to the development of Chineseporcelain painting. Paintings of“modern lady”and “little feet women” at that time reflected thoseemerging new phenomena at that time and offered plenty of material for the research of femalefigure painting in the Republic of China.Last but not least, the author starts with the characteristics and drawbacks of female images in theRepublic Time and concludes that the female images of the paintings at that time was a development anddiscard of traditional ones. Under the rigid male–dominated society, with women being silent forthousands of years, females are so weak in fighting for their own rights and freedom. However, thosefemales’ images in paintings at the Republic of China have injected new blood for the lifelessmen-governed society.In this essay, literature methodology, works analysis and inductive method are adopted.Through researching, generating and commenting on those documents, readers may have a generalimpression on the female images of that time and thus reach their own conclusion.