AN4AA Talks 2026 April Program

Invisible Ink: Feminism and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art
By Dr. Luise Guest

Date: Friday, 17 April 2026
Time: 13:30-14:30 PM AEDT 
On-campus + Online
Location: Block A, Room 101, UNSW Art & Design, Paddington (Sydney)
Please register via Humanitix

We are pleased to present a book talk by Luise Guest on her new book Invisible Ink: Feminism and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art, as part of the 2026 AN4AA Talks program.

Invisible Ink examines how contemporary Chinese women artists have reworked the traditions of ink painting to challenge dominant art histories, articulating complex and embodied experiences of gender, identity and cultural memory. Drawing on in-depth artwork research and artist interviews, Guest’s book reveals how ink and brush painting serve as a powerful material for transcultural feminist expression and resistance within contemporary Chinese art.

What does it mean to be a woman artist - or a feminist artist - in China today? Analysing how Chinese women artists have reinvented traditional forms of ink and brush painting, Invisible Ink shows how the use of ink in their work becomes a tool of gender and art historical subversion in contemporary Chinese art.

This book explores how the work of Bingyi, Ma Yanling, Tao Aimin, Xiao Lu and Xie Rong invoke contemporary manifestations of the traditional Chinese form of ink and brush painting to explore themes of the embodied, gendered experience of Chinese identity, including: motherhood and daughterhood; the exercise of state control over fertility in the implementation of the One Child Policy; and the experience of menopause in a society that prizes youth and beauty.

Each chapter examines one artist, analysing carefully selected key works and drawing on interviews with the artists themselves. It positions the artists as intervening, not only in historically exclusive, elitist literati traditions, but also in contemporary art discourses in which their contributions have been similarly marginalised. It explores the ambivalent views of the artists towards (Western) feminism and positions their work as counter-hegemonic expressions of a specifically Chinese experience of patriarchy.

Addressing an understudied aspect of contemporary Chinese art, this book powerfully illuminates the material culture of ink and brush painting through a transcultural, intersectional feminist lens, revealing the ways in which the form bridges Chinese history and the present day.

Dr Luise Guest

Dr Luise Guest is an independent writer, researcher and curator, and currently she is a sessional academic at the University of New South Wales in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture.

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Her research about Chinese contemporary art has been widely published, including in The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Yishu Journal, TAASA Review and Art Monthly Australasia. Her first book, Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China, was published in 2016 by Piper Press, and her second, Invisible Ink: Feminism and Chinese Identity in Contemporary Art by Bloomsbury in January 2026.