泛亞思潮中的「東方女性」塑造：民族，美學，慾望之交涉

Abstract

From the 1900s through to the 1940s, Pan-Asianism played a powerful role in Asian discourse, and exerted considerable influence on art. Set against the background of artistic exchanges, publications and productions among China, Japan and India during this era, and focusing on selected portrayals of non-native Asian women in Nihonga paintings in Japan and early oil paintings in China, this article studies the imagining and construction of "Oriental women" in Pan-Asian art. Compared with typical Western description of Oriental women at the time, and the portrayal of indigenous women in Asian countries, the female figures of Pan-Asian art exhibited greater complexity and tension. In order to become symbols of the anti-West and anti-colonial agendas of the pan-Asian movement, "Oriental women" needed to maintain some distance from those stereotypes shaped by Western narratives, but often became trapped in another type of essentialism. To embody an integrated yet heterogeneous Asia, those women had to exhibit both common "Orientalness" and their respective national heritages; at the same time, they also conveyed racist sentiments and colonial mentalities within Asia. Finally, portrayed by male artists, the women figures served as fantasized projections of both political passion and erotic desire. Such fantasies were often tinged with exoticism and patriarchal tendencies, but may also appear subversive to traditional gender roles. My analysis demonstrates how the various intentions clash and are reconciled in individual art works, and how the aspects of femininity conveyed by those works—from the spiritual to the erotic, the physical to the metaphoric, and the domestic to the public—at once reinforce, enrich and undermine the mainstream discourse of pan-Asianism.