\u3cem\u3eThe Second Sex\u3c/em\u3e and Contemporary Chinese Women\u27s Art: A Case Study on Chen Lingyang\u27s Work

One of the best academic publishing houses in China, Beijing Sanlian Bookstore, once made a survey of one hundred books that had most influenced Chinese society in the past twenty years (1978-1998); Simone de Beauvoir\u27s The Second Sex was on the list.2 Everyone knows what 1978-1998 means to China—a period of dramatic changes in Chinese society. However, if one were to do a survey on the history of western feminism in China, one would find the attention paid to and celebration of Beauvoir in Chinese society is a unique instance, unsurpassed by that of any other feminist of both Europe and the U.S.3 In this paper, I will demonstrate how exploring this fact not only provides a fresh perspective on the development on Women\u27s Studies in Chinese society, but how it also calls into question the very use of the notion of \u27western feminism\u274 for explaining contemporary Chinese women\u27s art. I will use the work of Chen Lingyang as an example to demonstrate the problem