The CAWA × AWARE Collaborative Research Initiative on Chinese Women Artists is jointly launched by AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions, a research entity within the Centre Pompidou, and CAWA–Connecting Asian Women Artists, a non-profit art research network. The initiative seeks to build an international network for exchange focused on the artistic practices of modern and contemporary women artists across China and the broader Sinophone world, advancing research, presentation, and public engagement.

The term “New Woman” (Xin nü xing 新女性) derives from the Chinese film of the same title. Released in 1935, the black-and-white silent film tells the tragic story of an educated Chinese woman striving for marital freedom and personal independence. As the film became widely known, the notion of the “New Woman” was continuously shaped and disseminated through Chinese literature, cinema, and popular culture, evolving into a concept charged with profound social and cultural significance. It came to reflect the series of structural transformations unfolding in Chinese society during the first half of the twentieth century, while gradually becoming synonymous with a new model of female subjectivity and modern womanhood emerging in that period.

For women artists in modern China and the broader Sinophone world, becoming a “woman artist” first required becoming a “New Woman.” The emergence of this identity marked a profound transformation in the social structure of modern Chinese society. Within traditional social frameworks, women’s engagement with art was largely regarded as a form of cultural cultivation confined to the domestic sphere, rather than a public profession. Beginning in the early twentieth century, however, Chinese women gradually entered a range of fields previously dominated by men through the expansion of modern education systems and the growth of urban public cultural spaces—including higher professional education, artistic production, exhibition-making, publishing, and educational practice. In this sense, the “New Woman” was not merely a social identity, but also a crucial historical framework through which to understand women artists of this period across the Chinese-speaking world. It encapsulates the profound psychological and ideological transformations experienced by a generation of female creators navigating between inherited traditions and emerging modern values, while also reflecting the formation of a highly self-aware sense of subjectivity.

In the context of cultural history, the “New Woman” also emerged in relation to the notion of the “New Youth” proposed during China’s May Fourth Movement (1919). If the “New Youth” largely embodied Chinese male intellectuals’ imagination of the modern subject, the figure of the “New Woman” reveals a far more complex and internally contradictory historical narrative. The resistance and transgression enacted by women artists in their creative lives against entrenched conventions, social structures, and cultural taboos likewise formed part of the broader process through which Chinese women continuously negotiated and asserted their social position and subjective identity within modern society.

In light of this, the first phase of the CAWA × AWARE Collaborative Research Initiative on Chinese Women Artists will focus on the historical period between 1911 and 1949, spanning from the fall of the Qing dynasty and the founding of the Republic of China to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Over the course of more than three decades, a significant number of women artists emerged whose practices would later assume an important position within the history of modern Chinese art. Their personal trajectories often reveal forms of transregional and cross-cultural mobility, as well as a vital force of resistance shaped through lived experience. Attention to and research on women artists working across the Chinese-speaking world during this period not only attests to the porous boundaries and cross-cultural dimensions of modernity itself, but also opens up new pathways for writing the history of modern Chinese art through the intertwined lenses of social transformation and personal histories. Women artists were not supplementary figures within the history of modern Chinese art, but among the driving forces behind the formation of artistic modernity in China. From a broader historical perspective, therefore, the “New Woman” was not merely a social concept, but also a historical force animated by profound vitality.