Photojournalism and war photography, traditionally male-dominated fields, have sparked discussions about representation, gaze, and power relations, while documenting atrocities and witnessing history. Historically, women were often the subjects of photographs, cast as victims and marginalized groups, which perpetuates gender stereotypes. Chinese photojournalism has followed a different trajectory than its Western counterpart. From the 1930s onwards, photography became a vital means of communication during the Chinese revolution. With the establishment of photography practice in anti-Japanese bases and liberated areas, the Chinese Communist Party actively encouraged and recruited women to participate in journalism and photographic propaganda. Female photographers such as Hou Bo, Xiao Zhuang, and Niu Weiyu used cameras to document and express, leaving behind a complex and distinctive female perspective in the visual records of the PRC’s early years.

Xiao Zhuang was one of the PRC’s first female photographers. From the 1950s to the 1970s, she meticulously documented the milestones of the new country, covering the Korean War, agriculture collectivization, public-private partnership, People's Commune, the Great Leap Forward, steel industry, and the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside” movement targeting the educated youth. The group photos she took, which often featured the labor and daily life of PRC’s working women, became emblematic of Chinese socialist photojournalism. Xiao and her contemporaries pioneered an autonomous visual language for China's socialist news photography, offering historical and visual references to the socialist values of gender equality.

Since the 1970s, the narrative focus of documentary photography has gradually shifted away from socialist realism. Photojournalists such as Luo Xiaoyun, Wang Miao, Wang Yao, and Huang Wen continued to examine the pulses of nation and society, and the lives of ordinary people. They recorded key events during times of change and inspired generations of female photojournalists. In the twenty-first century, although photographers have adopted different approaches and styles, they continue to explore the interconnections among Chinese society, individuals, and history.

Among the new generation of artists working with photography, Luka Yuanyuan Yang stands out for her delineation of the life experiences of women. She interweaves collected documents with specific events and histories in her works, such as Dalian Mirage (2017–2019), Shanghai Low (2020), and Make it Home (2022). These pieces construct various facets of Chinse history throughout the turbulent and eventful twentieth century. Women’s life experiences remain a central focus in her historically oriented works. Women's World, a film she has been working on since 2018, highlights the extraordinary experiences of Chinese women in the overseas entertainment industry during the twentieth century, bringing back and reappraising the female voices that have gradually been forgotten.

Photography, with its documentary nature, serves as a channel connecting photographers, social lives, and the fateful events of the times. The section “Connecting Society” draws attention to the important role Chinese women photographers played after the founding of the PRC. They documented, reflected, and connected people with society and history through their female perspective. Their cameras not only witnessed history, but transcended identity and cultural boundaries. They reshaped the position of women in the history of photography, and also in Chinese politics, society, culture, and daily life.

In the 1990s, articles like Xu Hong’s Out of the Abyss: A Letter to Female Artists and Critics and exhibitions such as “Women’s Art of the Century” inspired a re-evaluation of female artists, bringing issues of gender and art history narrative into the public discourse. Body, gender, and identity became important themes in contemporary art, drawing practitioners’ focus onto the self, the physical body, and female identity. Artists started to use photography to explore the body, gender, and other relevant topics such as romantic relationships and marriage, labor division, employment, family life, and contraception. Works such as Xing Danwen’s I Am a Woman (1994), Alice Chen’s Twelve Flower Months (1999–2000), Cui Xiuwen’s Ladies’ Room (2000), and Chen Qiulin’s I Exist, I Consume, I Am Happy (2003) visualize the gender issues existing in both public and private spheres. They not only pioneer a visual paradigm centered on self-gaze in Chinese photography and contemporary art, but also challenge the patriarchy of the art world and Chinese society.

With the development of feminism and gender theory, female practitioners have found a broader space for voicing their thoughts on the fluidity of gender and identity and other issues. Pixy Liao, for over a decade, has used her own body and that of her boyfriend as subjects in her project Experimental Relationship (2007–present). Via a conscious exploration of female identity in her works, she invites viewers to contemplate and resist societal norms that constrain female identity. Yushi Li’s works leverage the participatory nature of social media. In My Tinder Boys (2017), Your Reservation is Confirmed (2018), and Paintings, Dreams, and Love (2018–2023), with meticulously constructed private spaces, bodily interactions, and visual languages, she challenges the traditional male gaze in art history and rethinks the boundaries of gaze. From self-gaze to female gaze, contemporary artists like Pixy Liao and Yushi Li expand the discourse and visual paradigms of gendered perspectives, distinguishing themselves as exceptional Chinese artists in global contemporary photography.

“Exploring Discourse” focuses on Chinese women artists’ works that examine topics related to body/gender/identity, and studies how gaze and gender fluidity are expressed in the works of female artists across generations. This section aims to reevaluate how these artists’ exploration of female life experiences, creative languages, and media have challenged the singularity and objectivity of female body/gender/identity in images, and their unique position in contemporary Chinese photography and art history.

In the history of photography, landscape and geography have traditionally been the domains of men, from early imperial explorers’ photographic surveys to the “New Topographics” photographers’ landscape works. Female practitioners’ involvement has been restricted by social and natural factors, making it difficult for them to focus consistently on geographical subjects in their work. Since 2000, however, research-oriented art projects concerning landscape, geography, and concepts have offered another global strategy, through which photographers and artists connect their investigation of societal landscapes with artistic practice.

British-Chinese artist Yan Wang Preston’s early photographs capture the braided water system along the Qinghai-Tibet Highway at the turn of the millennium. Her works in 2005 show a growing awareness of the rapidly changing landscapes along the Yangtze River. From 2010 to 2014, she embarked on the Mother River series. She marked 63 points on the Yangtze River using Google Maps, each precisely 100 kilometers apart. Armed with a large-format camera and exceptional courage and determination, over five years, she documented the varieties of sceneries, from snowy plains to oceanic expanses, at each 100-kilometer interval. Integrating these images with footage and objects from her expeditions, she created the grand narrative of Mother River, addressing Chinese geography, modernity, and photography. Preston also offered a more intimate viewpoint alongside the epic scale of the Yangtze landscapes. She created a series of postcards featuring photographs of her bed each night during her fieldwork, leading the audience into Mother River through a female lens.

The landscapes of China also captivate many other artists. You Li’s Latitude of Silence (2007–2009) documents her journeys through Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and other regions. Beast by the Waterfall Guesthouse (since 2014) is Zhang Wenxin’s record of her travels in the hinterlands of China. Ku Lue Er (2016), a multimedia installation by Kan Xuan, stems from a five-month visit to 110 remote ancient cities in China for research and photography. Dutch-Chinese photographer Xiaoxiao Xu travelled 25,000 kilometers from Shanhaiguan to Jiayuguan, and created Watering My Horse by a Spring at the Foot of the Long Wall (2017–2020). The Epoch Of Rippling Hengduan Mountains is Chen Xiaoyi’s attempt to explore a grand narrative through “image-scanning” of the western mountainous regions. She traversed the Hengduan Mountains and worked in the temporal and spatial stacking of mountains and the land relationship.

This section focuses on Chinese female photographers and artists who use China’s landscapes and geography as their subjects of observation and study. It uncovers the value systems behind their extraordinary ambitions and determinations to explore these geographical features. Moreover, it examines the ways in which they transform their bodily experiences from travel into various forms of creative expression. Through this process, they challenge, transform, and redefine the meanings of landscapes.

This article builds upon the concepts outlined in my lecture at the Taikang Space in 2015, titled The History and Historiography of Women in Photography: An Exploratory Framework. It delves into the diverse and distinctive oeuvre of Chinese female photographers in the history of Chinese photography. In preparing this article, I consulted numerous sources and attempted to include as many female practitioners as possible, yet the vastness and richness of the historical materials make it challenging to be exhaustive.

I want to quote the late American feminist art historian Linda Nochlin’s words from Women, Art, and Power, feminist art history is “to reveal the structures and operations that tend to marginalize certain kinds of artistic production while centralizing others.” My hope as a scholar is that future students and researchers will no longer need to painstakingly uncover the history of women in art from the neglected corners of libraries.