British art historian Kobena Mercer provides his writings with a non-white-centric narrative of modern art history. He argues that questioning the politics of visibility helps us understand the complex history and future of diasporic culture¹. This belief was perhaps most recently exemplified at this year’s Venice Biennale. The exhibition, “Foreigners Everywhere”, focused on displaced persons, refugees, immigrants, and sexual minorities, aiming to bring previously marginalised groups into the centre of the visual field. It addresses the dialectical relationship between visibility and invisibility and reminds us that the ethics of exhibitions concern not only the politics of visibility but also the absences caused by various reasons. The list of participating artists included two less-known Chinese female artists, Pan Yuliang (b.1895, Yangzhou) and Georgette Chen (b.1906, Zhejiang).

Both grew up during the Republican era but became first-generation immigrants due to their destinies. Because of their gender identity and turbulent history, they are rarely mentioned in most art history narratives. However, having experienced the May Fourth Movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the confluence of Eastern and Western art, their creations deserve attention. Pan Yuliang studied in France and Italy and later taught at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts. She sojourned in France from middle age until her death. After receiving an education in Western modernist painting, Pan’s works show traces of Impressionism, Fauvism, and Academicism, as well as Chinese painting forms such as “baimiao” (white drawing) and coloured ink painting. Chinese revolutionary socialist and philosopher Chen Duxiu even regarded her as a model of integrating the linear language of Chinese painting with the shaping logic of Western painting. Georgette Chen, born into a privileged life, experienced a transnational and cross-cultural life from an early age. In her artistic studies, she briefly studied in New York before going to Paris and was selected for the Salon d’Automne exhibition in 1930. Her paintings from that period display a clear Post-Impressionist style. Still, the Oriental elements in her works also led to criticisms of “self-Orientalism”². In her work Paysage (1930), which is part of the collection of the Centre Pompidou, the Cézannesque impression harmonises with the composition of traditional Chinese landscapes. The light blue distant mountains in the background are rendered with a technique reminiscent of “xuanran” (ink rendering). This work later appeared in the joint exhibition “Reframing Modernism” (2016), co-curated by the National Gallery Singapore and the Centre Pompidou, echoing Mercer’s argument in his discussion of diasporic aesthetics: “Modernism was always multicultural”³.

As first-generation female immigrant artists, they acted as intermediaries between Chinese and Western cultures, but modernity also revealed their multiple otherness. Therefore, their creations not only present a dual consciousness but also involve multidimensional interactions and intersections, even though these interactions are not always equal. The marginalised are always easily excluded. According to Mercer, this situation is particularly evident in modernist art, as its core values—originality, transgression, and the unified oeuvre—are based on an either/or logic, depicting a landscape of highlights and shadows in art history. If Chinese artists are already marginalised in modern art history, then, as art historian Tao Yongbai stated, the history of Chinese female painters is a completely “lost history”.

For later diasporic artists, this loss also signifies the loss of subjectivity loss aggravated by the era, and their traditional attribution has become an eternally unsettled issue. Kan Xuan (b.1972, Xuancheng) seemed to foresee the coming dramatic changes in living situation at the turn of the century. In her work KanXuan Ai! (1999), she runs and shouts her name while traversing the passage of Beijing’s largest subway interchange station. This symbolic action not only foreshadowed her later career but also became a collective portrayal of diasporic artists calling out to themselves. After receiving the fellowship from Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam) in 2002, Kan Xuan began to shuttle between Beijing and Amsterdam. Her creative themes were also influenced by these life trajectories: from the early intake of Western ideologies (A Happy Girl, 2002) to later reflections on East-West differences and the wealth gap brought about by globalisation (Island, 2006–2009), to later explorations of Chineseness (Millet Mounds, 2012), all of which subtly reveal the process of a creative subject digesting and absorbing foreign cultures and ultimately choosing to return to their historical roots. This aligns with the characteristics of “diaspora” proposed by William Safran: from initial geographical mobility to longing for one’s homeland, and finally, due to the difficulty to fully integrate into the host country, forming an even stronger identification with their place of origin¹.

Contemporary to Kan Xuan but living as a second-generation immigrant on the West Coast of the United States, Patty Chang (b.1972, San Francisco) has had a more prolonged and embodied experience and reflection on her identity as an Asian female artist. Her early video work, Fountain (1999), vividly presents the relationship between self and others. In the work, she sips the water off a mirror’s surface, symbolising a subject drinking from its reflection (the other) to make itself whole. Unlike first-generation immigrants, second-generation immigrant artists work almost entirely with full awareness of their identity as the other. Sometimes, this consciousness of considering one’s “there-being” (Dasein) as “other-being” can lead to self-empowerment, helping artists use their otherness as a point of resistance. In Shangri-La (2015), Chang travels to Zhongdian, a rural town near Tibet (which claims to be the prototype of Shangri-La from the novel Lost Horizon), using fictional narratives and realistic photography to document stereotyped works completed with local people. The crude treatment of local culture and identity imagination in this way precisely depicts the mask imposed on her as a Chinese female, responding to the particularity of concrete other.

Yao Qingmei (b.1982, Wenzhou), who emigrated to France after completing her master’s degree, is also skilled in such identity strategies. In her work Dance! Dance! Bruce Ling! (2013), she wears Bruce Lee’s classic yellow tracksuit with black stripes, wielding a sickle and hammer in front of a rough and sketchy bamboo scenery backdrop, accompanied by her fighting sounds and a pianist playing the Fury of the Dragon theme tune. The performance video documents her collage interpretation of these Chinese symbols, ending with her exhaustion and collapse. The excess and disintegration of symbols linger in the video frame along with her vocal echoes. If the aforementioned two works are still based on the identity of the other in the West, then Sanzu Ding and its Motif: Hypotheses on the Origin and Evolution of the ‘Hammer-Sickle’ Symbol (2013–present) is a serious fabrication by Yao Qingmei as the other of her native land. In this long-term “research project”, “Professor Yao” she played investigates the “sickle and hammer” motif found on an unearthed artefact, thoroughly objectifying symbols from her native ideological environment and turning the exploration of motif history into an attempt to alienate her own history.

The rise of diaspora studies is not so much about addressing the cultural issues raised by these groups as it is about responding to the widespread sense of homelessness in our era. Hannah Arendt once described the launch of artificial satellites as an event that is “second in importance to no other” because it made people realise that escaping Earth as a home was possible¹. As Karsten Harries noted, the progress in astronomy and science has made the Earth increasingly less homelike; indeed, humans have been displaced since Copernicus².

Thus, for Xin Liu (b. 1991, Xinjiang), who currently works and lives in New York and London, exploring outer space has become a way to measure “home”. In her work The Earth Is an Image (2021), commissioned by M+, she recreates the radio signals and climate images sent by obsolete satellites. She traces their movements and brings those forgotten artefacts of outer space back to people’s vision. These satellites, which once carried dreams of freedom, are like symbols of Astronautics—they initially left us at home, but now we’ve abandoned them outside of it. This, too, reflects the situation of some diaspora groups. The artist empathises with these satellites from a post-humanist perspective and expresses her feelings about the diasporic condition. In White Stone (2021), she intimately refers to the debris of a rocket as “her”. This fragment, which fell when the missile was launched, is like the wisdom tooth she sent into outer space in another project (Living/Distance, 2019–2020). These fallen body parts would be quickly forgotten if not intentionally preserved.

The “non-human” subjects similarly evoke empathy in New York-based artist Shuyi Cao (b.1990, Guangzhou). She has stated that ecological art is a way, as a Chinese female immigrant, to establish her position within the context of identity politics in the United States. From the framework of multispecies ethnography, she reflects on ecofeminism centred on Western discourses through the lens of de-colonialism and Sinophone perspectives. This generation of female immigrant artists largely benefits from feminism’s engagement with the concept of “Otherness”. When Simone de Beauvoir pointed out that “she is the Other (elle est l’Autre), he is the essential being,” the alliance between women, minorities, animals, and nature became subtexts of The Second Sex. By analysing the discourse constructed by sovereign groups, the Other can potentially dismantle the inequalities in existing power structures or at least gain direction for speculation and action. On further thought, multi-species kinship might be a gift of otherness. As a woman, a Chinese, an immigrant, and an artist, Cao Shuyi’s overlapping identities prompt her to place the transformations of biology and geology within a planetary time scale. In her video work Begin with the End of What Comes Before (2023), she uses the element phosphorus to reveal the regeneration and reincarnation of nature. Moreover, this also makes her more sensitive to the shifts in her own identity as an Other. As the artist herself said, her overseas experiences cause her work to be perceived as “Western” in domestic exhibition contexts. Her diasporic condition makes her only transit from one form of Otherness to another, with her homeland becoming an uncertain “elsewhere”.

However, the etymology of diaspora (διασπορά) refuses such a forlorn meaning, as it also contains the connotation of “to scatter, to sow.” The latter points to another spiritual home for diasporic artists: to work and live within the knowledge of the locality. This is the belief and method practised by Shen Xin (b.1990, Sichuan), who recently migrated to the Isle of Skye. In her experience, diaspora reveals a more profound connection that an individual can reach. Her video Grounds of Coherence #1, but this is the language we met in (2023), was inspired by a dental experience. After her tooth was struck by a metal object for three hours, Shen Xin suddenly imagined a connection between teeth and the ocean, later discovering that scientists indeed believe human teeth were fish scales 400 million years ago. Here, the skeletal memory of pre-human civilisation is awakened in an embodied form. The scale of evolutionary biology and the “ancestrality” (l'ancestralité) described by speculative realism momentarily suspend the reality of current identity and history, prompting Shen Xin to turn towards the reality of the Now and Here. Just as she reaffirms her personal history by learning Tibetan and Arabic and identifies the Twin Cities, where she once resided, as the land of the aborigine Dakhóta Oyáte, Miní Sóta Makhóčhe, Shen Xin’s practice of locality presents another side of the diaspora story. Just as “leaving home” can also be understood in a spiritual sense as “renunciation” (Pabbajjā, which means “to go forth”), to be homeless might also point to a journey worth anticipating. (Translated by Zhao Wenrui)