Contemporary Chinese art enjoyed a stint as the darling of the art world, driven by market forces and capital. But it has always been seen as an "alien" that cannot be effectively integrated into the local American context. Despite its relevance to American society and its political and social history, the enthusiasm for contemporary Chinese art among self-important Western intellectuals has waned over the changing zeitgeist, with a noticeable distancing from it. The enthusiasm for contemporary Chinese art had little positive impact on diasporic Chinese artists. They have long practiced art in isolation, primarily due to the reticence within the Asian community and elite circles, where many hold conservative political stances. Moreover, unlike the widespread solidarity in the Black community, Asian communities have been grappling with complex regional histories and political tensions. Achieving a unified Asian front proves challenging, given the cultural ties each group maintains with their homelands and their ambivalence toward national identity. Asian women (including transwomen artists) and non-binary artists ¹, especially those of Chinese descent, remain largely invisible within the mainstream Western art system. Their voices, faint at best, sporadically emerge in group shows. Major museums, and even smaller non-collecting foundations and spaces, have hosted very few solo exhibitions devoted to Chinese diasporic artists. Institutional collections of their works remain unmethodical. While still on the fringes and unable to rival the rapidly expanding influence of Black art, Chinese diasporic artists have consistently opted for less spectacular, overt, or antagonistic expressions. This deliberate choice is a key factor in maintaining their practice's independence and genuinely unique perspectives. The nuanced narratives in their works, along with intellectually charged reflection, poeticism, and metaphor, tend not to be favored in the ever more fast-paced and superficial landscape of art consumption.

This state of drifting in between black-and-white dualism characterizes the Chinese diasporic community. Born and raised in Stockholm, Swedish Cantones artist Lap-See Lam has gained significant international attention since her solo exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm in 2021. She is a second-generation immigrant and grew up in a typical, even stereotypical Chinese immigrant family. Her grandmother initially came to Sweden and made a living by opening a Chinese restaurant—a successful family business that her parents continued to run. Lam’s creative work often draws from her personal experiences coming to age in a Chinese restaurant in Sweden as a starting point to narrate her and her family’s immigration story. She skillfully combines symbols commonly associated with “Orientalism” in European discourses with new media technologies, such as 3D scanning and printing, and VR. For example, the images in the multimedia series Mother’s Tongue (2017–2019) were captured using 3D scanning technology. By recording the interior structure and decoration of the Chinese restaurant, Lam hoped to preserve her memories of the restaurant. Unfortunately, the technology was still at an early developmental stage and therefore the output files had poor resolution, resulting in blurry and distorted images that failed to reenact the precise memory of the Chinese restaurant. However, Lam found unexpected aesthetics in the ruin-like imagery, which perfectly rendered the restaurant as a kind of ghostly presence, akin to what Derrida termed “survivance” ². This state, neither death nor life, exists beyond binary understanding. Mirrorring her own diasporic experience of being unable to firmly grasp her origin, such ambiguity neither belongs to the realm of the dead nor the living but is in a perpetual state of deconstruction and redefinition through the processes of input and output; imperfect and elusive, it enables Lam to envision various possibilities of her own identity.

Xinyi Cheng’s paintings take on a uniquely gentle and intriguing expression to imagine multiple identities. Her subjects, predominantly male characters and occasionally animals, are all drawn from her daily encounters. She portrays her male figures through a distinctive female gaze, infusing the image with intimacy and desire. Cheng does not shy away from expressing her own affection. Though never overt, it permeates the image through the interplay of color, composition, and brushworks. Her paintings are not deliberate provocations, yet they challenge the tradition of the female body being the subject of the male gaze, shaping a negotiation of powers through the shift of identities.

With the prevalence of the “#MeToo” movement in recent years in the West, the art world has witnessed a resurgence of feminist art within the currents of identity politics. Cultural circles in Europe and America have become increasingly aware of the limitations and partiality inherent in feminist theories and art histories based predominantly on white elite women’s perspectives and historical experiences. Consequently, there is a growing quest for knowledge and experiences brought forth by the so-called non-mainstream scholars and practitioners to broaden the definition, scope, and audience of feminism. Among Asian scholars and artists, the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha stands out and is widely celebrated. A Vietnamese-American, Trinh embodies a diverse range of cultural identities, including scholar, professor, filmmaker, multimedia artist, writer, and composer. While she does not explicitly identify as a feminist scholar, Trinh has long focused on issues such as the historical tension between individual experience and social collective consciousness, the postcolonial gaze and enduring violence, and interpretations of multiplicity and diversity. Her works not only expose the shortcomings of mainstream feminist discourse but also provide a unique entry point for the ongoing heated discussions on intersectionality ¹.

Trinh’s representation of the female perspective and experience is not declarative or polarized. The myriad ways of viewing and understanding the world that she proposes anticipate an organic and gradual erosion of male-centric historical perspectives and social structures. The approach resonates with other Asian female artists. Shen Xin, a native of Sichuan who lived in Europe, is currently based in New York. They have recently grappled with the question of how to represent, exploring new politics and aesthetics of representation, as well as the betrayals and unreliability in the act of representation. The recurring themes in their works include language, communicability and translatability, and imagination and portrayal of ghosts, spirits, and elves. By delving into self-identity and historical narratives, she extracts poignant and complex narratives that osciliate between stories and truths. With a broad perspective and a strong interest in history, Shen’s works increasingly expand to transnational and cross-regional contexts beyond their own cultural background. Rather than crudely contrasting Eastern culture with the Euro-American context in which they lives and works, Shen seeks the potential overlooked by mainstream culture, testing multiple boundaries. Much like Trinh, who once documented Senegal, a culture and everyday extremely alien to her, Shen continuously experiments with their ways of seeing and intervening as an artist. Two major recent works, The Earth Turned Green (2022) and Brine Lake (A New Body) (2020), both reflect their creative trajectory and priorities.

The Earth Turned Green is an audio-visual installation commissioned by the Swiss Institute in New York in 2022. Shen uses theatrical stage lighting to simulate the changing light throughout the day over the four seasons. The sound accompaniment comprises recorded conversations in English and Tibetan between her and her Tibetan language teacher, centered around discussions on describing light and color in Tibetan. The projections are positioned on both sides of the screen at the center of the exhibition space. The images, appearing like abstract paintings, do not represent specific entities, , but evoke a myriad of imaginations through the immersion of words. In Brine Lake (A New Body), Shen constructs a scene set in an iodine recovery factory, featuring two female workers and two invisible characters represented by the perspectives of camera lenses. Their dialogue unfolds in Korean, Japanese, and Russian, covering topics related to ecology, technology, economy, and personal memory. The processes of extracting and recovering iodine, encompassing extraction, assimilation, and interaction with other elements, serve as metaphors to explore the intricate historical experiences of Korean immigrants in Russia and Japan. Due to issues of national identity, persecution, and forced migration, their collective consciousness and identity remain perpetually statelessness. Despite their ongoing participation in local production, they struggle to attain visibility or have their voices heard. Their existence is only defined by the elsewhere, a negative image delineated through conflicts of language, family, emotions, and land.

Chinese diasporic female artists, once less engaged in interdisciplinary art practices involving technology and engineering, are now producing intriguing and profound works in these realms. Under the patriarchal societal structure, female perspectives and modes of knowing have long been considered private, incomplete, and lacking in universal objectivity. Science and technology have been upheld as probably the only domains unaffected by subjective emotions and absolute objective existence. Nevertheless, this view on science is gradually being dismantled within the scientific and philosophical communities, fueled by developments within the fields and social movements. The experiences of female artists also contribute to this constructive shift in perspective. Xin Liu, who divides her time between London and New York, has been exploring the technological advancements in satellites and rockets, as well as the imaginations of outer space. Via a personal and intimate approach, she investigates the relationship between the human body and the cosmos, and the competition and ideologies underpinning the development of outer space technology.

Miao Ying, based in New York, is a veteran in addressing the Internet as a phenomenon. She is dedicated to uncovering and presenting the absurdities and cultural dislocation within online spaces, particularly in Chinese internet culture. Her focus extends to the impact of computer technology and capital on a global scale. Since 2019, Miao has ventured into the realm of artificial intelligence. She has produced a series of new works related to the development of machine learning software and AI-generated art. Shuyi Cao, also based in New York, primarily works with sculpture and installation. Her practice spans the intersections of science, biology, technological culture, mysticism, and cosmology, by combining meticulous craftsmanship with digital outputs. She also incorporates queer theory into her practice. Liu Wa’s recent works also scrutinize the dialectical relationship between technology and the environment, particularly the historical dilemmas between military technology, environmental alteration, and the solutions to the climate crisis. Many of her visual works are accompanied by music composed by her husband, the musician Bao Yang. Wang Yuyan, a boundary-pushing figure at the intersection of film and art, garnered attention with her work at the Berlin Biennale last year. Based in Paris, she has gained prominence at major international film festivals and received numerous awards. Her short films often recycle and re-edit materials, such as online videos and film clips, to create new narratives. In an almost absurd and eerie manner, she critiques the image production and consumption spawned by the "attention economy" in our capitalistic society.

Due to the limited length and scope of the article, I unfortunately have to leave out some in-depth discussions and many artists who are actively creating and thinking. While considering “woman-as-an-idenity” can be an advantage and an opportunity, it can also become a constraint. Therefore, it is essential to return to the ontology and individulaity of each artist to truly understand and interpret their creative practices. More crucially, the younger generation of artists has begun to engage in profound reflections on their gender and the binary nature of gender. The understanding of their own gender is often multifaceted, no longer easily fitting into the traditional categories of male or female. This ongoing reflection and discussion on diversity and multiplicity will undoubtedly form a critical foundation for the future development of art, philosophy, and technology. (Translated by Zhao Wenrui)