Jeanne Dielman exposes two faces of the home. It enforces family systems and reproductive labor order, yet it is also gradually shaped and sensed through repeated bodily actions over time. This tension may explain why, half a century on, the home remains a recurring site of exploration for many women artists. The six artists discussed here engage with—and expand upon—this question from diverse perspectives.

Reflections on the home often stem from an artist’s immediate surroundings and lived experience, intertwining questions of personal identity with the shaping of a creative trajectory, and tend to emerge early in an artistic career. For Maggie Lee, “home” is a house. After her mother’s sudden death, she returns to the New Jersey suburb she once escaped, to clear out and sell the house of her childhood. Mommy (2015) emerges as her cinematic response to this act of clearing and farewell. She described her motivation in an interview: “I wanted to recreate all these feelings I had while living in New Jersey. I wanted to film it so I could have it in some way before I had to leave my life and my childhood home. I would sleep in every room and recreate these feelings and put them in the movie.” ¹

Like a whimsical family scrapbook, Mommy weaves together old photographs, home DV footage, diary entries, and simple animations. Millennium-era stickers, glitter, and stars flicker and bounce among the belongings Lee’s mother left behind. Upbeat music collides with adolescent murmurs—“tears!” “smiley face!”—repeating in a playful, almost frenetic rhythm in which emotion spills out raw and unruly. Rapid cuts and a young girl’s voiceover transport us to a childhood that is at once sweet and bitter.

Handheld, Lee records the act of farewell itself: her crying face repeatedly caught in the mirror; gestures of wiping, washing, and dismantling furniture sped to the edge of chaos. The house, once a vessel of memory, is erased. In its place, the image becomes a dwelling for memory. Within it, the mother’s story finds shelter, and the daughter’s act of self-writing begins.

While Maggie Lee uses film to bid farewell to her mother and childhood home, Han Qian situates “home” within a longer arc of migration. Having left China at a young age, repeated relocations sharpened her sensitivity to domestic space. In 2017, as she moved out of her Paris apartment, Han slowly ran a lint roller across every surface and corner—walls, empty bookshelves, countertops, floors—tracing the contours of a year’s daily life in Dust, An Inch of Breathing. In June 2020, shortly after returning to China, Han confined herself to a room in her family home in Wuhan for fourteen days. ¹Sunlight was sealed out by foil-covered windows; except for faint sounds beyond the door, time seemed to stall. An infrared camera placed at the foot of the bed recorded her repeated routines. In this enforced stillness, Han confronted her thoughts, writing and rewriting memories and dreams. Back on native soil, lying in a room unfamiliar yet nominally her own, she contemplates and senses her distance from home. During this confinement, the artist both processes her prior absence from home life and seeks to reconnect with her family and hometown.

From there, Han turned toward her family’s migration history, particularly the experiences of women across generations. In Missing Paths (2022), she retraced the route connecting her home to her grandparents’ former house; in One Day Distance (2024), she walked along the twenty-eight kilometers her grandmother once traveled upon marriage. Through repeated acts of walking, revisiting, and reorienting, Han searches for her position across multiple “dwellings.” As her practice takes shape, so too does an understanding of her place in the world: home is not a stable interior, but a shifting set of coordinates, continually revised.

Both Maggie Lee and Han Qian begin from family and formative experience, exploring the self through loss, migration, and return. The following artists, however, turn from personal history toward broader temporal and social frameworks.

Rinko Kawauchi’s work focuses on the generational shifts and the broader temporality a home can hold. In 2005, she published the photobook Cui Cui, compiling thirteen years of photographs taken at her grandparents’ house. The title “Cui Cui” echoes birdsong, as well as a quiet voice rising from deep within life itself: ordinary and intimate. The images unfold in fragments, near and far, bathed in soft light and translucent tones. They evoke scattered memories of childhood holiday visits to elders: hands mending clothes, a half-eaten slice of watermelon, the grandmother about to enter a room, the grandfather moving slowly along bright supermarket aisles, flowers in the yard, birds beneath the eaves, a corner of the bathroom, a lamp on the ceiling.

Kawauchi often works with a twin-lens reflex camera. Its fixed-focus lens and waist-level viewfinder create a perspective close to everyday vision, keeping the gaze low and the narrative rhythm gentle. Yet this is far from a family album drenched in private sentiment. Through careful sequencing, the cycles of life within an ordinary Japanese household unfold across the pages: a grandmother’s aging body curled on a tatami mat; opposite, a tiny newborn in the sink; then, the infant’s clear eyes mirrored by tender shoots breaking through the snow. An elder resting in a coffin, a spherical pincushion, dew on a lotus leaf, the weather outside—each appears within the same square frame. Life inside the home and the seasonal cycles outside, the most mundane moments and the grandeur of nature, are closely intertwined. By juxtaposing the everyday with the natural and leveling the hierarchy between micro and macro, Kawauchi sketches the approach that would come to define her later work.

Family relations and daily life are also central to Kyoko Idetsu’s practice. Unlike the quiet tone of Rinko Kawauchi’s photographs, Idetsu employs a rough, direct painterly language to convey the bodily experience of caregiving. In Ingredients (2018), a dense list of food ingredients overlay a mother and child shopping in a supermarket; the black text presses in on their bodies, mirroring how a caregiver’s attention is constantly consumed by nutrition labels, additives, and allergen warnings. The tense composition highlights the relentless vigilance that parenting demands.

At times, Idetsu constructs nested or displaced compositions, weaving multiple fragments of daily life into complex scenes that convey the relentless repetition of domestic labor. Clothing, food, shelter, and routines grind on endlessly: a hole in a sweater opens onto a living room; a foil tray from a ready meal holds an elderly figure eating alone. In Reward (2017), a bold, square Chinese character “报” (bao, “reward”) dominates the canvas. Within each stroke, miniature childcare scenes appear: a child having tantrum reflected in a car’s rearview mirror, a mother running with a crying infant, a child asleep with a fever patch on the forehead. Domestic labor offers neither pause nor reward. Idetsu frequently incorporates structural elements—Chinese characters, fences, branches, and houses—that function both as compositional scaffolding and as symbols of order: cultural norms, patriarchal rules, and social barriers. Within these imposed frameworks, life is compartmentalized, boxed frame by frame.

Her recent work takes on a heavier tone. In The World Beyond Through the Hole in the Washing Machine (2025), a woman cleans a washing machine whose pipes lead to skeletal remains on a remote island. In the accompanying text, Idetsu references Han Kang’s novel We Do Not Part, evoking the buried violence of Jeju Island’s history. Just as Han intertwines the domestic histories of Jeju households with the trauma of the Jeju April 3 Incident, Idetsu links the washing machine’s hole to a historical wound. Household discipline and deprivation resonate with national and historical violence. Through her painting, these hidden structures are rendered visible, making “home” a cross-section through which the order of the world can be apprehended.

Among younger Chinese women artists, many turn their attention to domestic violence; Xue Ying is one of them. Working primarily with household tools—kitchen knives, peelers, pots, spoons, ladders, rags—she materializes the pain accumulated within patriarchal families and society at large. In That We Don’t Eat Until Your Father Is at the Table (2022), two sharp blades are joined, pinning a dishcloth to the wall. Soft fabric and hard metal wrestle in tension, freezing patriarchal command as a suspended threat. In Crazywife (2022), a kitchen knife hangs from a braid, trembling in small, repetitive motions as it strikes a cross-shaped iron pan on the floor with crisp metallic sounds, yet remains confined within a narrow radius—a portrait of resistance caught in domestic cycles. In Fall (2024), kitchen peelers are stacked into a steep, vertical ladder. Each rung is a perforated blade, sharp, worn, rusted. The accumulation does not depict a single act of violence, but its terrifying sum. Time, bodies, emotions, and lives worn down day after day within the home accrue into massive, yet normalized, sacrifice. These invisible labors sustain the operations of both patriarchy and capitalism alike. Xue Ying’s work gives tangible form to social structure itself: exploitation within the family is not a subsidiary of state or capitalist violence, but their most fundamental and enduring foundation.

Ghislaine Leung’s early interest in structure focused on the systems of art production themselves. Through precise interventions, she highlighted the overlooked relationships, dependencies, and labor that underpin these systems, turning the exhibition into a space to reorganize and probe artistic mechanisms. In her 2019 solo show Constitution at Chisenhale Gallery, London, the gallery walls, originally invisible in their plain whiteness, were coated in high-gloss paint, revealing the accumulated traces of time—layers of paint, nail holes, and repair marks. In the staff corridor, a black door built to UK residential standards was installed, letting the “scale of home” seep into the institutional space.

Motherhood brought “family” fully into Leung’s practice. She opened her 2022 exhibition Balances at Maxwell Graham Gallery, New York with a statement: “I feel unable to make the new works requested of me because I do childcare evenings and weekends, and weekly. I do this childcare not in spite of my work as an artist but as an active and empowered choice to be a mother. (…) I wish to do both art and care and in doing so change the terms of identity and labour within our industry.” ¹The tools and temporal rhythms of caregiving were directly incorporated into the exhibition. As Leung put it, “I have to let the material that’s around me in.” ²Baby monitors streamed live footage from the gallery office; child safety gates marked thresholds; works were displayed only during her limited working hours, Thursdays and Fridays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. ³Through these gestures, Leung enacted a radical, care-centered approach: rather than excluding motherhood, daily life, and economic pressure to preserve a “pure” artistic practice, she embraced the intertwined realities of being both mother and artist, of embodying both care and creation, treating caregiving not as an obstacle but as essential conditions and materials for her work. Her institutional critique is revitalized, taking on a constructive dimension—an open set of structural rules. This logic extended into subsequent projects. Leung provided only brief instructions, leaving choices of materials, form, and installation to institutional teams. The work no longer obeyed her singular will, but emerged through relationships, collaboration, contingency, and trust. In doing so, Leung arrived at a mode of practice grounded in specific realities of both institutional and domestic life: creating art without disavowing life, and exploring creative possibilities amid caregiving.

Kelly Reichardt’s film Showing Up (2022) captures this state with precision: on the eve of a solo exhibition, the female protagonist’s creative work is repeatedly interrupted by everyday life, yet it continually reemerges in the interstices of that life. A broken water heater, a cat needing care, noisy neighbors, a landlord entering the studio unannounced, demands of family and friends—these moments, seemingly obstructive, in fact shape the rhythm and conditions of artistic emergence. Creation does not begin once these problems are resolved; it grows through ongoing entanglement with them.

Looking back at the artists discussed in this essay, we see that each engages, in her own way, with the relationship between home and artistic practice. Home is not merely the smallest unit of family systems, divisions of labor, or power relations; it is also a space that holds the body and actively shapes creative work. Attunement to structure often arises through the body’s situated experience of space, while investigation of the body–space relationship inevitably engages the frameworks of family, society, and production. Maggie Lee processes her mother’s death and the loss of her childhood home; Han Qian searches for forms of dwelling through migration; Rinko Kawauchi connects family life with the cycles of nature; Kyoko Idetsu portrays shared structural logics between caregiving labor and state violence; Xue Ying reveals the nested dynamics of domestic labor and patriarchal capitalism; and Ghislaine Leung brings the temporalities of home and the demands of care directly into the mechanisms of art production. These practices do not seek to reaffirm that “home is a feminine space.” Rather, they explore how home bears memory, daily life, emotion, relationships, labor, order, institutional structures, and creativity itself. Across these works, the unique resonance between women’s lived experience and the space of home becomes palpable. As Virginia Woolf observed over a century ago: “For women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force.”¹ (Editor: Ara Yun Qiu; Translator: Yi Yu)