Bringing to light the largely overlooked women’s traditionalist art practices from the last years of the Qing dynasty to the first three decades of the Republic (1900s to 1930s), the main objective of this book is to provide new perspectives on how women shaped the terrain of modern art, cultural diplomacy, and gender positioning during China’s important moments of social-cultural transformations from empire to republic, and the years of resisting military aggression from Japan. During these four decades, reformists, intellectuals, and artists in Beijing and Shanghai sought to define the characteristics of artistic heritage in Chinese culture, discerning them through inward reflection and outward-facing renegotiation of a national culture in the global sphere.

This study demonstrates that women artists played an important role in this process by not only actively contributing to the local art scenes, but also in international venues such as world’s fairs. As the traditionalists made their marks, it is important to note that Western-style art was also gaining prominence in China’s modern art developments, and women artists working in Western mediums had been instrumental in shaping the Chinese art world at that time. However, this study focuses on women artists’ role in safeguarding and renewing traditionalist practices, which underscored the close connection between the reassessments of these art forms and the shifting gender positioning in Chinese social and cultural developments in the early twentieth century.

Meng Yi writes in Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 46: "In Women of Chinese Modern Art, Doris Sung offers a deeply researched, multi-layered reappraisal of early twentieth-century Chinese art, highlighting how women’s so-called domestic arts became forces for national and transnational change. By foregrounding the complex gender politics woven into embroidery, painting, and calligraphy, Sung underscores how female artists contributed to and were shaped by their historical moment, reconfiguring the meaning of "modern Chinese art." Scholars and graduate students alike will find in this book not just a trove of case studies but also a blueprint for interrogating gendered labor and the expansion of cultural heritage in a global framework. It is a significant addition to ongoing conversations on cultural diplomacy, feminism, and artistic modernities in Republican China."

Dr. Sung is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on early modern, modern and contemporary art of East Asia, cultural interactions between Asia and Europe, and gender and visual culture. Her monograph Women of Chinese Modern Art: Gender and Reforming Traditions in National and Global Spheres, 1900s–1930s (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2024), examines the contribution of female embroiderers, and traditionalist calligraphers and painters to the development of Chinese modern art and cultural diplomacy on the global stage in the early twentieth century.

She is the author of several book chapters and journal articles on Chinese women artists active in the 20th and 21st centuries and is a contributor of articles on modern and contemporary Chinese art to Grove Art/Oxford Art Online. She is co-principal investigator of “Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts,” a digital humanities project to encourage and support sustained, interdisciplinary consideration of the role Early Modern women played in the hands-on production of visual and material culture in the courts of Europe and Asia (c. 1400-1750). She is one of the research leaders of the international “TEAM (Teaching, E-learning, Agency and Mentoring)” for AWARE (Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibitions). Dr. Sung’s research has been supported by grants from the College Art Association, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, Kress Foundation, and the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, and SECAC.

Before joining the University of Alabama, Dr. Sung was assistant curator at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) where she worked on Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, an exhibition organized by PEM, National Museum of Asian Art and the Palace Museum, Beijing. She held the position of project coordinator for the international research and digital humanities project “A New Approach to the Popular Press in China: Gender and Cultural Production, 1904–1937.” Dr. Sung is also a visual artist and an independent curator. She earned her Ph.D. in humanities, and MFA in visual arts from York University, Toronto.