Overview

Examines the career and message paintings of the feminist conceptual artist Jiny Lan, analyzing a cross-section of works that invite literary, historical, socio-political and transcultural interpretations. Jiny Lan is an avant-garde Chinese artist based in Germany. A founding member of the feminist art collective ""Bald Girls,"" she infuses astute, politically charged, and iconoclastic criticism into her conceptual and visual art. Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion provides a hermeneutic and critical analysis of Lan's idiosyncratic, provocative, and ingenious artwork. ""Subversion"" refers not only to her political and cultural subversiveness but also to her iterative technique of reproduction and repainting, which she uses to create a series of genealogically related ""sub-versions"" of her own paintings. As an émigré and immigrant artist, Lan is profoundly influenced by both eastern and western cultures and traditions. Her immersive experience and extensive knowledge of two contrasting national histories, cultures, and political systems endows her with a unique intersectional positionality. Her artwork is at once figurative and abstract, realistic and fantastic, chaotic and logical, appropriative and creative. It interrogates serious issues such as censorship, authoritarianism, democracy, human rights, sexism, racism, war, migration, and Covid-19, but in a dynamic and often humorous manner. This book lays a foundation for evaluating Lan as an artist whose work invites discussions about portraiture, power, temporality, space, corporality, and sex. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

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9781640142220

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QINNA SHEN received her PhD in German from Yale and is Associate Professor and Chair of German at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films (2015) and co-edited volumes Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia (2014) and Charting Asian German Film History (2025). She is on the editorial board of German Studies Review and is currently co-editing the special issue marking the German Studies Association's 50th anniversary in 2026.

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