Vivian Chiu, "Facing," Brad Cushman Gallery, Windgate Art + Design Building, UA Little Rock. Jan 20 - March 15.

• Artist Round Table and Reception: February 12^th, 6 – 8 pm.

• Gallery Walk-Through with Artist: Friday, February 13^th, 12 – 1 pm.

Content Advisory: This article contains images with nudity and discusses LGBT+ art practices.

As artists, we are taught to contextualize our practice within the canon of art history through a process of citation, in which we argue for which artists, genres, or artworks we are working with and against. A canonical citation has long been one cog in the legitimization process for artists, along with other accomplishments, such as an exhibition record and discussion within critical and historical discourses.But what do artists do if they cannot find themselves within the canon? Linda Nochlin famously wrote about identity gaps in her polemic “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971). Her conclusion was not to defend this statement, but to agree – there have been few ‘great’ women artists because of societal limitations: lack of art education for women, including access to nude models, women not being allowed to be financially independent, and therefore not able to support themselves as artists, women being sidelined to ‘crafts’…the list goes on. Her solution, which she put into practice through the founding of a ‘feminist art history,’ was a canonical revolution.

"Facing," by Vivian Chiu, installed in the Brad Cushman Gallery at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock.

We are seeing a similar revolution today with LGBT+ identified makers. Facing, a solo exhibition by Vivian Chiu, is currently open in the Brad Cushman Gallery at UALR. Chiu identifies herself as a queer Asian woman who has lived in Hong Kong and the United States. The exhibition consists of two series: Self Portrait and Crate Vessel. The objects are ripe with connections: the female body in art, the Asian body in transnational politics and economies, capitalism and trade, colonialism and assimilation, and queerness. For Chiu to find a similar artistic practice within Asian art or European art histories would be difficult. Instead, Chiu interacts with artists and objects, who, like herself, move between Chinese and Euro-American traditions, and between embracing and rejecting traditional womanhood.

"Facing," by Vivian Chiu, installed in the Brad Cushman Gallery at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock.

In his seminal text, Disidentifications (1999), José Esteban Muñoz discusses a survival strategy that LGBT+ makers use to combat an art-historical canon that erases them. In the process of “disidentification,” LGBT+ artists both cite and subvert art and cultural references that are close to them. Muñoz states, “to disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject” (13). It is a type of cherry-picking sources that almost resonate - but cannot fully because the artist is part of a marginal (and erased) group.

For the Crate Vessel series, Chiu has collaborated with Wing on Wo & Co (W.O.W), the oldest storefront in Chinatown. W.O.W. is known for importing Chinese porcelain. Chiu does not work with the porcelain artworks, but the crates they are shipped in. Meticulously, she cuts and rebuilds the crates into vessel forms to mimic the objects once within them. Carrying their original stamps and markings, the usually discarded, worn wood is transformed into art. Here, the disidentification happens between material and purpose, ‘high art’ and ‘low objects.’ Chiu draws strong connections between the objects’ journeys from Asia to the United States and her own immigration.

Objects from the Crate Vessel Series, Vivian Chiu.

Vivian Chiu, "Three Conjoined Vases," 2025, Pine Crate Wood from W.O.W.

Chiu specifically cites the work of Pan Yu-liang (1895 – 1977) as an inspiration for the Self-Portrait series. Yu-liang is remembered as the first female artist in China to paint in a European style. A portion of Yu-liang’s practice was portraying Chinese models in a ‘reclining nude’ pose. Much can be said about what these works meant in terms of transnational visibility, assimilation, and respectability politics. Chiu disidentifies with these paintings through a series of photographic self-portraits in which her own body is multiplied and placed in compositions similar to those in Yu-liang’s works. Unlike Yu-liang’s passive portrayal of women who act as demure objects for the male gaze, Chiu confronts the viewer with direct eye contact. A real body does not recline like an imagined one and Chiu’s figures sit more abruptly and awkwardly on the page than Yu-liang’s images.

[Left] Vivian Chiu, Photograph from the Self Portrait series. [Right] Pan Yu-Liang, "Nudes and Masks," 1956, Ink and Color on Paper.

[Left] Vivian Chiu, Photograph from the Self Portrait series. [Right] Pan Yu-Liang, "Baigneause," 1958, Oil on Canvas.

Broader comparisons can be made between these works and other cross-continental artworks. Manet’s assertive reclining nude in Olympia (1863), or maybe more aptly, the use of many angular African-inspired nudes in Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). It cannot be overlooked that the women in Manet’s and Picasso’s work were sex workers. Yu-liang, herself, was sold to a brothel at a young age, but was able to escape.

The through line here is the commodification of female bodies.

[Left] Pablo Picasso, "Demoiselles d’Avignon," 1907, Oil on Canvas. [Right] Edouard Manet, "Olympia," 1863, Oil on Canvas.

The rise of orientalism in 19th-century Europe aligned with the expansion of empires and trade routes. We know that so much of the “Asian” representation in the traditional canon was either 1. European artists copying Asian styles, or 2. European artists fetishizing Asian female bodies through paintings of harems and nudes. Thanks to Napoleon’s conquests and France’s expanding empire, chinoiserie, or mimicking Chinese styles and motifs were popularized in Europe in the 18th Century. Later, when trade with Japan opened in the mid-1800s, Japonaiserie gained popularity. Artists, including Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso, frequented new ethnographic museums in Europe, drawing direct inspiration from the stolen objects they saw there. Other artists, such as Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and Paul Gauguin, traveled to colonized areas and mythologized their experiences.

Chinoiserie Example: Francois Boucher, “The Merit of Every Country,” 1842 - 45, Oil on Canvas. Note the porcelain vase in the back.

Chiu’s work subverts this history of forced exchange, colonialism, and orientalism through a centering of the Asian body as object. Like many contemporary queer artists, Chiu is willing to conflate subjecthood and objecthood in her practice. I argue that both of Chiu’s series are portraiture. The Crate Vessels act as a Chinese body, exchanged, reconstructed, and revalued. When shown with Self Portraits, these through-lines become clear. She uses her own body in action – sometimes overtly in photographs, sometimes chopping it up and fragmenting it, like the crates, where it is simultaneously visible and invisible, body and object.

Vivian Chiu, "Self V" (front) and "Self I (back left), installed as part of "Facing."

In 1985, Guerrilla Girls aptly pointed out that 85% of the nudes portrayed in the Metropolitan Museum were female, while less than 5% of the artists in the collection were women. Chiu follows this protest – but deepens it by contextualizing her queer Asian body within these complex colonial economies: How can a queer Asian woman get into the museum?As Nochlin called for, disidentification is a survival – and a resistance – strategy. Chiu does not simply repeat or follow the traditions outlined above; she takes from them what she wants, reworks it, subverts it, and presents new ideas. A key tenet of ‘queer abstraction’ is that by abstracting the body or by presenting ‘body surrogates’ as Chiu does with the vessels, queer artists can be present without the downsides of representation: fetishization, commodification, censorship, or surveillance. Unbound by the limitations of language or the confines of specific identity boxes, her ‘bodies’ of work can hold histories of transnational exchange, and multiple identities – Chinese and American, queer and female, and artist - simultaneously.

For more information about this exhibition: https://ualr.edu/chasse/event/vivian-chiu-facing/

For more information about Vivian Chiu: https://www.vivianchiustudio.com/