Female Writer 她--美女作家 Favorite 

Yu Hong’s Female Writer, a painted and photographic portrait of the writer Zhao Bo 趙波 (b. 1971), recalls courtly images of idealized beauties. Yu, however, deliberately complicates the perspective in her composition: she asked the sitters for her She series to select photographs of themselves that could be paired with her paintings, meaning that the images together convey dual female perspectives, both the artist’s and the subject’s. Ultimately, Female Writer grapples with issues of identity and self-expression. These works reimagine conventional images of women from a female authorial perspective and can thus be understood as examples of feminist art, creating subjectivities that are explicitly female and subverting the concept of the gaze as a path to visual pleasure.