Song Ta Scandal Puts Art World's Sexism on Full Display Favorite 

Ahead of a recent exhibition at the prestigious modern art museum OCAT Shanghai, the artist Song Ta described the process of creating his multimedia piece “Uglier and Uglier.” After secretly filming thousands of unsuspecting female college students, Song and three assistants painstakingly ranked them by their perceived attractiveness; those deemed most appealing featured early in the show, with the women on display getting progressively “uglier” as the day went on. By dusk, Song claimed that visitors to the exhibit would be greeted by “a living hell.”

Song debuted “Uglier and Uglier” in 2013, but, with the exception of a brief controversy over a misogynistic 2019 interview, it largely flew under the radar prior to its showing at OCAT, when an online post about the show and Song’s introduction to it attracted widespread criticism on social media. Critics blasted Song for objectifying women and infringing on their privacy, leading OCAT Shanghai to take down the piece. In a public apology, the museum acknowledged that “the artist’s intentions and the work’s English title were disrespectful and offensive to women” and promised to do a better job screening works in the future. (The piece’s Chinese title, “Campus Flower,” is a term used to describe attractive female students.)

To Song’s champions, and there are still many, he is a boundary-pushing artist whose work challenges political correctness and staid social norms. As they see it, “Uglier and Uglier” wasn’t an exercise in misogyny, but a critique of the politically correct idea that no person can be judged objectively more beautiful than anyone else and that beauty is societally determined rather than genetic. Detractors, on the other hand, found the piece crass and demeaning. Some said that Song’s next work should involve him finding the women he secretly filmed and apologizing to them.

Arguably more interesting than the controversy over “Uglier and Uglier,” however, is what it says about the politics of contemporary Chinese art. OCAT Shanghai is among the most prestigious art institutions in China. The same goes for the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, which first exhibited the piece in 2013. Together, they wield enormous power over the boundaries of what constitutes “acceptable” art in the country, making their insensitivity to gender issues all the more significant, even if those values generally reflect what is found in both domestic and global artistic circles.