Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion

<b>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.</b><br><br><br>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. <i>Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion</i> 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.<br><br>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.<br><br>This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.