Rachel Seah

• Body Histories
• Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary China
• Chinese Contemporary Art
• Chinese Contemporary Photography 

• PgCert in Research Practice, Birmingham City University, UK (2023)
• MA in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, Nanyang Technological University Singapore (2021)
• BA in Fashion Media and Industries at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London (2014)

Working title

The Eroticised Image of the Chinese Female Body in 21st Century Private Photography in China

Abstract

This PhD research explores the crisis of looking as captured in Chinese contemporary private photography and positions the practice within the art historical canon, Chinese hybridised philosophies and new material culture with a focus on the representation and transformation of the Chinese female bodies and psyche. In centring the Chinese females’ lived experiences within Chinese feminist geographies and discussing their positionality in the private photography practice, this research seeks to propose a vernacular semiology of the private photographic and unveil its capabilities of addressing generational and personal entanglements.

It further suggests that private photographers, through their distinct queering gaze and the eroticization of the female body, are influenced by new materialism, feminine psyche and participatory photography methods, forming the foundation of the Chinese private photography movement and enabling individuals from diverse backgrounds to explore and negotiate structural powers through this photographic engagement.

Research Context

Looking and surveillance seem almost synonymous in China. With its government-controlled monitoring systems that are in place to keep a watchful eye on Chinese citizens, it claims to “promote honesty and traditional values” to raise the “sincerity consciousness” of the entire society. This Orwellian nightmare trespasses the privacy and welfare of citizens and converts quantifiable scores that determine the citizens’ benefits and movability within society (Seah 2020, 3). The state control of censorship and, sometimes, encouraged amnesia, decidedly affect the ways of looking. The controversy of looking in China therefore predetermines the digestible and indigestible fibres of the social order in Chinese society.

This highly sophisticated and complex monitoring tool manifested the crisis of looking in China where Roland Barthes’ third meaning is subjected to political subjugation but contested radically to push the envelopes of material things and normativity. Unlike the conditions of the crisis of looking as described by Chris Townsend as “a crisis of the body, especially in regard to its limits, and a separate one that concerns visibility and vision” (1998, 8), the crisis of looking in China generates what seems a genderless, immaterial, and indeterminate futurity as depicted by China’s leading generation of private photographers.

In their provocative and absurdist photographic style, this research traces alternative associations such as the surrealistic influences, gender and sexuality, the premise of queering within Chinese feminist geography and the affective theory in intra-activity to explore and expand the historiography of Chinese contemporary photography and emergent private photography. This research inquiry into the eroticized Chinese female body serves as a starting body of history to draw and deduce the different normativities and the limitations in its gendered perspective.

As Margaret Hillenbrand highlights in looking at public secrecy and its anomaly in China’s disavowed past through her proposition of “photo-forms”, photographs as an aesthetic object, “enjoins spectators to the task of decipherment, as it is through this labour that a kind of justice can be done to the things that dare not speak its name” (2020, 210). Chinese contemporary private photography in their antithetical approach is hypothesized to postulate a form of introspection that can be explored and discussed through dimensions such as the field of action (which includes the n-dimensionality and accident), psyche, paradox and collective care ethics. It is within this structure of codedness that propelled further investigation in the Chinese contemporary private photographic practice to discover their sense of communing in an act of building solidarity and subsidiarity with one another and the audience as well.

In a disavowal of Michel Foucault’s ‘repressive hypothesis’ that is widely adopted to explain the polymorphous relations between sex and power particularly within China’s context seen in international news media, this research draws on the plurality of voices and the alternate narratives and histories to propose a shift of the social order in line with the decentering of humans by constituting them as actors and their constantly shifting relations with other matters (Latour 2005, 9).

This research adopts Eva Hayward’s “visceral seeing” to “bend the spectator away” from a dominating gaze of self and the devoid of the subject/object divide (2005, 29) so that it can challenge the premise of contemporary private photography in China as engaging in the “was” and “is” (Berger 1972, 59) and “will become” in the production of a “resonating involvement” (2005, 162).

With these considerations, my doctoral investigation seeks to address these questions:

1. What could looking through the gendered lens reveal about Chinese private photography?
2. How can we use existing both Chinese philosophies and feminist theory to examine the development of private photography in China?
3. What are some methods in analysing Chinese private photography? How does one read and write about private photography?
4. And what can this research infer on the power of the eroticised image and its potential contribution to society?
5. How does Chinese private photography help people navigate their personal and generational entanglements?

Peer-reviewed

Seah, R. (2024). Negotiating private and public relational boundaries of the Chinese female body through the lens of past and present. Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Great Britain), 11(2–3), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1386/jcca_00104_1

Seah, R. J. (2022). Cao Fei’s Imagery of the Chinese Female Cyborg as A Posthuman Identity In 21st Century China. Proceeding of the International Conference on Arts and Humanities, 8(01), 36–45. https://doi.org/10.17501/23572744.2021.7104

Art / Exhibition Reviews

Seah, Rachel. (May 2023). Understanding Diaspora Communities | Esea Contemporary. Plural Art Mag.

Seah, Rachel. (Aug 2023). A Photo Oxford Retrospective. smArt Magazine, Issue 12 (Togetherness), 7-10.

Seah, Rachel. (Aug 2023). Melati Suryodarmo heads to the Midlands with Passionate Pilgrim at Ikon Gallery. Plural Art Mag, https://pluralartmag.com/2023/08/08/melati-suryodarmo-heads-to-the-midlands-with-passionate-pilgrim-at-ikon-gallery/.

Seah, Rachel. (Spring 2024). Whose Tropics Is It Anyway?, Art Review Oxford, http://www.artreviewoxford.com/issues/ARO%208.pdf.

Seah, Rachel. (June 2024). Make _________ Great Again, DVAN diaCRITICS, https://dvan.org/2024/03/make-_________-great-again/

Conference / Workshop / Roundtable Presentations

"Analysing Diversity and Agency through China’s Queer Intimacy Paradigm in Chinese Contemporary Private Photography" presented at UoB Navigating the Politics of Gender and Sexuality in China Workshop, 17 June 2024
Contributor reading and discussion on my review of Kent Chan's exhibition and collectively thinking about the change we want for the future at Art Review Oxford Environmental Humanities Research Hub Roundtable, 20 February 2024
"Negotiating the neiwai of the Chinese female body in early ‘art’ photography and contemporary Chinese private photography" presented at Centre for Chinese Visual Arts 16th Annual Conference, 23 -24 November 2023
"Cao Fei’s Imagery of the Chinese Female Cyborg as A Posthuman Identity in 21st Century China" presented at 8th International Conference on Arts and Humanities 2021 (Online), 21 - 22 September 2021

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