In Conversation: Dr Luise Guest with Professor Jing Han

Date & Time: Saturday, 6 June 2026, 2:00–3:00pm Venue: Rochfort Gallery RSVP: Essential. Please go to the Rochfort Gallery official website.Rochfort Gallery is delighted to host this event in partnership with the Institute for Australian and Asian Arts and Culture at Western Sydney University. Presented alongside our current exhibition, Brocade, which showcases contemporary works by the Sydney-based Pulvers sisters, this conversation will explore Dr Guest’s new book on feminism and identity as expressed through the practices of five prominent contemporary Chinese women artists, offering an engaging and insightful discussion.About the book What does it mean to be a woman artist—or a feminist artist—in China today? Through an analysis of how Chinese women artists have reinvented traditional ink and brush painting, Invisible Ink reveals how this medium becomes a tool for gendered and art historical subversion in contemporary Chinese art. In this book, Dr Guest examines the work of Bingyi, Ma Yanling, Tao Aimin, Xiao Lu, and Xie Rong, showing how they draw on contemporary iterations of ink and brush painting to explore embodied and gendered experiences of Chinese identity. These include motherhood and daughterhood, the impact of state control over fertility under the One Child Policy, and the experience of menopause in a culture that prizes youth and beauty. The artists are presented as intervening not only in historically exclusive, elitist literati traditions but also in contemporary art discourses where their contributions have often been marginalised. The book also considers the artists’ ambivalent relationships with Western feminism, positioning their work as counter-hegemonic expressions grounded in specifically Chinese experiences of patriarchy. By addressing an understudied dimension of contemporary Chinese art, Invisible Ink sheds light on the material culture of ink and brush painting through a transcultural, intersectional feminist lens. In doing so, it reveals how this enduring form connects Chinese history with the present day.About the Speaker Dr Luise Guest is an independent writer, researcher, and curator, and currently a sessional academic in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture at the University of New South Wales. Her research on contemporary Chinese art has been widely published in journals including The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Yishu Journal, TAASA Review, and Artist Profile. Her first book, Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China, was published by Piper Press in 2016. Her second book, Invisible Ink: Feminism and Chinese Identity in Contemporary Art, was published by Bloomsbury in 2026. Read more details