Claiming Li Qingzhao’s Legacy in Modern China: Women’s Participation in Chinese Collecting Culture from 1800-1950

Abstract

This paper aims to address the absence of women's participation in collecting in previous studies of Chinese collecting history, collecting culture, and antiquarianism. More specifically, this paper is driven by the following question: why do we conceptualize Chinese collecting culture as male-dominated, when there exist plenty of well-known visual and literary materials indicating women's active participation in this field?To address this question, I will first clarify the distinction between the concept of "collector" and "collecting household" in premodern Chinese collecting culture, which is nowadays simplified under the single term of “collector.” I argue that premodern Chinese women participated in collecting culture via the medium of the “collecting household,” which aimed to contribute to, and most importantly preserve, family collections and intellectual traditions, rather than as “collectors” who focused on possessing and accumulating objects. I will draw on cases from female poetry in the nineteenth century to discuss how intellectual women contributed to the collecting household via patronage and memory. I will also compare female donors who preserved “national treasures” in the twentieth century with a female collector who engaged actively with the global art market which increasingly demanded Chinese collections to show how the role of the female collector is only meaningful in the context of the modern art market. These arguments aim to help us reflect on our conceptualization of collecting culture through a gendered perspective, and to reconsider our overemphasis on purchase rather than preservation, and accumulation rather than dispersal.