As a companion series to the exhibition Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting, we present a small selection of Chinese films that portray women, their desires, and their sacrifices. Frames from Cecile Tang Shu Shuen's rare The Arch (1969), with its portrait of a seventeenth-century widow spinning wool, reading books, and teaching children, could double as paintings from the exhibition, while the sensual 35mm textures and hues of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000) form compositions as timeless as any in ink or silk. Both offer us protagonists separated by centuries, yet connected by a propriety that leaves them unable to express themselves or their needs.
Many of the films feature one of prewar Chinese cinema's greatest performers, the legendary Ruan Lingyu, who tragically committed suicide at the age of twenty-four. Her roles in The Goddess (1934) and New Women (1935) defined the “new woman” of urban China. Ruan's films offered up images of women fighting against their submissive role and against the straitjacket of sexuality forced upon them by men. “Only a slave sells her body!” one of her characters defiantly cries. Like the lead characters of The Arch and In the Mood for Love, Ruan's heroines are figures of propriety, able to keep their virtue even when surrounded by vice. They are defined not by an unexpressed love for a man, however, but by love for their children.
Fittingly for this series, Stanley Kwan's innovative modernist biography of Ruan Lingyu, 1992's Center Stage, presents a “meta-portrait” not only of the actress, but of all the ways in which images of women can be constructed, memorialized, and deconstructed.