Description
00:00 | Introducing Dr. Wang: Art, Science & the Body
01:22 | Setting the Scene: Modernity Fought Through the Body
02:35 | 1919: Nude Models Arrive at Shanghai Art Academy
05:11 | The New Cultural Movement & Coeducation
06:32 | 1925: The Warlord Government Bans Nude Models
08:03 | "The Nude Doesn't Belong in China": One Critic's Case
09:09 | Brushwork as the True Essence of Modern Art
11:14 | The Counter-Case: The Nude as Scientific Truth
11:44 | 1851: A Pioneering Anatomical Treatise in Chinese
13:29 | Anatomy, Evangelization & Scientific Racism
14:31 | The Body as a Site of Empire: "Sick Men of Asia"
15:08 | 1892: Medicine First Undresses the Female Body
16:56 | Eugenics & the Politics of Women's Health
18:24 | The Nude Goes Global: Transnational Print Networks
19:20 | The Young Companion: Venus Meets Chinese Beauty
20:47 | 1927: Breast Binding Bans & the Cult of Curves
23:48 | March 1927: The Wuhan Women's Emancipation Parade
27:32 | Pan Yuliang: From Brothel to First Female Professor
30:20 | War, Exile & the 1941 Paris Salon Attack
33:45 | Legacy: The Nude Debate Resurfaces in 1979 Beijing
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/gmlQqetDMlk
The bare, naked, nude, and tradition-defying body constituted one of the most radical sites of cultural transformations in China’s pivotal historical transition from the last imperial dynasty to a new Republic. This lecture reveals how the female nude – at the intersection of art, medicine, and science – became deeply entwined with the cultural politics of nationalism and modernisation, structured new racial, gender, and class relations, and simultaneously, shaped the genesis of modern art and visual culture in China.
This lecture was recorded by Dr Di Wang on the 8th of June 2026 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London
Dr Di Wang is an art historian and curator. Her work focuses on art and culture of East Asia from the late-nineteenth century to the present.
Following her doctorate at the University of Oxford, she has taught as a departmental lecturer and research associate at the Department of History of Art at Oxford. Her first book project reveals the surprising entanglement of medicine, science, and revolutionary politics in the genesis of a socially engaged modern art and visual culture in China, offering the first inter-disciplinary history on how science and medicine shaped the contours of avant-garde thinking in China during the modern period.
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/nude-china
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