Short Ladies Gold Pin-Up Girls?

Chinese Paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

December 20, 2014 - July 19, 2015
Asian Painting Gallery (Gallery 178)

Images of women by Chinese artists from the 11th through the 20th century.

Across all cultures, physical allure has been a central focus of depicting women in art. In China, the rich visual cultures of the region have produced many different images of women in fashions, styles, aesthetics, and concepts of beauty. Works that today seem to be modest depictions of beautiful women may have been considered highly suggestive when first created. "Short Ladies or Pin-Up Girls?" Includes paintings, prints, posters, and photographs of women by Chinese artists from the 11th through the 20th century. Highlights include Short Ladies Preparing Silk Newly Woven (1082-1135), one of the MFA's great masterpieces of Chinese paintings, 18th century erotic paintings, turn-of-the-century hand-colored photographs of shortans, a 1930s advertisement poster, and 20th-century propaganda posters of female factory workers.