“Oh, Gorels!” when the then 5-year-old boy Chance was brought by his parents to befriend a kid of his opposite sex, he simply uttered so, though vaguely, to the girl in front of him. It is surprising to think how our society is able to so efficiently implant the fixed ideas differencing girl and boy, male and female already from such a young age. Spinoza explained “ to define what something is always starts from what something is not.” Already in 1959, the American psychologist Ruth Hartley pointed out that the little boy learns how not to behave before he learns how to behave in order to be masculine. For the boy, everything that is not feminine is masculine. So then, what is the girl and what is feminine?

“ Qui est la jeune fille?” ( What is the girl?) For Simone de Beauvoir, The Girl was a crucial figure in the project that would become The Other Sex. She described The Girl as in the stage between child and woman, in the transition between childhood and adulthood. The Girl is both being a girl and becoming a woman. “Becoming a woman” is de Beauvoir’s strong contribution to the foundation of feminism thoughts in which the female body is seen as a significant site of the process of becoming. De Beauvoir drew our attention to the body of The Girl as the physical transformation at this stage that paves the way for the becoming of womanhood. The body of The Girl is the source of her emotional turmoil. She feels uncertain, both proud of her body and feels awkward in it. She turns into a narcissist, a dreamer who seems to endowed with magic virtues yet she is growing anxious towards her own femininity. At the awkward age of The Girl, she tests the world with eyes and head, but also with mouth and stomach. When she feels not being loved, The Girl goes to the nature and she feels, records and observes the world passing by as she transcends and becomes the woman-to-be.

Simone de Beauvoirr’s existential insights over The Girl provide us a feminism reading of the artworks presented in this exhibition. In Wang Jiaxue’s Tired Romantic we see a young individual caught in a half-wild and half-tamed body. She stares at the world as the world reveals in her over-sized eyes and in them we can read longing, fear, hope and despair. In Wu Di’s Twin Sisters, two girls turn against us facing whatever in front of them in the dark. Tragic or hopeful? We are left in bewilderment. In Qin Qi’s Wind, a girl in restaurant worker’s uniform sinks into daydream as she takes a short pause from her daily work. Is she dreaming of her love like Cinderella dreams of her Prince Charming? For the young girl, erotic transcendence includes in the process of becoming woman. In Shen Ling’s painting we meet two seemingly quite bored young girls sitting at a richly decorated banquet table unable to be happy. Passivity is The Girl’s instrument for grasping power. A girl’s narcissism and bodily self-destroying lie not just on looking at the mirror with a blind eye (as in He Sen’s Make Up 1), she tests the world with her own body parts. The cut on the girl’s thigh in He An’s photograph screams for pain and yearns for affection. Schopenhauer sees boredom and pain as two evils of life, yet, it may as well be the calls for attention and the sources of creation.

Certainly we can not talk about femininity without the gaze from the other sex. When Yu Youhan merged two of the 20th century’s most iconic images, Mao and Monroe, into one, he has also merged two symbols that both strive for control: power and sex. While Liu Jianhua’s porcelain female body is provocative in objectifying womanhood, the fine quality China tableware also grow uncomfortable association when the work echoes an old Chinese saying: women as candy for eyes and for mouth, Yuan Yuan disguises both the intention and the motive in his painting behind the camouflage color and pattern. In Japan, pornographic films are also screened under the disguise of mosaic on women’s sex，a social moral smokescreen for justifying the industry of female body trade. I have always wanted to find a feminism reading in Yang Fudong’s body of work. There is always a strong female figure standing in the center of his creation, may it be the daughter-in-law of the family who determined to move the mountain (Moving Mountains) or the self-possessed Ms. Huang at M. Last Night” (2006) fascinated, not necessarily merely male viewers. Yang Fudong’s female image has the power to step out from the shadows of men and establish her own authority. Such power in Yu Hong’s works on glasses are transformed into eulogy for girls in nature. Beauty breathes there. Light shines there. The fragility of the glasses lands softly on the vulnerability of the girls. For Yu Hong, it has to be autobiographical. The art history’s most enigmatic gaze is disguised behind Liang Manxue’s Little Princess. Running through the historical corridor, the girl’s becoming of woman has to overcome layers of man’s gaze.

This exhibition has gathered paintings, photographs and sculpture of 12 Chinese artists from Lingling and Andrew’s collection. They all have female protagonist(s) covering the stage from the transitional girl to the woman-to-be. Each individual work addresses, to certain extent, our discussion on femininity, some reconfirm the stereotypes; others confront the social norms, one of which being the makers of these images just as the makers of the social norms implanted to femininity are still predominately men. These are enough urgent reasons for a show addressing the myth of Femininity to be opened here. Hopefully the exhibition could trigger more discussions around femininity issues both in the art world and in our society in general. Please be reminded by Simone de Beauvoir, the woman who laid the foundation for our modern times gender study: One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.