“Gender is a key issue in this era,” says Ping Lin, director of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), in an interview screened at the entrance of “The Herstory of Abstraction in East Asia,” an exhibition of postwar abstract paintings by 13 multigenerational women artists from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. In the video, Lin recounts how, as an art student in New York in the late 1980s, she often heard visiting academics express surprise at the number of Asian female artists who favored the “masculine perspective” of Abstract Expressionism.
Decades later, TFAM’s exhibition, curated by art historians Moon Jung-Hee and Wang Pin-Hua, attempted to shed light on how, far from merely copying pre-existing Western, “masculine” approaches, East Asian women artists established distinct abstract visual languages. “The Herstory of Abstraction”…
