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China’s ‘war’ over the human body rages on
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IN ancient Rome and Greece, the naked body was sculpted to perfection and generally glorified. During the Renaissance, the human form was rendered not only anatomically correct but profound in refined drawings and paintings.
In China, however, the body was kept hidden until the dawn of the 20th century.
To be sure, there were erotic images in ancient China, but they were created during the Taoist-dominated eras as manuals to educate young married couples. Far more typical were the paintings that depict upper-class men and women perched on carved wooden chairs, their hands hidden in the sleeves of beautiful brocades, their faces stoic, inexpressive, like peg dolls. To project a cold, outward face was akin to moral rectitude.
“The human body in traditional China was not seen as having its own intrinsic physical glory,” says China scholar Mark Elvin, author of “Changing Stories in the Chinese World.” Beauty was not dependent on sexual characteristics and attributes, he says, but on artifice and ornamentation — a painted face, silk brocade, the jade bracelet that dangles from the wrist — or alteration such as the painful and crippling binding of feet.
Contacts with the West changed all that. The presence of the pale-skinned, blue-eyed gweilo, or “foreign devil” in Cantonese, forced a new kind of self-awareness on the East.
Take the beautiful cheongsam, a body-hugging piece worn by Chinese women. Developed in cosmopolitan Shanghai around 1900, it originated from its opposite, the qipao — a baggy and loose-fitting dress once meant to de-emphasize and conceal the wearer’s figure. It was transformed in the final years of China’s last dynasty to reveal curves, waist, bosom, and a lot more skin.
Under Mao, the body was once more inducted to represent the nation. In posters that have become collectors’ items, workers are depicted as strong and square-jawed; athletes are lithe and agile. Sports became synonymous with modernity.
A strong body was reflective of national strength and was seen as necessary for unity. The self was in service to a larger cause, and everyone moved together wearing Mao jackets — a sea of blue and gray.
Shame is gone
The end of the Cold War however came along with the forces of globalization that surged through the culture and began to wash away hundreds of years of social mores — all variants of a single unifying characteristic: shame.
“Lead the people with excellence and put them in their place through roles and ritual practices, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will order themselves harmoniously,” Confucius said in his Analects.
Shame, in other words, binds the tongue and inhibits behavior. Those who seek to change the old world order, on the other hand, learn to be shameless.
Consider the controversial body art showcased in Shanghai in 2005, in which traditional brush paintings were drawn on naked models.
Images of mountains and rivers, of peonies and songbirds, suddenly migrated from the familiar old canvas onto a moving one made of human skin. Most compelling was the female model who had a blue cheongsam with a white crested wave motif painted on her body. She is both beautifully clothed and astonishingly naked — and a literal transfiguration of the past.
Indeed, that old sea of blue and gray Mao jackets has been rapidly transformed into a field of a 100,000 flowers blooming.
Now protestors in China sometimes do so with being naked. And sexuality has become the vehicle to promote individualism. Many women bloggers have become famous for discussing their sex lives online since the early 2000s.
Last year in Beijing, two men stripped down to their g-strings and ran around at Peking University in protest of music piracy. And in Shanghai last year a woman was seen posing nude at popular tourist spots at night and was arrested for bathing in a fountain naked.
Nudity in the US became a popular cultural event — streakers protested the Vietnam war, and the sexual revolution that began in San Francisco became a counterbalance to rigid social mores that eventually changed the cultural life of the United States.
China is in breakneck transition toward modernity, and the fight over the body — how much it should be clothed and unclothed becomes a conversation about something more than issues of morality but social change, and boundaries of freedom.
And the way things go, the borders are definitely shifting.
Andrew Lam is New America editor and the author of “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres” and “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora.” His book of short stories, “Birds of Paradise Lost,” was published in 2013.
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