With the gender revolution, opportunities available to women have expanded. Yet the race implied by the process – burning ambition in the workplace, physical allure as a passport to success, hedonism as a way to override perceived biological differences between the genders – came at a psychological price to women’s self-respect and wellbeing. Qishan Li’s methodology tackles this issue through expressive arts therapies, where aesthetics – shaped by feminist principles – interact with societal structures, thus manifesting its transformative potential for women’s psychological health, and grounding them in their bodies, meaningful interpersonal relationships, and self-awareness.
Li’s practice suggests that the race to equal opportunities did not bring freedom; rather, it is a new kind of oppression that equates femininity with commodification, where choices are determined by cultural norms, media conditioning, economic necessity, and by men’s expectations. In her work, the gym is one of the loci of this alienating process, a space in which art critiques consumer industries and their pernicious ability to exploit feminist rhetoric to market a narrow, homogenised female ideal that perpetuates gender stereotypes. The negative impact of these ideological and economic mechanisms, Li’s art conveys, is not only on women’s aspirations, decisions and self-image, but also, most alarmingly, on their cognitive-emotional health.
Qishan Li’s Until the Sea Turns Blue (2023), an experimental video art piece which explores the gym as a space filled with gendered gazes and women’s punishing perceptions of their bodies, tackles the following questions. Firstly, in a society where the vision of femininity is airbrushed, how do we come to terms with the feminist motto “empowerment, choice, liberation”? Repetition, mechanisms, bodily movements conveyed through dehumanised undertones, and a subdued palette of greys, blues, and greens characterise the fitness studio, suggesting that the triad of the gender equality movement has given way to a bleak future and a desolate psychological landscape.
Secondly, how do women confront the fact that gender equality rhetoric has been co-opted to sell both male fantasies and consumer goods as essential to their freedom, identity, and self-expression? The words in the video evoke an inner world of resistance, teeming with the ambivalence of certain feelings: loneliness as a beacon of autonomy, escapism as a precursor to assertiveness, and inner peacefulness as the weapon of the daily battle.
Until the Sea Turns Blue is not only a tale of defiance and endurance, but also of hope and love, manifested in an idyllic return to nature and the glorious turquoise of the sea. In this tale, tenderness is entwined with a longing for emotional connectedness and expressiveness, allowing Li’s art to epitomise the idea that individual women’s lives and experiences are important – whether we wish to leave the political behind or not – and that art with therapeutic purposes can contribute to this. Ultimately, it reminds us that the personal is political: this remains a vital feminist sentiment, and we cannot discuss one without the other.
Written by Kalinca Costa Söderlund (PhD), Art Historian and Critic
