User:Granaj/gap analysis

Gap analysis

 * What is the title of the article in which you identified a gap. If no article exists at all, what should the title be?

Xing Danwen


 * Document the gap you found, describe how you identified it, and analyze its impact on knowledge.

Chinese photographer Xing Danwen has no Wikipedia article detailing her life and work. As a feminist, not only is her work not included under the article on Feminist Art, but neither is any art movement outside the U.S. and the West.

A Wiki search of Chinese photographer Xing Danwen yielded eight articles. One brief article on the 1990s avant-garde artistic community of the Beijing East Village, two on art magazines and journals (Artist Profile and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art), one on Photography in China, two on art festivals (Rencontres d’Arles and Moscow Biennale), one on a gallery space that showed Xing’s works (C-Space, Beijing), and one on an artist that shared exhibition space with Xing (Diana Lui). The only mention of Xing Danwen that is longer than her name on a list is in a single sentence under Photography in China.

The gap in superficial information about Xing’s origins and her work limits knowledge of, among others, the avant-garde scene of 1990s Beijing, photography in China, feminist photography, and most importantly, Xing’s feminist critiques of society and the political hierarchies between China and the West.
 * Propose a paragraph of new or substantially edited content based on reliable sources. (If you are editing existing content, post the current version along with your edited version, and clearly mark which is which.)

Photographer Xing Danwen was born in Xi'an, China, in 1967, in the second year of the Cultural Revolution. Her parents were electrical engineers, so she was never influenced by her family to become an artist. She was educated in the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, and obtained her BFA from the Beijing Central Academy of the Arts. She lived in the Beijing East Village and made herself known among performance artists alike Ma Liuming nd other avant-garde artists of the time. Her art is characterized by a constant critique of society: from urban change, to beauty ideals, to the U.S. dumping of technological refuse in Guangdong province, to effects of globalization in China. She uses both staged and real settings, and photographs materials like discarded doll parts and technological waste.

Her first largely exhibited series was Scroll (1999-2000), where the photographer displayed long, blurry images featuring swimmers and pedestrians in Beijing. Her series Urban Fiction is a response to Beijing's sudden obsession with high-rise housing building. Photographing real-estate maquettes, Xing would later add minuscule digital characters performing all kings of tasks from sunbathing to murder. This, she said, was in response to how similar cities begin to look after globalization. In her disCONNEXION series (2002-2003), Xing travelled to Southern China and took landscape-inspired shots of wires, keyboards, telephones, computers, and other forms of high-tech trash that the U.S, Korea, and Japan return to China. The beauty and color saturation of the shots make unconventional photographs in themselves, and the art pieces are politically loaded, in protest of the ecological and social effects of these dumpings. The arrangement and aesthetic of these photographs led Xing to take similar shots in toy factories, making the series Duplication (2003). These photographs show eerie displays of overwhelming amounts of doll heads or arms, which Xing critiques for establishing Western characteristics as canon, as well as reinforcing gender roles. Xing has been influenced by artists like Shirin Neshat, Thomas Demand, Vik Muniz, Alice Neel, Jim Dine, and Wong Kar-wai.

List the reliable sources that could be used to improve this gap. (You can use the Cite tool from the editing toolbar above to input and format your sources.)
 * Artist Profile
 * BLINK
 * Container Culture
 * Art in America
 * As Others See Us?