ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the overwhelming interest in the female nude in both the art community and larger popular culture stems from a newfound embrace of Western anatomy and medicine. It argues that anxiety about the health of the nation led artists to advocate for the realistic depiction of a perfected body image that was simultaneously informed by the prevailing medical discourse and based on the Western aesthetic ideal. Artists of the Republican period such as Tao Cuiying sought to paint comparatively buxom and full-hipped women modeled after the plump beauties found in masterpaintings of the Western tradition. If China self-identified as the Sick Man of Asia, then it was women’s bodies that held the potential to rehabilitate its international standing by modeling the opposite. Women’s bodies came to illustrate a litany of China’s social ills, such as the perceived sexual depravity of the cosmopolitan Modern Girl.
