ABSTRACT
Li Yin may be the only Chinese woman artist of the early modern period included in this anthology, but she was far from the only woman active in the visual arts in early modern China. Li Yin’s biographer, Li-Chou (actual name Huang Tsung-hsi; pinyin Huang Zongxi) was an eminent philosopher-poet, and a nearly exact contemporary of the artist. The brief biography was later transcribed to the colophon of Li Yin’s handscroll, Flowers of the Four Seasons, by the twentieth-century collector, Huang Chun-shih. Li Yin is necessarily beautiful, intelligent, devoted to her husband, and precociously gifted in painting as well as in poetry. Li Yin’s extraordinary feistiness is also evidenced in a brief anecdote that reveals how she once shielded her husband from physical harm threatened by harassing soldiers. In these ways, as in numerous Western European life stories, the exceptional female was historically wreathed in male attributes to demonstrate her transcendence of that culture’s normative gender role.
