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Contemporary flâneuses in late capitalism: the representation
of urban space in two Hong Kong women artists’works
Hong Zeng
Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China
ABSTRACT
In literature on modern urban life, a flâneur is a man who wanders
seemingly aimlessly but with the intention of observing people or
events in urban life and perhaps recording these observations in
text or images. This article shows how contemporary women artists
in Hong Kong—a city in late capitalism, perform the role of the
flâneuse, the female counterpart of the flâneur. The article analyses
Stella Tang’s series of paintings Sauntering Through My City Series
(2009–2016) and Annie Wan’s ceramic works Looking For Poetry in
Wanchai (2005) and Collecting Moonlight (2017). The article takes
a nomadic nondialectical approach to explore how the two women
artists practise their flâneurie, and how they transform such experi-
ences into art projects that are different from the conventional
flâneur art. I identify three aspects of the alternative representation
of urban space in the works of the two flâneuses: reconfiguration of
conception, the creative appropriation of alternative art forms and
public engagement.
KEYWORDS
Chinese contemporary art;
hong Kong art; women’s art;
flâneuse; nomadic subjects;
feminist art
Introduction
The ‘fleeting, anonymous, ephemeral encounters of life in the metropolis’(Wolff1985, 37)
has attracted Baudelaire and his successor Benjamin since the literature of modernity in
nineteenth-century. In Baudelaire’sThe Painter of Modern Life (1863), he portrays the
illustrator Constantin Guys as the ideal flâneur/artist, a person who wanders aimlessly,
but with the intention of observing people or events in the city and recording these
observations in texts or images. Half a century later, Benjamin centred the figure of the
flâneur in daily urban life. Yet some feminist scholars argue that because of the gender
divisions in the nineteenth century, women had to stay mainly in private spaces like
homes and private gardens. The figure of the flâneur is thus inherently gendered male
because women had limited access to public space (Wolff1985; Pollock 2003). The female
counterpart of the flâneur in French –the ‘flâneuse’–is invisible in the literature of
modernity. Elkin (2017) points out that most French dictionaries do not even include the
word ‘flâneuse’. Parsons (2000) notes that in modernity, the activities of the flâneurie are
the privilege of bourgeois males. Therefore, only they can be the ‘artists of modern life’.
However, today, women in late capitalist cities such as Hong Kong are no longer pre-
vented from accessing public spaces; theoretically, they have the same access to
CONTACT Hong Zeng zenghong0808@gmail.com
CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2020.1750565
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
