For Elsa by Professor John Clark

28 September 2011

Dear Taiwanese friends,

It was with great sadness that I and others at Sydney have learnt of the passing of Elsa, Chen Hsiang-chun. She was known to many of us since the early 1990s as a keen and diligent student, but also as a lively and companionable friend. She could even be very cheeky with her supervisor.

Whist she was here she wrote her BA Honours Essay in 1994 Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks and its Consequences for Chinese Traditional Style Painting in the 1950s, and her MA Long Essay , The Problems of the Art Theory and Practice of Liu Kuo-sung 1959 – 1966, in 1994/5. We were all very glad when her work and abilities were recognized with the opportunity to do her PhD at the University of Leeds on Beyond Commemoration: The 2-28 Incident, the Aesthetics of Trauma and Sexual Difference which she completed in 2005.

All this work showed an intense commitment to understanding Modern Taiwanese Art in the context of twentieth century Chinese art and politics. Her work on the questions of women’s art and feminism in Taiwan also greatly expanded the understanding of art in Taiwan across its variously gendered social contexts previously so often left to voices from a masculinist position.

In fact Taiwan has a large number of successful and important women artists who have impressed themselves both at home and abroad, standing out in the international Chinese world for their originality, firmness of expression about women’s positions, and art discursive power. Elsa was a great interpreter and defender of these positions, acquainted with most recent theories but with also a deep awareness of the realia of Chinese lives.

I will remember her fondly as a thinker, and above all for that insouciant charm.

With best wishes

John Clark

Professor John Clark, FAHA, CIHA, PhD

Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow

Postal Address: Department of Art History & Film, RC Mills A26, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia