Subject Area
Art History/Criticism/Conservation
Abstract
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, several Chinese and Hong Kong artists began engaging with family photographs to explore questions of kinship, memory, and personal identity. While existing scholarship on Chinese art has provided important insights into ancestral values and Confucian lineage systems, it has largely focused on pre-twentieth-century works and overlooked how contemporary artists reinterpret familial imagery to address shifting cultural and political conditions. This thesis offers a complementary perspective by examining three case studies, Zhang Xiaogang’s Bloodline: Big Family (1993-2010), Feng Mengbo’s My Private Album (1996), and Kurt Tong’s The Queen, The Chairman and I (2009-2013), to analyze how these artists rework family photographs to expose personal narrative and national ideology, gendered hierarchies and generational power dynamics, especially within marriage and parent-child relationships, embedded in traditional Chinese kinship structures. Through close analysis of images, textual annotations, and exhibition strategies, this study demonstrates how visual culture both preserves and reconfigures dominant family models across national and diasporic contexts, revealing the complex relations between kinship, memory, and migration in a time of social transformation.
Degree Date
Spring 2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.
Department
Art History
Advisor
Dr. Anna Lovatt
Second Advisor
Dr. Tashima Thomas
Third Advisor
Dr. Vivian Li
Number of Pages
113
Format
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Zhang, Lin, "Kinship, Memory, And Migration In The Work Of Zhang Xiaogang, Feng Mengbo, and Kurt Tong" (2025). Art History Theses and Dissertations. 31.
https://scholar.smu.edu/arts_arthistory_etds/31
agreement form
