Lu Qing creates one work each year on a bolt of silk 25 meters long.

Yin Xuizhen with her sculpture of black shirts sewn into a tire shape.

By HOLLAND COTTER

BEIJING - On a February day in 1989, a young woman walked into a show at the National Gallery of Art here, whipped out a pellet gun and fired two shots into a mirrored sculpture in an exhibition called “China/Avant-Garde. Police officers swarmed into the museum. The show, the country’s first government-sponsored exhibition of experimental art, was shut down for days.
The woman, Xiao Lu, is an artist. The sculpture she fired on was her own, or rather a collaborative piece she had made with another artist, Tang Song, her boyfriend at the time.
She had set off a symbolic explosion. The international press saw a rebellion story. China’s political and cultural vanguard claimed a hero. The government reacted as if attacked. The renowned art critic Li Xianting has described the incident as a precursor to the Tiananmen Square crackdown four months later. Whatever the truth, Ms. Xiao made the history books. She was a star.
She is the first and last Chinese female artist so far to achieve that status. Contemporary art in China is a man’s world. While the art market, all but nonexistent in 1989, has become a powerhouse industry and produced a pantheon of multimillionaire artist-celebrities, there are no women in that pantheon.
Yet the art is there, and it is some of the most innovative work around. On a monthlong stay, I visited several women who live and work in and around Beijing and have important careers, although none of them top the auction charts. If any woman qualifies as a power artist on the current male model, Lin Tianmiao probably comes closest. She was born in 1961, and like many artists of her generation who were raised during the Cultural Revolution but came of age professionally in its rocky aftermath, she had a difficult start.
In the mid-1990s, with money scarce, censors watchful and no gallery or market structure in place, she and her husband, the conceptual artist Wang Gongxin, lived and worked in cramped Beijing apartments where they mounted one-night shows .
Ms. Lin’s work reflected these conditions. It was made from used household utensils - teapots, woks, scissors, vegetable choppers - that she laboriously wrapped in layers of white cotton thread to create inventories of domestic life that looked both threatening and precious.
With the market boom, her work grew in scale and formal polish. Her floor-toceiling installations of self-portrait photographs anchored by braids of white yarn are fixtures in international shows.
Yin Xuizhen is Ms. Lin’s near-contemporary. The threat of destruction pervades her recent large-scale work . For a continuing piece called “Fashion Terrorism, she created a miniature airport baggage claim with mysterious parcels stalled on a carousel. They may hold the possessions of immigrants in transit; they may hold weapons. We cannot know.
Since 2000 Lu Qing has made a single new work annually. At the beginning of each year she buys a bolt of fine silk 25 meters long. Over the next 12 months, using a brush and acrylic paint, she marks its surface with tight grid patterns. The results look like a cross between Agnes Martin’s grid drawings and traditional Chinese scroll painting, historically a man’s medium.
Some years she fills the cloth. Other years, when she can bring herself to work only sporadically, she leaves it half empty. At least one year, she painted nothing. But completion in any ordinary sense is not the goal. Whatever state the roll is in at year’s end, that is its finished state. She packs it away and buys a new bolt.
This is private, at-home work. “I don’t think what I’m doing is art, Ms. Lu said. “In fact, it makes me forget what art is about.
Recently Cui Xiuwen , who is in her late 30s, has produced highly finished photographs and paintings of adolescent girls dressed in uniforms of the Young Pioneers, a youth organization in China. Sometimes bruised and bloodied, the girls pose in what looks like the Forbidden City. And most recently, she has made pictures of older girls floating like angels above Beijing rooftops. The theme of childhood and maternity recur almost obsessively .
As for the influence of feminism, Li Shurui, a young artist, acknowledges the force of male chauvinism in the art world, both in China and elsewhere. But, she says, she is still too much in the stage of discovering herself to figure out whether she considers herself a feminist or not.
It may say something about her thinking, though, that when asked to name a cultural role model, she pointed neither to other artists nor to contemporary politics, but to the deep past: to the seventh-century ruler Wu Zetian, China’s first and only empress.


The Chinese artist Cui Xiuwen, left, in her Beijing studio.