‘‘Female Boat-Haulers of the Sui Emperor Yang’’ is by Annie Wong, who supports equality for female artists . ART BEATUS

HONG KONG - Men dominated the Chinese contemporary art boom that began in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. While some women eked out artistic careers, none broke auction records or became quasi-celebrities. Even the era’s imagery - the military symbolism, Mao figures and giant leering faces - was macho.

Two decades later, as new studies look back on that early underground scene, many are asking when China will be ready to produce a truly iconic female artist. The closest anyone came in the ‘90s was Xiao Lu, whose autobiography called “Dialogue,” after the name of her best-known work, was published in February through Hong Kong University Press.

In 1989, Ms. Xiao, a recent art school graduate, entered the National Art Gallery in Beijing - where an exhibition of avant-garde art had opened only hours earlier -took out a concealed firearm and shot two live bullets into her own entry in the show, an installation that involved phone booths. The incident earned her a brief jail stint and instant fame as a symbol of youthful defiance, particularly since it took place in the months leading up to the student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. The work is now in a Chinese corporate collection, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York has a photographic print.

“Dialogue” could be called China’s first major feminist contemporary work of art. It shows a man and a woman talking to each other in phone booths; between them is a red phone with its receiver dangling off the hook. For years, Ms. Xiao, now 48, left the work unexplained. In her book she writes that it refers to a confrontation she had with an older family friend, a man who had assaulted her when she was a virgin, only to have him hang up on her.

Today, change is happening as more women become dealers, gallery owners, curators and experts.

“You could say that women artists have a different sensibility,” said Dr. Annie Wong, 80, the doyenne of the Hong Kong art scene and owner of Art Beatus, a leading Hong Kong gallery. “But the most important issue is the quality of the individual’s work. It’s about technique, education and effort, not whether someone is a man or a woman.”

For some, however, a nuanced perception was key. “Female artists are not different in the way they create works,” said Katie de Tilly, another Hong Kong gallery owner. “But they are different in the way they verbalize it.”

“They are better in tune with their personal experiences in life and able to communicate that as a whole,” she said.

Nicole Schoeni, owner of the Schoeni Art Gallery in Hong Kong, took over her family’s gallery when she was 23, after the death of her father, Manfred Schoeni, a veteran Chinese art dealer. She talks of a gradual change.

“When Dad started working in the 1990s, 95 percent of his represented artists were male,” she said. “It’s better now; but if you looked at a list of top names now, that list would still be male-dominated.

“But maybe young women were not encouraged earlier,” Ms. Schoeni, now 29, added. “And most museums and galleries at the time were run by men.” Gallery owners like herself also might be more willing to exhibit lesser-known female artists than their male counterparts.

Claire Hsu was 24 when she founded the Asia Art Archive in the Sheung Wan district of Hong Kong. Now 34, she runs the world’s largest collection of documentation on contemporary Asian art.

The AAA recently completed a major research project on the roots of contemporary Chinese art, in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “When we looked for artists to interview about the scene in the ‘80s, there were very few women,” Ms. Hsu said, and many of those around then have since given up their craft. “The most famous names are still not women.” Nor was she spared stereotyping by the China art world. “I’ve had quite a lot of correspondence sent to ‘Mr. Hsu,’ ” she laughed.

Still a working artist, Dr. Wong said she had no particular favorite piece, but pulled out a catalog of a show she had with Unesco on International Women’s Day in 2009.

“Female Boat-Haulers of the Sui Emperor Yang” (1996-97) is a 4.5-meter- long work based loosely on a painting by the Russian artist Ilya Yefimovich Repin of laborers pulling a barge.

Dr. Wong’s version is set amid a classic misty mountainscape. Two dozen women, yoked like cattle, strain to pull the imperial vessel of a historic tyrant. The figures are rendered like the gentle beauties of traditional Chinese art, only their pretty faces are distorted with pain and anger.

“It was really unequal before,” she said of women in the Chinese art scene. “People say our society is equal now ? but is it?”


By JOYCE HOR-CHUNG LAU