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【朱雀按】《LOOK》杂志是澳大利亚新南威尔士艺术博物馆出版的双月刊。2024年6月-7月刊发表了曹音女士的长篇文章《诗意的洗衣板》，我们在此特别分享文章的中文译版和英文原版。
曹音女士是新南威尔士艺术博物馆中国艺术主任。曹音毕业于北京大学考古系和哈佛大学人类学系。曾在华盛顿史密森尼学会和佛利尔/赛克勒艺术馆进修学习博物馆管理，并曾担任北京大学赛克勒考古与艺术博物馆副馆长、新加坡国立大学李光前博物馆研究员。目前她还担任澳洲华人博物馆董事和澳中基金会理事。
诗意的洗衣板
曹音
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AGNSW中国艺术馆策展人曹音
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陶艾民与她的作品...
一个姑娘兄两人
奴捧香茶待连襟
两徕有事共商量
未必读了不泪流
—— 摘自陶艾民《一指间系列之九》
陶艾民曾经这样形容自己，“一个带着笔记和相机四处游走的如苦行僧的女人”。在旅途中，陶艾民有着很明确的收集目标——洗衣板，而这些被收集来的洗衣板一直被陶艾民视若珍宝，如今，她已经收藏了1000多块洗衣板！陶艾民收藏的洗衣板大多来自于生活在中国农村地区的女性群体。因此，经常有人问她，为什么这种平凡无华的生活用品能如此地吸引她。对陶艾民来说，这些平凡的木板恰恰是了解这些女性日常生活的载体。她将木板上反复磨擦而形成的扁平波纹视为一种特殊的“语言”，这些印迹记录着女性的生活，承载了她们善良和坚韧的美德。![]()
陶艾民曾经的工作室陶艾民收集的第一块洗衣板来自一位 93 岁的女性，她的名字叫王淑清，出生于 1911 年，是最后一代的缠足女性。2000 年代初，陶艾民作为王奶奶的房客居住在临近于北京的一个画家村。陶艾民在一部名为《残莲》的影像作品中记录了王奶奶的日常生活，这部作品通过她在洗衣板上搓洗衣物的场景将一个坚强且独立的女性形象呈现于众，这件洗衣板已经陪伴王奶奶30年了。陶艾民的影像作品《洗河》(2008 年) 于 2023 年被新州美术馆收藏，其中展示了七双妇女的手在做类似的繁重家务。陶艾民说：“这种艰苦而重复的工作其实有着自身独特的音乐性，但往往这些劳作是极易被忽视的。就像，年轻的手渐渐被苍老的手取代。而河水却不曾停止流淌。”陶艾民《洗河》节选, 单通道视频(彩色,有声)
2005 年创作的《女人河》是陶艾民最著名的作品，这件作品参加了在北京举办的丹麦作家安徒生诞辰 200 周年纪念展。尽管安徒生的童话故事在世界范围中广为流传，但却很少有人知道他的母亲安妮-玛丽-安德斯达特（Anne Marie Andersdatter）是一位目不识丁的洗衣妇。《女人河》这件作品是由 56 块洗衣板组成，每块洗衣板上都画有女人的肖像，从地面到天花板有序地悬挂着。蓝色灯光照射在洗衣板下面的白色布料上，伴着有如潺潺流水似的背景音乐，让观者仿佛能亲眼看到这些女性在河岸洗衣的场景，礼赞她们沉默的艰辛。中国著名艺术评论家贾方舟说：“安徒生如果看到陶艾民的作品，他的一定会为之感动”。2016 年，《女人河》被提名为中国当代艺术 “30 年来最具影响力的 30 件装置作品 ”之一。
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陶艾民《女人河》中国妇女博物馆展览现场
陶艾民还利用洗衣板创作了其他不同形式的艺术作品，直观地评论了女性的家务劳动——这种劳动常常被压制、轻视，并被淹没在父权制的主流话语之下。从 2007 年起，她开始用宣纸拓印洗衣板，并加上 “女书 ”文字篆写。一组名为《一指间系列之九》（2011 年）的四幅卷轴就是以这种方式创作而成的，于2023年被新州美术馆收藏。乍看之下，这组作品沿袭了传统中国长卷的绘画形式；然而，通过她的重新诠释，陶艾民将探讨更广泛的性别和劳工问题注入了更深层次的当代性。![]()
陶艾民《一指间系列之九》正在新州美术馆展出![]()
陶艾民《一指间系列之九》正在新州美术馆展出在中国，纸质拓片很可能是在五世纪末或六世纪初发明的，但到了七世纪的唐朝，它已变得相当普遍。拓片的主要功能是复制具有知识、审美或宗教价值的书法作品，模版图像大多雕刻或铸造在青铜、石头等坚硬物体的表面上。在中国的艺术家和学者中，寻求拓本的主要原因是欣赏精美的书法诗词或散文，这些作品往往是以组合的形式呈现的。由书法家将著名艺术家和学者的著作篆刻下来，制成拓片，然后拓印成册，让其在众学子间流传。到了近现代，拓片在中国的影响力进一步扩大，受到了众多收藏家和鉴赏家的追捧。对拓片的研究已被视为一门高深莫测的学问。陶艾民通过对洗衣板的拓印，将这个平凡的物件提升到了精神层面。对她来说，这些通过日积月累浆洗所留下的印记是独一无二的，它记录了每一位主人的生活，表达了它所蕴含的每一位女性的情感。在一次访谈中，她回忆道："有一位女士用她的方式在木板上磨擦出了一朵花的形状。我想，她一定是个心地善良的女人，有真正意义上的佛教精神，才能创造出这些莲花般的图案”。
2008 年，“女书”的发现为陶艾民的艺术实践增添了另一种视觉语言。通过揭示一个只有女性才知道的秘密世界，增强了她作品的深度。“女书”诞生于 19 世纪，在中国南部的湖南省湘江流域，由大部分未受过教育的女性创造，用于彼此之间的交流。有人认为，这种斜钩状的文字是从刺绣针法发展而来的，以此在女性群体之间表达生活中的喜怒哀乐。在阅读了关于“女书”的研究报告后，陶艾民得知“女书”源自于她的家乡，这让她兴奋不已。2008 年春节假期，她在回乡看望父母的时候，去江永县蒲尾村看望了一位名叫义有奇的 83 岁老人，她是少数几个还能读写“女书”的人之一。义奶奶一边揭开缝有“女书”文字的手帕和腰带，一边解释上面所饰诗句的含义，据陶艾民回忆，她还总会不自觉地将这些诗句吟诵。在陶艾民创作的《一指间系列之九》的表面，刻有由江永女性创作的五首诗歌和歌曲，她们用文字将自身的生活经历化成了一曲动人的悲歌。其中一位女性无奈地嫁给了亡夫的弟弟；另一位妇女讲述了她带着年幼孩子的孤独生活，因为她的铁匠丈夫忙碌而无法回家；第三位妇女也讲述了她和她的妹妹在没有丈夫陪伴时所经历的孤独；第四位妇女的丈夫去世了，她无法回到娘家，因为她的孩子需要照顾，一天要喂三次奶。唯一一位妇女尽管承受着艰苦的体力劳动，但仍表现得略微开朗，因为她的一个儿子在 16 岁时通过了重要的考试，为这个家庭带来了些许光明。根据陶艾民的说法，作品《一指间》的标题具有与时间概念相关的双重含义。在中文中，“弹指 ”意味着短暂的瞬间，而在这里，“弹指 ”也指女性的手在洗衣板上上下搓磨。陶艾民在创作《一指间系列之九》时，直接在旧洗衣板的表面进行水墨拓印，并用宣纸承载了这些印记。她还在宣纸上涂上矿物颜料，为这些作品赋予了色彩。水墨与色彩的交融和重叠，让人联想到山川河流、薄雾和山谷。最后，她还按照文人山水画的传统，题写了“女书”散文，诗情画意与抽象优美的形式相得益彰。陶艾民甚至将红色印章沿用到了作品中，只是她的印章刻的是“女书”。近二十年来，陶艾民通过她的多学科艺术实践，将她所了解到的中国农村女性生存环境分享给了国际艺术界。她的作品曾多次参加国内外的中国当代女性艺术家联展，包括 25 年来首次举办的中国女性艺术家调查展《出走！中国当代艺术中的女性身份》，该展览于 2022 年至 2023 年在欧洲巡展。她还参加了亚洲协会在德克萨斯中心举办的《召唤记忆：超越中国传统的艺术》展览，该展览展出了 32 位优秀艺术家的作品，其中包括著名中国当代艺术家徐冰、刘晓东、孙逊和杨永梁。陶艾民未来计划继续发掘新的艺术形式，更进一步展现“女书”文化的丰富内涵，并尝试将这种独特的语言与数字和人工智能技术相结合。她希望找到一种途径可以接触到对“女书”感兴趣的国际观众。正如玛雅-科夫斯卡娅（Maya Kóvskaya）为陶艾民在北京 INK Studio举办的个展所写的那样：“力量来自于分享平凡的真理；来自于将那些被淹没和压抑的东西重新浮出水面，重见光明的勇气......。当我们的声音汇聚在一起时，我们就会发现自己的力量，而这种力量是我们在渺小、孤独、沉默的状态下无法获得的。”
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陶艾民 (图中) 与她作品的参与者
英文原文
Poetic Washboard
Yin Cao, curator of Chinese art AGNSW
… One girl serves two brothers, I make tea for my brother-in-law. You are the only one I can talk to. I can imagine you will cry after reading my letter.– From Tao Aimin’s In an instant no. 9 2011
Tao Aimin once described herself as ‘a rag and bone woman, going round with a notebook and a camera’. She has always been specific about what she picks up and collects, but she doesn’t sell her ‘treasures’. For Tao these treasures are washboards, and she has more than 1000 of them!Tao used to collect wooden washboards from women living in rural areas of China. Unsurprisingly, she has often been asked why used washboards – such prosaic items in mundane life – are worth collecting. For Tao, each one is a vehicle to understanding women’s quotidian lives. She reads the flattened corrugations caused by repetitive rubbing as a special ‘language’ recording women’s life stories and revealing their virtues of kindness and resilience.The very first washboard Tao collected was from a 93-year-old lady, Grandma Wang Shuqin. Born in 1911 Grandma Wang, who happened to be Tao’s landlady in an artist village near Beijing in the early 2000s, was part of the last generation of footbound women. Tao recorded Grandma Wang’s daily life in a video work entitled Lotus Fragments 2002–11, in which the hands of this fiercely-independent lady are shown scrubbing garments on her 30-year-old washboard. A similar video work titled Washing in the River 2008, which entered the Art Gallery collection in 2023, shows four pairs of women’s hands conducting similar onerous chores. Tao explained: ‘This hard and repetitive work has its own musical sound, and yet the work is unseen.I recorded the hands from women at different ages. Young hands are replaced by old and gnarled hands. The river flows on.’ River of Women 2005 was Tao’s most well-known work shown in an exhibition in Beijing to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s birth. Although Andersen’s fairy tales are widely read to children all over the world, very few know that his mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter, was an illiterate washerwoman. River of Women is composed of 56 washboards, depicting portraits of women, each suspended in an orderly formation from floor to ceiling. Blue lights shone on white fabric underneath the washboards accompanied by background music of running water, evoking the feeling of standing next to a river, watching the women washing clothes, and gaining insight into their hardship. Jia Fangzhou, China’s leading art critic on female artists said, ‘Andersen would have been moved [by Tao’s work] if his spirit had seen it.’ In 2016, River of Women was nominated as one of the ‘30 most influential installation works in 30 years’ of Chinese contemporary art.Tao has created other artworks using the washboards that intuitively comment on women’s domestic labour – work which has often been silenced, trivialised, and submerged beneath dominant patriarchal discourse. From 2007 she started to make paper rubbings of washboards and, a year later, inscribed them with a very special script called Nüshu (women’s writings). A set of four scrolls titled In an instant no. 9 2011, acquired by the Art Gallery in 2023, is one example of this technique. It first appears to follow the centuries-old tradition of Chinese scroll painting; however, through her re-interpretation, Tao has injected contemporaneity by addressing wider gender and labour issues.In China, paper-based rubbing was likely invented in the late fifth or early sixth century, but by the Tang dynasty in the seventh century, it had become quite common. The principal function of rubbings has been to reproduce intellectually, aesthetically, or religiously valued calligraphies, or images that were carved, incised, or cast on hard surfaces such as bronze or stone. Among artists and scholars in China, the primary reason for seeking rubbing copies is due to an appreciation of fine calligraphy poems or essays, which are often presented in combination. Works by important artists and scholars were copied by famous calligraphers, then carved onto stones from which rubbings were made. They were then bound and distributed among the educated elite. In modern times rubbings, while ubiquitous in China, are highly sought after by collectors and connoisseurs. The study of rubbings, bei xue, is considered a profound and recondite discipline.Generating rubbings from the washboards, Tao elevates the objects to a spiritual level. For her, the marks made on the washboards are unique, recording the life of each owner and expressing the sentiments of every woman whose board she represents. In an interview, she recalled: ‘One woman created a shape like a flower through her way of rubbing. I thought that she must be a really kind-hearted woman with a real Buddhist spirit to be able to create these lotus-like patterns.’The discovery of Nüshu in 2008 added another visual language to her artistic practice and enhanced the depth of her works by revealing a secret world known only to women. Nüshu was created in the 19th century by the largely uneducated women of the Xiao River valley in today’s Hunan province of southern China, in order to communicate with each other. The slanted and hook-like script, which some believe was developed from embroidery stitches, was used among ‘sworn sisters’ to express the joys and sorrows of their lives.After reading the research on Nüshu, Tao was excited to learn that it came from her hometown province. During the Spring Festival break in 2008, while visiting her parents, she went to the Pumei village of Jiangyong County to visit an 83-year-old woman named Yi Youqi, one of very few who could still read and write the secret language. Grandma Yi uncovered her handkerchiefs and belts sewn with Nüshu characters while she explained the meaning of the poems they’re adorned with and, as Tao recalls, occasionally recited songs.Inscribed on the surface of In an instant no. 9 are five poems and songs created by Jiangyong women who recount their lives in melancholy prose. One woman reluctantly had to marry her late husband’s brother; the other relays her lonely life with a young child because her blacksmith husband was too busy to come home; a third woman also tells of the loneliness she and her sister experienced without the companionship of their husbands. The fourth woman’s husband died and she couldn’t return to her former home because her baby needed care and breastfeeding three times a day. The only woman who expressed slight cheerfulness, despite the harsh physical work she endured, was because one of her sons passed his exam at the age of 16, which brought some light to the family.According to Tao, the Chinese title for In an instant, yi zhi jian 一指间, has a double meaning related to the concept of time. In Chinese, the flick of a finger means a brief moment, while in this context also refers to women’s fingers and hands rubbing up and down the washboards. Tao’s process for In an instant no. 9 involved making ink rubbings directly on the face of the old washboards and using rice paper to record the mottled marks left behind. She also applied mineral pigments to the paper to add colour. The blending and overlapping of ink and colour suggests mountains and rivers, mists and valleys. As a final step, she inscribed Nüshu prose, following in the tradition of literati landscape paintings which bear poetry, complementing the beautiful and abstracted forms they depict. Tao even adopted the custom of using red seal marks, only her seals are carved with Nüshu.For nearly two decades Tao has focused on highlighting the challenging lives of rural women in China through her multidisciplinary artistic practice, which she has shared with the international art world. Her works have been included in domestic and international group exhibitions of contemporary Chinese women artists, including the first survey of Chinese women artists in 25 years, Stepping Out! Female identities in Chinse Contemporary Art, which toured in Europe between 2022 and 2023. She was also in Asia Society’s exhibition: Summoning Memories: Art Beyond Chinese Traditions in Texas in 2023, which featured 32 artists including prominent Chinese contemporary artists Xu Bing, Liu Xiaodong, Sun Xun and Yang Yongliang.Her ambition for the future is to explore new art forms that reveal the richness of Nüshu culture and to experiment with combining this unique language with digital and AI technology. She would like to find ways to reach out and engage with international audiences who are interested in Nüshu. As Maya Kóvskaya wrote for Tao’s solo exhibition in INK Studio in Beijing: ‘Power comes from the sharing of quotidian truths; from bringing that which was submerged and suppressed back up to the surface and into the light ... When our voices are all raised together, we find our own powers in ways unavailable to us in atomised, isolated silence, alone.’![]()
陶艾民 1974 年出生于湖南，现生活工作于北京。陶艾民的创作综合了现成品使用和民间艺术的手法，并涉及绘画、书法、拓印、影像、装置等多个门类。她的作品游弋于大众和精英文化、传统和当代艺术之间，对艺术创作权、艺术自我表达、劳动、身体经验和集体记忆等问题富有深刻而细腻的哲思。
她的作品曾在中国、美国、及欧洲多国的重要美术馆和博物馆展出。其作品被多家机构永久收藏，包括澳大利亚新南威尔士州美术馆、中国妇女儿童博物馆、成都现代艺术馆、长征空间、炎黄美术馆、美术文献杂志、德国艺术与教育国际交流促进会Fiake- Förderung des internationalen Austausches für Künste und Erziehung e. V. 、瑞士Garage Collection, Lucerne 等。
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即将展出
9月5日至9月8日，朱雀艺术即将第六次参展南半球最大的艺术博览会 —— 悉尼当代艺术博览会 Sydney Contemporary阿仙，陈文令，方力钧，李津，彭勇，陶艾民，王云云，杨喜发
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更多信息参见艺博会官网：https://sydneycontemporary.com.au/
关于朱雀艺术
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创立于2015年的朱雀艺术是澳大利亚首间专注中国当代艺术的独立双语画廊，坐落于地标建筑悉尼大桥边，和澳大利亚当代艺术博物馆MCA近在咫尺。朱雀艺术与一批顶尖的中国当代艺术家和优秀青年艺术家密切合作，致力为澳大利亚及太平洋地区的藏家与艺术爱好者提供一个了解中国当代艺术的平台。Founded in 2015, Vermilion Art is the first independent commercial gallery in Australia focusing on Chinese contemporary art. It is located near the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge and within easy reach of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Through close collaboration with leading and emerging contemporary Chinese artists, Vermilion Art has introduced outstanding Chinese art to the collectors, art institutions and the general public in Australia and the Pacific.
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