Queerness in Chinese Erotic Paintings

Explore the rich, complex, and often hidden histories of sexuality in Chinese art through this engaging program led by expert and enthusiast Wendy Chuwen Xiao. Centered on the visual language of traditional Chinese erotic painting and its resonances today, the session invites participants to consider how desire, intimacy, and the body have been represented, imagined, and interpreted across time.

Wendy Chuwen Xiao is a researcher and visual artist whose work explores the intersections of art history, material culture, and the history of sexuality in early modern China. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in History and Art History in 2022, and her M.A. from Harvard University in Regional Studies—East Asia in 2024.

Her research focuses on how objects generate and mediate fantasies of desire, with particular attention to visual, textual, and sensorial forms that challenge normative understandings of gender performativity and sexual morality. In her M.A. thesis, she examined an eighteenth-century Qing dynasty erotic album, arguing that its idiosyncratic visual language suggests it may have been produced for a female audience, offering new perspectives on viewership and agency in historical erotic art.

Alongside her academic work, Xiao maintains an active artistic practice, creating illustrations and paintings that reflect her engagement with image-making, narrative, and the expressive possibilities of form.