Intimates and Home Country: Fang Junbi’s Emotional Experience and Reflections on Modern Chinese Female Subjectivity

Fang Junbi was a renowned modern Chinese female painter. As an intellectual woman in an era of transition from the old to the new, she possessed strong national sentiment and patriotic fervor, while upholding the moral ideal of unwavering fidelity to personal emotions. During the war she witnessed national collapse and the capitulation of close friends to Japan, suffering agonies of spirit. When she revisited China in the 1970s and saw the achievements of the new China, she embraced the Communist Party and revolutionary culture from the heart. For Fang Junbi, “soul-mate” and “nation” were the deepest emotional coordinates—experiences neither the CCP narrative of women’s liberation nor Western feminist discourse can fully articulate.

This lecture will take you into the spiritual depths of Fang Junbi and her siblings, early Republic revolutionaries like Fang Shengdong and Fang Junying, to understand their values and character, enrich the understanding of the emotional ethics of modern Chinese intellectual women, and promote reflection on female subjective consciousness.