In Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975), the protagonist paces her apartment repeatedly. Her steps, gestures, and domestic tasks fuse into a seamless routine: tidying the table, stove, and bed; tending her son; peeling potatoes, sipping coffee, reading the newspaper. She runs the house, yet remains trapped by its order. Even a small disruption sends life off balance. The home becomes a structure where discipline is enacted daily.
But the film goes beyond merely exposing this structure. Akerman fixes the camera in space, letting the body move in and out of the frame: threading doorways and narrow corridors, appearing in mirrors, heels striking the floor, cupboard doors swinging, a feather duster tracing display cabinets. Through these repeated movements, the room’s scale, paths, and boundaries emerge, and the body, attuned to the space, develops its own rhythms and perception.
Jeanne Dielman exposes two faces of the home. It enforces family systems and reproductive labor order, yet it is also gradually shaped and sensed through repeated bodily actions over time. This tension may explain why, half a century on, the home remains a recurring site of exploration for many women artists. The six artists discussed here engage with—and expand upon—this question from diverse perspectives.
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Among younger Chinese women artists, many turn their attention to domestic violence; Xue Ying is one of them. Working primarily with household tools—kitchen knives, peelers, pots, spoons, ladders, rags—she materializes the pain accumulated within patriarchal families and society at large. In That We Don’t Eat Until Your Father Is at the Table (2022), two sharp blades are joined, pinning a dishcloth to the wall. Soft fabric and hard metal wrestle in tension, freezing patriarchal command as a suspended threat. In Crazywife (2022), a kitchen knife hangs from a braid, trembling in small, repetitive motions as it strikes a cross-shaped iron pan on the floor with crisp metallic sounds, yet remains confined within a narrow radius—a portrait of resistance caught in domestic cycles. In Fall (2024), kitchen peelers are stacked into a steep, vertical ladder. Each rung is a perforated blade, sharp, worn, rusted. The accumulation does not depict a single act of violence, but its terrifying sum. Time, bodies, emotions, and lives worn down day after day within the home accrue into massive, yet normalized, sacrifice. These invisible labors sustain the operations of both patriarchy and capitalism alike. Xue Ying’s work gives tangible form to social structure itself: exploitation within the family is not a subsidiary of state or capitalist violence, but their most fundamental and enduring foundation.
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Looking back at the artists discussed in this essay, we see that each engages, in her own way, with the relationship between home and artistic practice. Home is not merely the smallest unit of family systems, divisions of labor, or power relations; it is also a space that holds the body and actively shapes creative work. Attunement to structure often arises through the body’s situated experience of space, while investigation of the body–space relationship inevitably engages the frameworks of family, society, and production. Maggie Lee processes her mother’s death and the loss of her childhood home; Han Qian searches for forms of dwelling through migration; Rinko Kawauchi connects family life with the cycles of nature; Kyoko Idetsu portrays shared structural logics between caregiving labor and state violence; Xue Ying reveals the nested dynamics of domestic labor and patriarchal capitalism; and Ghislaine Leung brings the temporalities of home and the demands of care directly into the mechanisms of art production. These practices do not seek to reaffirm that “home is a feminine space.” Rather, they explore how home bears memory, daily life, emotion, relationships, labor, order, institutional structures, and creativity itself. Across these works, the unique resonance between women’s lived experience and the space of home becomes palpable. As Virginia Woolf observed over a century ago: “For women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force.”6 (Editor: Ara Yun Qiu; Translator: Yi Yu)
6. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. ↲
