This capstone is an art historical study that provides a previously unexplored feminist and postcolonial interpretation of three male Nanyang artists, Chen Chong Swee, Cheong Soo Pieng, Liu Kang, and their paintings of Balinese women in landscapes during the twentieth century. This project argues that the Nanyang artists’ artworks encode notions of the colonial picturesque, Chinese migrants’ anxieties, propagandist images of women, and the French modernist canon. While their art reflected the artists’ desires of adapting to and searching for a regional identity in Southeast Asia, I contend that their social construction of female subjects reinforced both the erotic and totemic stereotypes of Balinese women. These artists subscribed to a patriarchal mode of thought that projected the Balinese female body as an ideal subject for male audiences.
