Student Spotlight: Hyacinthus Zhang '25
2024 Mary Ellen Hale Lovett Travel Fellow
The Lovett Travel Fellowship, through the generous support of Mr. H. Malcolm Lovett, provides students with the unique opportunity to enhance their educational experience at Rice by traveling to significant sites to conduct field research in art history and architectural history.
Art history and architecture junior Hyacinthus Zhang will be using the Lovett Travel Fellowship to head to China over the summer to study the formation of Nü Shu, a system of largely Han-Zi-based symbols and calligraphy that contributed to the latest wave of Chinese feminism.
“As a young Chinese female art historian and dancer, I am fascinated by the formation of Nü Shu in how its creator(s) reshaped the traditionally masculine Chinese characters by the use of calligraphic and embroidery techniques. With the knowledge that pictographic languages often incorporate dances, I am particularly interested in how the migrations and encounters between the Han women and the Yao and Yi minorities in Hu Nan, Guang Dong, and Guang Xi Province informed the confifiguration of Nü Shu calligraphy, given that these two minorities are known to have unique dance forms.
I am also interested in the direction of Nü Shu’s contemporary employment by artists like Xu Bing, Tao Aimin and many ordinary female participants of the current feminist movement who have produced a large amount of Nü Shu artworks ranging from calligraphy, paintings, prints to tattoos.”